Pirate Pistol Redux

This post is a follow up to Pirate Pistols.

I finally had time to go back and re-finish the ‘wooden’ parts of these plastic pistols. I used the technique in TribalDancer‘s steampunk pirate gun mod on Instructables.com. With this particular pistol I only re-finish the ‘wooden’ part because the ‘metal’ part already looked pretty decent.

I did this on my back porch, at night, with almost no light. It was nearly impossible to really see what I was doing and I had to go inside between layers to try to get an idea of how it was looking. Not quite up to my usual exacting standards but here is the result before and after:

Rain at the Ren Faire? You need a Sword-brella

A while back my friend Paul Laster (of buckskinning.org) pointed out to me the existence of the Sword Hilted Umbrella. Although I thought the idea of  an umbrella with a sword hilt for a handle was a product that was long overdue, I couldn’t come up with a good argument to convince my wife that it was a necessity. Until now…

My wife pointed out to me that there is a 60% chance of rain for the Texas Ren Fest when we will be there this weekend. This means i’ll need an umbrella – no, a sword-brella. I have two problems though. First, the sword hilted umbrella above does not have a cutlass hilt (and wouldn’t be very piratical) and second, I’m not spending $40 on an umbrella that I may use once a year if I’m lucky. Time to get out the tools.

I bought a $10 umbrella and a $3 plastic sword. I removed the screws from the plastic sword handle and popped out the blade. I twisted the black end-cap off the umbrella and flattened the bottom section down to the width of the plastic blade so it would fit inside the handle. I marked and drilled 3 holes in the bottom of the umbrella where the plastic post inside the handle connect the two halves. I seated the bottom of the umbrella over the posts inside the handle, screwed it back together, and wrapped it in some leather scraps I had (it was originally wrapped in some really thin, crappy, cloth strips). Here’s the result:

Pirate dagger

While checking out one of thrift store this Halloween I spotted a set of Wolverine claws that looked cool and were made of very sturdy plastic (and were cheap). I thought the blades would potentially make cool looking daggers.

I ripped one of the ‘claws’ off and thinned down the end I intended to insert into a handle with a rotary tool. For the handle I used a small section of bamboo that I notched (also with the rotary tool) to accommodate the ‘blade’.

After a little hot glue and some black leather cord wrapped around, this was the result:

I then used a wood burning tool to add the inscription. The loose translation from Latin is “everyone lives, not everyone deserved to”. It seemed like something a pirate would say.