"Carbon fiber" wakizashi
Jan 18, 2022 1:55:48 GMT
Post by steveboy on Jan 18, 2022 1:55:48 GMT
At my dojo, an 80-year-old, lifelong martial-artist named Francis was studying batto to help him recover from a stroke, which I thought was awesome. But he'd been bringing this godawful thrashed mall wakizashi to class. My instructor asked if I could fix it up a bit, because the saya was cracked and the blade was so beat up that it was going to saw through the wood and hurt Francis or someone else.
This is what it looked like when he gave it to me:
I took it apart, stripped the paint from the fittings and airbrushed them gloss black, then lacquered the ito:
I wasn't confident I could re-create the saya's pretty India red, so I just cleaned it up, wood-glued the cracks, and repainted the black on the ends. I cleaned the habaki with Brasso and Peek metal polish.
The blade looked like it had lost a fight with a lawn mower. I went to town on that thing: I smoothed the very rough edge with a rattail file, then worked the blade with a palm sander and grit from 400 to 2500. I lubricated it with vegetable oil.
I was amazed how polished it got by the time I hit 2000-2500 grit. It was also interesting to see how badly alloyed the metal was -- thick veins of copper wove through the polished blade:
I finished up with a round of Peek polish on one side and MetalGlo on the other, just to see if there was any difference. FWIW I think Peek had a slight (ahem) edge.
It was still scratched, and all I could do about that copper was polish it up, but I was still surprised by the amount of improvement:. Here's a before & after:
I put it all back together and returned it to Francis. My reward was watching his eyes bug out when he saw it.
Sadly, Francis had to quit batto not long after, but he gave me the wakizashi and its matching katana as a present, which really touched me.
I'd been learning to use my new airbrush by doing simple painting on repairs like the ones above. I loved it: paint went on even and flat, no cracking, peeling, non-bonding, or other chemical weirdness. And clearcoat was so much smoother. I'm sorry, rattlecans, but we're through. It's not you, it's me. (Yeah, no: it's you.)
I wanted to do more creative stuff with the airbrush -- and hey, look, here's a kinda fixed-up mall wakizashi someone gave me....
I thought I'd try a carbon-fiber effect on the saya. There are a lot of YouTube airbrush tutorials on this, so I thought, why not?
I sanded that beautiful India red from the saya and painted it jet black. Then I got some drawer liner from the Dollar Store and cut out a section:
A saya's oval cross-section, lengthwise curve, and slight taper can make geometric patterns and larger stencils problematic. Here I wrapped the drawer liner tight and sewed it along the bottom curve of the saya:
I masked off the saya ends and hung it in front of a foamcore backdrop (again, yay Dollar Store), and airbrushed the liner with flat black mixed with a little silver. You have to be sure to do light coats and aim straight down, or the paint tends to blow under the liner. (This was great practice for when I stenciled lace on another katana). I faded it in from the top.
Then I did another pass using silver:
Here I made a mistake: to get a dimensional, "weave" effect, the silver should have been sprayed from a slightly different angle. The coverage on the saya would be different, and a consistent "shadow" of the painted black wouldn't be touched.
Instead I sprayed straight, which simply covered the previous black pass and made more of checkerboard than a carbon-fiber weave. Oopsy. Live & learn!
I faded from the saya bottom using brushed-aluminum-color paint, then clearcoated. I let it hang for a week, then buffed with 3M rubbing compound and polished with Maguiar's car polish.
Even though the finished product wasn't quite what I was shooting for, I like how it looks, and I learned a lot making it.
This is what it looked like when he gave it to me:
I took it apart, stripped the paint from the fittings and airbrushed them gloss black, then lacquered the ito:
I wasn't confident I could re-create the saya's pretty India red, so I just cleaned it up, wood-glued the cracks, and repainted the black on the ends. I cleaned the habaki with Brasso and Peek metal polish.
The blade looked like it had lost a fight with a lawn mower. I went to town on that thing: I smoothed the very rough edge with a rattail file, then worked the blade with a palm sander and grit from 400 to 2500. I lubricated it with vegetable oil.
I had only ever done minor polishing as part of maintenance, and this felt kind of -- well, a combination of bold and wrong. I had to keep reminding myself that this was a ganked-out mall sword that I wasn't gonna make any worse. Still.
I was amazed how polished it got by the time I hit 2000-2500 grit. It was also interesting to see how badly alloyed the metal was -- thick veins of copper wove through the polished blade:
I finished up with a round of Peek polish on one side and MetalGlo on the other, just to see if there was any difference. FWIW I think Peek had a slight (ahem) edge.
It was still scratched, and all I could do about that copper was polish it up, but I was still surprised by the amount of improvement:. Here's a before & after:
I put it all back together and returned it to Francis. My reward was watching his eyes bug out when he saw it.
Sadly, Francis had to quit batto not long after, but he gave me the wakizashi and its matching katana as a present, which really touched me.
I'd been learning to use my new airbrush by doing simple painting on repairs like the ones above. I loved it: paint went on even and flat, no cracking, peeling, non-bonding, or other chemical weirdness. And clearcoat was so much smoother. I'm sorry, rattlecans, but we're through. It's not you, it's me. (Yeah, no: it's you.)
I wanted to do more creative stuff with the airbrush -- and hey, look, here's a kinda fixed-up mall wakizashi someone gave me....
I thought I'd try a carbon-fiber effect on the saya. There are a lot of YouTube airbrush tutorials on this, so I thought, why not?
I sanded that beautiful India red from the saya and painted it jet black. Then I got some drawer liner from the Dollar Store and cut out a section:
A saya's oval cross-section, lengthwise curve, and slight taper can make geometric patterns and larger stencils problematic. Here I wrapped the drawer liner tight and sewed it along the bottom curve of the saya:
I masked off the saya ends and hung it in front of a foamcore backdrop (again, yay Dollar Store), and airbrushed the liner with flat black mixed with a little silver. You have to be sure to do light coats and aim straight down, or the paint tends to blow under the liner. (This was great practice for when I stenciled lace on another katana). I faded it in from the top.
Then I did another pass using silver:
Here I made a mistake: to get a dimensional, "weave" effect, the silver should have been sprayed from a slightly different angle. The coverage on the saya would be different, and a consistent "shadow" of the painted black wouldn't be touched.
Instead I sprayed straight, which simply covered the previous black pass and made more of checkerboard than a carbon-fiber weave. Oopsy. Live & learn!
I faded from the saya bottom using brushed-aluminum-color paint, then clearcoated. I let it hang for a week, then buffed with 3M rubbing compound and polished with Maguiar's car polish.
Even though the finished product wasn't quite what I was shooting for, I like how it looks, and I learned a lot making it.