Acrylic Blade – Hey This IS My Job

Are You Crazy Enough?

I’ve got some updates and an offer for you. Let’s get to the progress report on the wakizashi first.

No, I didn’t break it. That’s an extra chunk of Plexiglas in there.

At last! The pattern is all cut out. Edges ain’t pretty yet but that gets fixed next.

I like keeping aside the pile of all the off cuttings to see how much plastic gets removed. Some of these bits are big enough to make a pendant or small decoration. I try not to waste plastic unnecessarily.

Now! My proposal …

I’ve mentioned before that my wife and I are struggling financially. If I were back home in Canada, I could put up my Patreon or PayPal and you could simply contribute a buck or two if you felt like supporting my work here. But in Finland, that’s illegal.

Yep. I have to sell a product or a service. I can’t legally take donations. Sucks eh?

So I have to take more of my very limited time and energy and try to make an additional product to sell in hopes of getting a trickle to take some of the pressure off.

That’s why I’ve decided, for the first time, to offer tutorials on how to do what I do, step by step. It’s difficult. It requires a degree of insanity to stay patient and stick with it. But it produces results that you cannot get by any other means.

This kind of clarity, structural strength, and inner “glow” cannot be produced by 3D printing or moulding and casting.

What do you think? Are you crazy enough to try it yourself? Or perhaps just curious about the techniques? Would you be interested in some tutorials?

Artistic Accidents

So, I was trying to make a lovely smooth, flawless, transparent coating of red over a clear sword. I had to strip it all off and re-finish the blade completely three times before I realized that it was absolutely impossible to get a coating free of drips without an air-brush unit. Which I don’t have.

I tried giving it an extra thick coating and then sanding it down, hoping for an artificially-created flawless finish. But there was no getting around it; there were still drips and …

wait a minute …

That actually makes a really cool pattern!

I accidentally produced a lacy pattern much like Damascus steel on a semi-transparent blade. My wife, who is very much a fan of blacksmithing and adores the Damascus patterns told me on no uncertain terms to do the whole blade like that.

So here it hangs in the closet dripping bloody red into a bucket while it dries. Spinner isn’t even finished and it is already hands-down the weirdest sword I’ve ever made.