Critical Hit Creations

Prop replicas, writing, and creative hobbies

Superior Wolf School Swords and Harness, The Witcher 3 (Part 2)

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Creating the molds for the blades was a much more complicated and involved process. Due to the size of the pieces, I decided to make matrix molds with a fibreglass shell. Luckily, both blades are roughly the same shape, so I only needed to create a single shell within which I could pour both molds. I started by laying one of the blades on MDF and claying up the shape of the first shell half around it, including registration for the mold and for the second half of the shell, and pour holes for the rubber. This was sealed and painted with a coat of epoxy, before laying layers of fibreglass and more epoxy coats. When the fibreglass was cured, I removed the clay, flipped it over, sculpted the second half of the shell, then sealed it and applied release agent, and laid down the second half of the fibreglass. I embedded a steel pole into each half of the shell to improve its strength, and once the second half was cured, I cleaned up the excess fibreglass, drilled in holes to bolt the halves together, and added smaller holes to allow air bubbles escape during the molding process.
Unfortunately, fibreglass doesn’t like sharp angles, and when I removed the clay from the finished shell, I discovered that there were a lot of voids and lifted fibreglass on the inside. This added a lot of work time as I had to sand down the fibreglass and fill it with Bondo to redefine the internal shape of the shell. When this was complete, I primed and varnished the interior to make sure there was no bubbles or surfaces for the rubber to get stuck in to.
With the fibreglass jacket complete, I clayed up the first blade and bolted the jacket together. I mixed a large bucket (nearly 4kg) of Mold Max 40 and began slowly pouring this into the shell. As the silicone filled the shell, it pushed air bubbles out through the holes I had drilled, which I patched with clay once silicone started leaking through. The rubber was left to cure, then the jacket flipped, opened, the clay removed, release agent applied, jacket re-sealed and the second half of the silicone mixed and poured. Once the mold for the first blade was finished, it could be safely removed from the jacket, and the second mold made following the same approach.

After finishing all fourteen molds, including the two huge blade molds, it was time to start casting. The casting for the two-part block molds was relatively straightforward, though I did have some curing issues while testing the slower-curing Smooth Cast 305, so I stuck with Smooth Cast 300 for the final pieces. Each mold was dusted with aluminium powder and sealed, part A and part B of the resin was measured out, with a drop of black dye and some additional aluminium powder added to part B (about 50% powder to part B, by weight). I usually mixed enough to pour into two or three of the smaller molds as a time, rotating the molds and tapping them gently to release air bubbles as I poured. It took some time to learn the intricacies of each of the molds, and since I was going for a cold cast finish I couldn’t have any bubbles or imperfections, so it took a few attempts to get a set of castings that I was happy with.

As with the molds themselves, the casting of the blades was a much more difficult process. I knew that I would need to embed a steel rod into the casting to give each blade strength, and that I was working with a 1-2mm tolerance between the rod and the surface of the blade. For my first attempt, I dusted the mold with aluminium powder, sealed the jacket around it and secured it upright, lowering the rod in through the pour spout. I mixed and poured a full batch of Smooth Cast 300 (about 600 grams of plastic), only for most of it to leak out onto the floor due to the pressure exerted by the liquid on the narrow mold. Additionally, when I removed the cured plastic from inside the mold, the steel rod was sticking through the surface.   
The solution to embedding the rod was to start the casting with an open mold. The mold was dusted and the rod carefully suspended over one half of it using thread. The rod was placed close enough to the mold wall so that it wouldn’t rest against either side, but also with enough space to allow the resin flow freely around it. This step was a separate challenge for both blades, as each have a different layout of fullers and centreline that have to be avoided. With the rod in place, half of the resin was poured into the open mold, getting it as close to the edge of the mold as possible while not overflowing. With the rod successfully embedded, it took me a handful of failed attempts before I had a reliable technique for producing high-quality finished castings.

In order to minimise leaking of the resin, I initially attempted doing multiple partial pours into the closed mold once I had completed the open pour to secure the rod. I experimented with quantities and pouring techniques, eventually resolving the leaking. However, I now had streaks and curing inhibition between the separate pours, and each attempt was taking hours, with a lot of wasted resin on every failure. I figured that I could use the initial closed mold pour to coat the surface of the mold, and once it had cured backfill it with additional pours until it was solid.
To produce the final blade castings, I first secured the rod using my open mold technique, then closed the mold and bolted the jacket together. Next, I mixed up a small quantity of Smooth Cast 300 (about 80 grams part A) and poured this into the mold so that it flowed along the steel rod instead of streaking the aluminium powder off the mold surface. As soon as this resin was poured, I quickly and carefully slushed it around the mold so that it completely coated the surface, again taking care not to wash away the aluminium powder. This step required lifting and rolling a four and a half foot long fibreglass monstrosity which held nearly 10Kg of rubber inside it. Once the surface layer was cured, two additional batches of resin were poured to backfill the piece, again using small quantities so that the surface layer wouldn’t deform under the pressure of the liquid. 
Getting away from the dust and mess of fabrication and casting, I began work on the leather covers for the scabbards. Starting with a veg-tanned cow side, I cut a rectangle of leather for each scabbard, long enough to fit into the scabbard’s chape and locket. This leather was wetted and stretched over the scabbard, clamped in place along its centreline. Once it had dried, most of the excess was trimmed away and I laid in the pattern. I cut a hexagonal template in styrene and marked in the centre points of each of the partial circles and the larger circle that surrounds them. I set the template on the dampened leather, then placed my wing divider in each of the centres and scribed the circles, avoiding marking the centre point holes on the leather. The scabbard narrows from top to bottom, so the pattern got smaller, requiring me to reduce the radii and make increasingly smaller styrene templates. Once the pattern was marked onto the leather, I hammered in all of the stitching holes using a mallet and stitching stamp.   
The leather was dyed with Angelus Leather Dye’s Brick dye, buffed and sealed. Next began the time-consuming process of saddle-stitching the pattern for both scabbards. For each part of the pattern (i.e the outer circle and inner flower-like design), two needles were tied to the ends of a piece of thread, and the part was hand-stitched: stitch inner pattern, remove needles, rethread needles, stitch outer pattern. Rinse and repeat for 32 flowers per scabbard! Luckily as the pattern got smaller, the time required to stitch it went down. With the pattern complete, the leather was stitched onto the scabbard. Its edges were trimmed down close to the stitch line, dyed and burnished.
At this point, all of the pieces of the swords were fabricated and ready for finishing and assembly. All of the cold cast parts were cleaned up to remove any mold lines, then buffed with fine steel wool and polished with Autosol Metal Polish. The inner surfaces of the locket and chape were hollowed out slightly to allow them fit over the leather when attached to the scabbard. I used 5-minute epoxy to glue the pieces of the guards together and attach them to the tang. For the grip, I dyed veg-tanned leather cord the appropriate colour (Brick for the Silver Sword, Chocolate for the Steel Sword), and wound it around the grip, securing it in place with leather glue. With the swords assembled, I added some subtle weathering, focussing on the pommels and the base of the blade. I used a black ochre powder as a close approximation of dirt and grime, mixing it with water and painting it into the corners and crevices, then wiping most of it off.
Part of the iconic design of Geralt and the witchers is the pair of swords hanging across their back, hilts sticking over their shoulder. With the swords and scabbards complete, I felt I couldn’t leave the project without attempting to create a harness to achieve this look. While The Witcher 3 does a great job of rendering highly-detailed weapons and armour, it takes some slight liberties with how the swords are hung from Geralt’s back. Most armours in the game are designed with straps and parts to represent the sword harness, but the exact method of mounting the scabbards is not present. With this in mind, I picked my favourite armour design and spent some time figuring out if I could make it work practically to hang the swords over my shoulder.
As with the swords, my favourite armour in the game is the Superior Wolf School set, which has a set of studded shoulder pads and straps worn over the jacket. The shoulder pieces are strapped together across the chest, and have buckled under-arm straps, so the piece can be fabricated and worn separate from the armour. I knew that I’d need two mounting points on this to hang the swords across rather than straight down, and after careful study of the in-game reference, I had a fair idea where these mounting points would be.

I started by drawing out the pattern on cardstock. I did the shoulder pads first, using my scabbards and the metal rivets as scale reference. I drew the straps longer than necessary, then cut out the card and taped it together, resizing it until I was happy that the piece correctly fit my shoulders. Next, I transferred the pattern onto some heavy veg tanned leather, cut it out, and punched in the stitching holes. I temporarily stitched the pieces together and did a test fitting, ensuring that it sat correctly and everything lined up.

At this point, my leather matched the in-game design, but it was missing a way to mount the swords. I cut out two pairs of leather straps and attached buckles to them, sizing them to fit around the top of the scabbards. I tied the straps onto one of the scabbards, and a friend wore the work-in-progress harness while I held the scabbard up to it and marked in where the straps would attach. I stitched on the straps for the first sword, then lay the second scabbard side-by-side to mark its mounting points. The top straps for both swords anchored to one of the shoulder pads, and were stitched together for additional support. For the second scabbard, its lower strap didn’t actually come in to contact with the main harness, so I ended up stitching it to the strap for the first scabbard, and ensuring that this strap was stitched securely enough to the cross-strap of the harness to support both swords.
Confident that the piece fit together and that the swords hung from it correctly, I removed the temporary stitching, labelling each piece so I would know how everything went together once it had been dyed and finished. I punched in the holes for the rivets, and the stitching holes for all the decorative stitching, as well as cutting out strips of thin veg-tanned lambskin to stitch onto the edges of the shoulder pads.
My standard practice for finishing leather is: dye the pieces and let them dry, buff them with a cloth to remove the excess dye, rub olive oil into the grain side and let it dry, brush gum tragacanth onto the edges and flesh side and burnish, and finally seal the grain side with leather finish. For the harness, all of the pieces were dyed with Coffee Angelus Leather Dye.   
  
With the leather pieces finished, I set the rivets and began stitching, taking care with my order of operations. The decorative stitching for the buckled under-arm straps was completed before stitching in the buckles, then the cross-chest straps were stitched before mounting the under-arm straps to them. The edges of the shoulder pads were wrapped with thin lambskin, which was doubled-over and stitched above and below the leather of each pad. Where the shoulder pad meets the cross-strap, I stitched through four layers of leather – the two sides of the lambskin edging, the shoulder pad, and the cross-strap. Once the main harness was complete, the mounting straps were stitched into place and the swords were ready to be attached.  

Thanks for reading,
Terry

2 comments :

  1. This is super interesting. Your method for producing the swords is solid. Biggest question I have, at the end of all of that, is how durable the resin blades actually end up being - obviously they're rigid enough with the steel core in, but I would be worried about the blades being brittle / chipping / cracking if too much stress is applied, particularly while sheathing and unsheathing. Anything you can share?

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    Replies
    1. Hi Ein,
      You raise a valid concern, one I had throughout the project. It was part of the reason I made the scabbards out of carbon fibre, so that the blades would have as much protection as possible.

      However, they are relatively durable, and have a reasonable amount of flex. The biggest concern is the metallic surface finish scratching or the edges of the blades getting dented. So its fine to swing them around a bit, but I wouldn't be swinging them at things!

      As for drawing and sheathing the blades - I don't remember if I said it on here, but there is no practical way to draw them over the shoulder. They're far to long, my arm is fully extended over my head before they're even halfway drawn.

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