River Koi Tanto & Matching Stand (walk-through)
Apr 27, 2022 21:42:30 GMT
Post by steveboy on Apr 27, 2022 21:42:30 GMT
I started off with a $50 scratch & dent tanto from Ronin Katana:
Tried to disassemble it and found that the tsuka had been epoxied near the fuchi. I pried & malleted until my pry tool slipped and scratched the habaki & blade and I sliced my thumb open on the edge. Off to a flying start.
I posted my problem on the forum here and got terrific responses showing me how to make a tsuka-nuki hammer specifically for removing stubborn tsukas. Hot damn!
I fabricated the nuki from a spare piece of wood:
...and used it to bang off the stubborn tsuka:
Disassembly time!
Originally I'd planned a very Art Deco design. You can see the fan scallops in my pencil drawing. Beside the pencil is a list of the steps I'd need to take. A lot of taping, masking, lace-patterning, you name it. Plus even more tanto disassembly and the sanded saya. You can also see the epoxy residue on the tsuba and fuchi.
I primered everything white:
Sprayed an Auto Borne Metallic Silver Sealer base coat on the saya--
--and taped it off. I don't want to say how long it took me to tape this thing.
Then the problems started. The primer & sealer simply would not bond to the wood. The tape just lifted it up. I sanded it off, cleaned with TSP, repainted, and had the same problem. I sanded it off again, cleaned with TSP, cleaned with Krud Kleaner, repainted, and had the same problem.
I've learned not to argue with the weather, so I put it away for about 5 months. I worked on a bunch of other projects (some of which I've posted here), and by the time I got back around to the tanto, I wanted to do something very different.
I sanded the saya back down to the wood, cleaned with TSP and Krud Kleaner, then brushed on two coats of PVA glue thinned 1:1 with water. I like this trick. It saturates the wood so that it doesn't drink up the paint; it acts as a filler for minor scratches & irregularities, and -- most important in this case -- it gives you a clean surface to paint on.
I repainted with silver base coat, wrapped one end with vinyl tape, removed it -- and the paint held. Yay.
By now I wanted to do something even more challenging: A fairly rendered koi fish swimming above realistic rocks. I had practiced the rocks on a Contigo mug--
--so I wasn't worried about those. But the only fish I'd ever done was a stylized stencil version on a dojo katana--
--and I had no idea if I could pull this off. One way to find out, yah?
I'd gotten a Cricut cutting machine for a good price for another project (a Keith Haring trash can), and I used it to make a koi-shaped stencil.
I wanted a gloss black saya with long panels on either side that would contain the rock bed and koi fish. I wanted the panels trimmed in silver. So I vinyl-taped the saya and rubber-banded the stencil negative (the solid body of the fish) where I wanted it.
I masked the parts I wanted to paint black and speckle-painted the panels & kurigata with black, gray, and white paint. (This is an airbrusher trick where you hold a popsicle stick just under the spray needle and the paint bounces off of it and spreads as speckles. You can change the size & density by moving & angling the popsicle stick.)
I drew some smooth river rock shapes and cut out the ones I liked.
I used the rock stencils on the saya in different positions to spray fading black outlines, positioning them as I worked my way down.
Then I rendered some depth by filling in shadows and contours to accentuate the shape and depth of the stones.
The detailing may seem a little heavy handed, but I was going to paint the panel a teal color with candy paint, which would both make it look more like the stones were in water, and make it look a little deeper with all that black.
Here's a first pass with the candy teal. The koi shape is still between the rubber bands, hard to see because it's been speckled with the rest of the panel.
I faded the candy out near the bottom because I like the effect. At the same time it seems to be turning to black-and-white, the noncolored stones seem oddly more realistic. The fade looks a bit as if there are sunlight/shadow differences in the water, and also helps highlight the koi swimming where the color transitions. Here's after the final candy layer with the koi-shaped mask removed.
With the koi-shaped mask off I now had a nice metallic-silver fish shape. I put the koi stencil over it so I could get a hard edge and sprayed three layers of metallic white. Then I sprayed candy orange spots.
I don't have the chops to airbrush the fine detail the fish would need, so I knife-sharpened two different-sized pencils and drew them in. A happy accident was that the fine lines from the very sharp pencils actually grooved the soft wood, which gave a more realistic texture to the fins and tail. I used a Sharpie for the eyes (using two hands, holding my breath, and going very slowly -- I'm not terribly deft at this).
The fish was way too white and popped out too much -- as if it were floating above the water and not in it. I didn't want to lose the opalescent white but I knew I had to tint him with some of that teal.
I decided to do a fade, working the teal darker at the koi's edges and lighter toward the top, keeping the head largely white. It would make him look submerged but with his head poking up toward the viewer.
I was startled by the result. The fish seemed to be more solid, and the teal fade made it look more luminous instead of muting it. I really like how the need to fix a problem led to a huge and unforeseen improvement in the image. I'd never done anything like this before, and I was really happy with how it was turning out.
Now I had to mask off the panels to paint the rest of the saya black:
Createx had just come out with a new gloss black and I was eager to try it. It .... didn't work so great over the metallic silver. It just wasn't opaque enough. So I sprayed two coats of jet black over the gloss and then tried the gloss again over that. Bingo.
I pulled off all the tape except the band near the koiguchi, and was very happy with the result!
I did a black fade-in on the non-koi panel, first with jet black, then with gloss black. Then I pulled the last bit of tape from near the koiguchi.
There were two areas that needed fixing: an inch or so of black overspray along one of the silver panel outlines, and an inch of silver line that had lifted when I removed the tape. No-brainer fixes: Because they're straight lengths, it's easy to mask off the line borders and respray the silver paint.
So I did that -- and a dime-sized area of a panel by the fish head lifted off down to the wood. This friggin saya is cursed, I tell you.
That little area represented 2 coats of silver primer, 2 of gloss intercoat, 3 different speckle colors (black, gray, white), 4 of candy teal, and two more of gloss clear. No way to reproduce that.
I tried to reapply the silver primer, and it just wouldn't go on. So I sprayed candy teal onto the bare wood until the color reasonably matched. Without the metallic underneath it wouldn't have the same light reflectivity as the rest of the panel, but I could downplay that by increasing the black shadow at the top of the stone where it falls into shadow anyhow, and by adding new speckling with a Sharpie.
Here's the repair:
At this point my biggest desire in the world was to cover this damn thing with polyurethane, because encasing it in clear plastic was about the only way left to protect it. I was pretty much terrified to do anything else to this saya and invoke the Curse of Koi George. So I sprayed three coats of gloss polyurethane and hung it to cure for a week.
Time for the tsuka: I brushed the same candy teal onto the samegawa, then rag-wiped it so that the nodules would show lighter outlined with darker teal.
There were some humps in the samegawa near the koiguchi, so I wet the back to make it pliable, then reglued it flat to the tsuka and wrapped it tight.
I painted some silver details on the fuchi and kashira, then clearcoated these and the tsuba, seppa, and shitodome.
Tsukamaki time! I won't detail the process because I've covered it a bunch in previous walk-through posts. I will say I found it a lot harder to wrap the much smaller handle, though. Here's the outcome:
And the parts ready for reassembly:
Considering the effort it took to disassemble it, I was surprised how well it went back together. I did end up wrapping a towel around the blade and gripping that while I banged on the towel-draped kashira with a rubber mallet. The hole in the tsuba was way off center, and getting everything to fit mostly symmetrically took some doing. It still ain't right, but ya work with what ya got.
I brushed two coats of polyurethane onto the ito and glued the shitodome back in place with E6000. Nothing to do now but let everything dry and cure.
As I mentioned early on, I'd put a decent scratch on the blade & habaki when I was trying to disassemble it.
I wanted to try to polish it out. I went at it with 800, 1000, 1500, & 2000 grit, then Peek & Mother's polishes, and got it down to a fainter line.
I'm still not happy about that scratch; I get the feeling I'll be revisiting it with some 400 grit. But at least the blade was better-polished than when I'd got it.
I went to work on the cheap little vertical stand I bought for it. The top cradle piece was too narrow, so I enlarged it with a rotary tool. Then I taped off the base and airbrushed a rock bed, with a reversed mask of the tail of the koi swimming away on the top right:
I added detail and contour, candied it teal, & painted the koi. I thought about painting ripples around where the sword would be placed, but I decided not to push my luck. I painted the rock bed darker & the koi more muted than those on the tanto so that the stand wouldn't steal focus.
I masked off the rock bed and painted the base black, then faded the neck parts from candy teal to black. Then untape, clearcoat, & assemble. To help protect the finish on the saya I glued rubber padding meant for instrument cases to the stand's top cradle and bottom divot.
Here's the final tanto & stand:
Thanks for reading!