Objective: Replica of this historical Four Tiger Sword in the collection of the National Museum of Korea

It’s called this (“four tiger sword,” saingeom) because historically it was created in the year of the tiger, in the month of the tiger, in the day of the tiger, in the hours of the tiger. More info in this article, if you’re interested.

For creating these kinds of inlays for boffers, here’s my process.

Step 1: Cut the pattern out of the outer layer of duct tape

Step 2: Carefully transfer this to rest on top of the inner layer

For designs like this, this involves creating a whole latticework on top of the outer layer to hold it together while transferring it over.

Similarly to the music sword, there’s closed-cell foam along the sides of the carbon-fiber core and open-cell foam along the edges, so that you get the right amount of total compression regardless of which vector the hit comes in along. Then the whole thing is surrounded by a thin layer of closed-cell foam. In this case, I found that you get a funny view into the interior by holding it up to the light before dressing it with duct tape. The greener areas are the closed-cell foam along the sides of the core.

Here’s part of the cross-section, although I actually ended up replacing the core with a slightly wider diameter, and remember that in addition to what’s shown in this picture, there’s an outer wrapping of a thin layer of closed-cell foam around the whole thing, seen above.

I created an ornamental guard based on another Korean sword hilt.

Same technique as shown above, but even more fiddly and precise. Then I added a bit of gold along the first inch of the blade.

Lesson learned in this build: gold actually doesn’t show up very well against the normal silver duct tape, so it really should be used against darker materials for higher contrast. I’d used the usual silver because it’s the recommended color for the league this sword was for, and because my tape in that color was especially thin, but in the future I’ll do these fine ornamental gold designs against a darker background.