Swash, swash, buckle, buckle.

This one’s got a wondrous floaty feeling to its handling – the combination of a block-carved method for the blade and the relatively narrow wrap of the handle combine to make this piece very responsive in the hand.

It’s about 4 ounces (113 grams), and around 2 feet 8 inches long. I’ve been realizing that most people probably have no point of reference for the weight measurement and therefore don’t realize how ridiculous this is, so here are some comparisons:

• A standard deck of playing cards: 3.5 ounces
• Four AA batteries: 3.4 ounces
• A hamster: 3 to 5 ounces
• Most of the other boffers at this league of similar length: 7 ounces
• Most foam LARP swords of similar length sold online: 9 or 10 ounces, sometimes more

So getting this down to 4 ounces really is unusual. I used a carbon fiber tube core, and 1.2-pound-per-cubic-foot-density closed-cell foam for the blade.

I’ve been experimenting more with using the Cricut, which I affectionately refer to as the knife printer, to enable more detail in the duct tape designs. It requires doing some of the design work digitally and then converting that into a vector file.

The wide guard is the most iconic part of this kind of sword. I found a cutlass model with a reasonable-looking design, but it was, of course, wrapped all around the guard. So I took images of three different angles and traced (blue) a version of the outline that was a bit modified to work with the 2-color guard design I had in mind, transferring between angles.

Plugged this into the knife printer to cut the outline, carefully removed all the negative space (I still use the craft knife for this)

I’m skipping over a lot of the math here because it’s not as visually fun to present, but, kids, getting a strong intuitive understanding of basic algebra is really important for most good art projects.

Really important to wrap from the convex side of a shape – and in this case the curve is so extreme and important that I held it in place with a marker while doing the wrapping. Note the tabs cut to fold around the outside edges.

I found an appropriately pirate-related font (can you imagine this kind of blade being inscribed in Times New Roman? Not the right vibe) and wrote a somewhat piratey phrase along its side, since otherwise the blade would be a bit blank-looking compared to the ornate handle.

I hope it leads people on profitable, or at least interesting, adventures. Random linguistics: The “buckler” part is relatively straightforward (it’s a small shield), but the “swash” of “Swashbuckler” comes from an old term used to refer to bluster, violent movements, or a striking against a surface, but also sometimes used to refer to the impact of water upon water. So I’ve seen different stories of how this formed “swashbuckler.” One story is that it refers to a person with a sort of bluster and swagger. The other is that it comes from a period in which informal English often inverted noun and verb, and so refers to someone who would strike their own shield to intimidate – a buckle-swasher, rendered as “swashbuckler.”