007: More SoL progress

Well, today was another day of progress, but it's the best kind of progress. The kind where your vision starts to come into focus and gets really exciting. Today I crafted the blade in preparation of fiber-glassing the week of thanksgiving or a weekend soon.

Onto the pictures!

Here is the blade, roughly shaped out of EPS, or Expanded PolyStyrene. This was cheap and super lightweight. I used a super dull dremmel sanding head to shave down the EPS, which couldn't support much force for fear of snapping.

Next I covered this in masking tape. This is simply a layer of protection for the EPS as fiberglass resin will eat the EPS. I made sure to cover the whole thing with a solid layer of tape.

Here are the pieces so far. Clockwise from bottom left is the Pommel, the PVC Handle, the Crossguard, The blade (taped up), and the 1/2 in Dowel rod that runs through the sword.

Here is a picture of the Dowel rod sitting in a recess within the PVC recess.

From there the PVC will slide down into the recess. Once all the pieces are in a finished state, it will be put together permanently.

The the cross guard will slide down and it has a recess on the underside for the PVC handle part.

A pic of the recessed underside of the cross guard.

It is very exciting to see something you plan on paper start to resemble your prop in real life!