The Woodshop Shed

My Kid's Projects

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


Recently, my boys have been using their shop time to work on wooden swords to play with. This has been their biggest and most time consuming project so far. To start, Dad cut two strips of 3/4 plywood I had left over from my sawhorse build. Then we cut printer paper to the same width as the swords, folded it in half vertically and designed one side our handle shape, and the shapes at the base of the blades. We cut out our designs and unfolded the paper, giving us a symmetrical stencil to trace onto the wood. I helped out by using the jig saw to cut the handles then the boys sanded down their swords and created the edges of the “blade” before using the wood burner to make the lines and shapes down the center of each side. They picked out some more scrap to smooth out and make finger guards from, sho shugi'ed them and stained them with the colors of their choosing. My youngest also used green to color wash the wood burned portion because “c'mon mom, if it isn't a full blown poison sword then what good is it, anyway?”. I second that notion, young sir. So now we're closing in on the end of this project, we threw on some stain, glued the guards to the hilts and coated the each sword in polyurethane. For the final step, I wrapped the handles with 550 so there was no chance of splinters. They're pretty proud!
Now if anyone has any tips to spruce up my tired, 100 year old wood floor then let me know in the comments, please! I know you lumber jocks noticed it in the pictures! :)Sorry for the sideways picture, the uploader kept doing it for whatever reason.

0 comment(s)