The Finn Sword – Case Study (Part 1)

A while back I made the “Finn Sword” from Adventure Time. If you read my blog post about it, I wasn’t too happy with how it turned out. This was because I knew I could do a better job. So I did just that.

I started off by choosing a more rigid material than foam. In this case wood (mostly pine).

Once I had my material in mind I went back to the reference material to help design my template. I did this by taking lots of screenshots of the sword from Adventure Time.

The hardest part about this was getting the right measurements from these references. Cartoons are generally hand drawn so the sizes of things can be inconsistent. I came up with this template by making a lot of educated guesses based on proportions of Finn compared to the sword, and doing some research about swords in real life.

The two wooden boards that I had selected were glued together with opposing grains facing each other to prevent warping. I clamped them down with tons of clamps to insure that the bond would be as strong as possible.

After a day, the glue was fully set, so I took the board and cut it to the length of the blade. It was then run through my table saw to create the angles of the blade, along with cutting the point on my bandsaw.

I marked the point of the sword at one end of my newly formed blade and sanded it down to shape.

I took the leftover pieces from the original boards I glued together, and glued them side to side to build the “cross-gaurd” of the blade

I then transferred the design from the template to the wooden block. It was then cut out to the basic shape.

Using a router, it was then rounded down on the side of of the cross-guard.

The cross-guard and the blade were then drilled so that they could be fitted together with a dowel. I also created a smaller test piece to check the fit, and also as a reference while sanding down the cross-guard.

Then, I cut the blade portion of the cross-guard to shape with a coping saw, and sanded it the rest of the way. Along with increasing the size of the bevel because I wasn’t quite happy with the shape.

Taking a 2×4 and cutting it in half, I rounded the edges and put it on my lathe. This would become the grip and the pommel of the sword. I made a template of the hilt based off of my original template, and divided it up into sections. I transferred these sections onto the hilt I was turning. Using calipers I constantly checked to make sure the size of the hilt matched up with the template.

Both the hilt and cross-guard were drilled so they could be connected by dowels. All the components were taken and glued together to create one solid piece.

From there, wood filler was applied to some of the seams and then sanded down. It still wasn’t perfect, so some Bondo was added and sanded again. Bondo works a bit nicer with my workflow because it sands down smoother, and also dries much faster.

I had to find something for the gem, so I decided to go with a croquet ball. It worked out pretty well, but if I were to make this sword again, I might have tried to find something made out of a softer wood because sanding it was very tough due to its hardness. Because the ball was obviously round, cutting it while still getting two even halves would be difficult so I build a jig to help me out.

Using wood glue, the ball was glued to the cross guard of the sword.

I used another layer of Bondo to fix all the surfaces, and blended some of the edges on the ball.  That helped everything look like one piece. I started the priming and sanding process (with 320 and 400 grit) to smooth everything out after adding an I-hook to the pommel.

After going on a trip to Reynolds Advanced Materials, I had acquired some “free form air” which is a two part epoxy/putty that Smooth-On makes. Realizing the gem wasn’t looking quite right, I sculpted around it with the free form air, and made the gem look inset, which really made the sword come together.

I continued the priming and sanding process until all the defects were removed. The sword was painted glossy back, and sanded with 1000 and 1500 grit sandpaper. After this process was repeated many times, the sword was buffed, and prepped for casting.

More on that in Part 2 of this write up (coming soon)!

Thanks for reading!