Cyborg Ninja Sword

I first drafted up the sword in Illustrator based on reference images and some info I found that said the sword was based on a Japanese chokuto. I actually made some modifications to the design as I went along but the blade and handle length stayed the same.

I started off with 1/4" poplar and used it for the blade and tang.

The handle was made by sandwiching layers of sintra. It's glued together using Gorilla Glue.

The tsuba was made by sandwiching layers of sintra together. I had initially started with 4 layers of sintra but it looked way too thick so I remade it using just 2 layers. The sintra I'm using is 1/8" thick so the final thickness was 1/4".

The other parts were all made using sintra as well. Body filler was used to smooth it out.

The entire thing was primered and sanded down. I used Zinsser Bullseye primer since I was at my parents house and they had some laying around. I'm sure regular primer would work but I figured I'd go ahead and use primer specifically for wood since it was there.

This was then painted using RustOleum Metallic Silver. The handle and other pieces were painted with acrylic gold paint. I buy the cheap $1 ones from the craft store. I actually didn't originally intend to make all the parts removable but I thought it would be neat to keep them separate.

Once I thought about wrapping the handle using the traditional handle wrapping method, I realized that I had to make the endcap (kashira). I watched this Youtube video of someone making this out of wood and used a similar method.

The slot on the handle is necessary so the tsukaito can actually slip through.

In the interest of trying to keep it as accurate as possible I folded about 50 hishigami. It's not that hard, just time consuming.

After some filling, sanding, and priming, the kashira was ready for paint. The part closest to the tsuba was made using some thin sheet styrene.

It took about and hour or two to wrap the tsukamaki. It's a lot harder than I thought because you really have to pull it super tight. For the wrapping I followed this tutorial.

Final sword painted in both disassembled and assembled form.