Beowulf's Sword

One of the things that kept me so busy lately was helping my friend Emiliano Carrillo with a project of his - Beowulf's sword.
The whole sword was a massive project.  He spent a huge amount of time making his own steel by the light of full moons, refining it, etc  (his account is here).  I came in at the end to help him get a hilt on it.  He had spent so much time working on the blade that 17 days out from his show he realized he wasn't going to have time to make a hilt worthy of the blade.  Luckily for him I had just retired.  He sent me pictures of an original hilt he wanted to reproduce, and off we went.

The original hilt from the 7th or 8th century.

One immensely helpful tool I got recently is an iMac on my carving desk.  No more working from bad printouts and memory.

First thing was carving the waxes based off the photos.  I start by laying out the rough design on the computer, then printing a carving guide and glueing it to the wax.

10 hours later I have something like this.  

I made copies of the parts using silicon molds, but used the more detailed originals for the sword...

...except for the plain parts.  I cast injections of those because there was no detail to lose.

The bare bronze parts being fitted to the sword.

A partial assembly of the pommel.  The red is jewelers resin, which I'm using here as a substitute for garnet.

Farther along.  The black horn spacers are being fitted.

And finally, the whole sword.  The blade is has crazy complicated pattern welding done entirely in home-made steel.   The handle is made of bog oak with a clear horn spacer in the middle, black horn spacers in the guards, and bronze of course.