Deathtrap part IV - Shield, Garrote and Crossbow

When I think of a collection of medieval weapons I think of a shield among them.  A shield isn't mentioned in the script, and I don't think anyone but me wanted one, but that didn't stop me.  I found a great article at Yeoldegaffers  (http://yeoldegaffers.com/project_shield.asp) detailing plans for constructing a heater shield and I set about seeing how much I could bastardize it and have it still work.  Instead of using real plywood I used cheap 1/8" fiberboard and instead of using two layers I just glued some of the scraps left from cutting the shape to the back side.  I didn't bother with a proper shield press either, I just piled up whatever was close at hand (drill batteries, a brick, hand tools, wood scraps, etc.) in a roughly curved pile on top of a cardboard box and used a ratchet strap to bend the glued fiberboard down to the curve.

 Strategically placed squeeze clamps helped even out the spots where the fiberboard layers disagreed with one another and left gaps.


The main character in Deathtrap is named Sidney Bruhl. I did a little research online and found several coats of arms associated with the German name von Bruhl. I chose the simplest of them, and the only one within the scope of my painting ability: a white line on a blue background.

 The white line is 2" wide, the thickness of normal blue masking tape, I used a square to find the 45° angle and measured down from the top on each side to make sure it was reasonably even, realized it wasn't, and repeated the process several times until by sheer dumb luck it ended up even.



They needed a garrote, which took me a while because I had no idea what it looked like. Even after finally figuring out how to spell it google images just showed me confusing pictures of a medieval torture apparatus. Someone finally explained to me that it's basically a piano string with handles and I got to work.

It was the simplest thing in the world, all I did was drill a hole in each of two small pieces of dowel, stick ends of a wire inside and squeeze hot glue in to hold it.
I forgot to take pictures, but here's a link to a picture of a similar one.

The wire I used is called safety wire, not because it will break away safely if used to strangle someone but rather because it won't break when used to suspend pipes or hand paintings.  The hot glue though proved weaker than the actor's neck, which I suppose is a good thing because it saved me some police questioning and paperwork, and if there's one thing I hate it's paperwork.




The last item I produced for Deathtrap was a crossbow, which in hindsight probably should have been produced first because it is an important storyline element.  The assistant director showed me a picture of an Arbalest, basically a crossbow with a full stock like a rifle, and an idea was born.  I cannibalized a BB gun and cut a piece of wood to fit in the slot where the barrel would normally go. Then I glued two long pieces of fiberboard together with a little added scrap to give the butt joint some strength, and screwed that onto the piece of wood in turn screwed to the fake stock.

I punched a couple holes in the ends of the fiberboard and tied a string through them with sufficient length to reach back near the trigger group.

I put a considerable amount of thought into the firing mechanism and came up with a handful of fairly complicated designs. The solution I finally settled on though was very simple. The piece of real wood that I had to fit in the stock happened to have been used at work as a test scrap for a dado cutter.  A dado cuts a wide and shallow notch, a perfect notch for your thumb to flick the string free.

 The bent fiberboard applies very little actual tension so this mechanism (or lack thereof) worked perfectly

 Deathtrap's weapons wall

Thanks for reading!

Deathtrap part III - Maces

The maces were my favorite pieces, and the most fun to make. So much fun evidently that I completely forgot about my camera and ended up with only two work in progress pictures. Fortunately the construction processes just a reapplication of the techniques used foe the flail and axes. (I knew I wrote those first for a reason)

The morning star is practically the same as the flail except that the head is attached to the handle directly, with no chain.  I wanted it to look a little different though, so I cut the spike molds to be a little smaller and made another ball with smaller but more numerous spikes. I drilled a hole in the plastic ball the diameter of the dowel and stuck them together with hot glue. I made a simple handguard out of a scrap of 1/4" plywood cut to a kind of rounded star shape with a jigsaw and with a hole in the center to fit on over the dowel.

Painting it was the interesting part. I made the handle plain black and the handguard plain gold but the ball-o-spikes needed to look more interesting. I don't know what possessed me to do this, but I painted it all gold, then painted over that all black, then before that dried wiped most of the black off with a rag.  Whatever it was possessed me to do that obviously knows more about painting than I do because it looked pretty good.

 When there isn't a camera flash directly on them the stitches even blend in pretty well.

The flanged mace built nearly the same way as the smaller axe.  I pie-cut the end of another dowel with a jigsaw and cut out three pieces of 1/8" fiberboard to the shape of the flanges I wanted

My crude drawings in Paint are actually a fair approximation of how poorly I cut the pieces out with the jigsaw. That being so, it should come as no surprise that the final product was composed of 80% hot glue.

The flanges were spiky and dimensional enough to look fine plain black. I painted part of the other end of the dowel black and added some small paperboard rings painted gold to make a handle. I also stained the exposed wood part of the handle a light color, Golden Pecan if memory serves.

Thanks for reading!

Deathtrap part II - Battleaxes

The simplest of the deathtrap weapons were the axes. The first one was just a scrap of plywood glued to a dowel. It only took about half an hour.

I began by cutting a scrap of 1/4 plywood to a shape like a crescent axe blade with a curved pick.  I used a jigsaw following pencil lines drawn freehand and around a bucket.  Light sanding on the cut edges to remove the splinters the saw made

I found a piece of wooden dowel in the garage courtesy of a previous tenant who hid all sorts of treasures (read: garbage) around the house for me.  I stained it with some extra Minwax 225 red mahogany stain borrowed from work and cut a 1/4" wide notch in the end with a jigsaw.

Wood glue, squeeze clamp, 15 minutes... Pretty self-explanatory...

Ready to paint

A little silver spraypaint made it good enough to sit on a wall and be ignored by 90% of the audience

Since the first one was so easy I decided to make the second one almost absurdly large and more complex


I started by using a pencil on a string as a compass to sketch out a more interesting shape. By varying the length of the string and changing the pivot point almost any curve can be made. For a couple parts I even let the string slowly slip through my fingers while drawing to create a slightly non-uniform curve

 As before I cut out and sanded the plywood but to make this one so big I had to use two pieces

 The end is cut to just fit into a piece of 1" pvc

I cut out a few star shaped pieces to bridge the two main pieces and to give a little dimension to the piece.  I glued the bridge pieces on and came up with a crazy idea. Metallic spray paint looks vastly better on the finished side of plywood than on bare side and I noticed it also looks better on spots of glue. While the bridge pieces were drying anyway I coated the entire surface of the plywood with a thin layer of wood glue

It took a little longer to dry but ended up paying off, the paint looked much better.

 I painted the raised details by hand with gold paint and again drybrushed black paint to beat up some of the corners

 I wedged it in the pvc with a piece of dowel sawed in half lengthwise, painted the pvc black and called it done.

In the course of the show it was thrown on the ground a number of times and the paint chipped off the pvc in a couple places. I probably should have scuff sanded and primed it first but since it only needed to be used a couple times it did the job.

Thanks for reading, more coming soon!

Deathtrap

This is one of what will soon be several very backdated posts. Starting this blog has been something I have meant to do for a long time but it's been too easy to put off.
Back in October, I was asked to help construct a set for Deathtrap at the local high school. In Deathtrap there are more murders than there are characters and they required many uncommon weapons including a garrote, maces, battleaxes, daggers and blank-fire revolvers.

Since I had only a vague idea of what those weapons actually look like I consulted google images.  Here are some of the better hits:

Over the next few days I began to notice how certain of them bore a resemblance to scraps of wood or pipe laying around the house... hmmm....


Part I.  The Flail

For the ball I found a some toy softballs at a local toys r us.  They sell balls in a sack. I can't help but wonder if that's a subtly dirty joke.

I started by folding and taping a piece of cereal box paperboard to make a conical shape for the spikes

I cut off the excess and folded (and smushed) a piece of paper into the cone. The paper is just an expendable buffer to make the cone reusable.

Filled the paper covered cone with hot glue nearly all the way to the top, set the ball on top of it and held the two together until the glue cooled.  Once the glue hardened more completely I removed the paperboard cone leaving a spike of solid glue covered in paper.

I eventually made more paperboard molds but discovered that my glue gun (30 watt I think) takes as long to heat up as two spikes to cool.  I don't think it makes much difference in this case but I use multi-temp glue in a gun set on high. I experimented with placing the ball and spikes in a freezer to cool but it didn't seem to make a big difference. The engineer in me considered stratification of the cooling glue and contamination of food, but found these to be negligible.

I marked what I thought would be a good layout for the spikes on the ball with a marker and glued them on with ever lessening regard for those marks until I had something truly brutal looking.

Once I had all the spikes I wanted I ran warm water over the spikes and gently rubbed the excess paper off leaving a reasonably smooth and paintable material.

I found a dowel and a couple feet of cheap home depot chain. I forget what they called it, galvanized or anodized or something like that. I purchased it based on its shape and weight because I didn't want a very heavy chain to interact poorly with the very light hollow spike ball.

I drilled a hole the size of the chain in one end, stuck the chain in and put a screw through the end link. I later filled the hole in with hot glue to prevent the chain from rattling.

I liked the look of the wood shaft with metal handgrip I saw on google images so I stained the part of the dowel that would remain exposed

It was at this point one of my ideas turned pretty awful. I had to secure the other end of the chain to the ball and I thought I could use expanding polyurethane foam to fill the inside of the ball and hold the last few links in there. I bought a can of Great Stuff, at considerable expense, and proceeded to create something similar to a baking soda/vinegar volcano.  I drilled a hole the size of the chain, inserted the chain and sprayed the Great Stuff in and 85% of it came right back out. It didn't even come close to filling the ball.  I ended up solving the problem by cramming bits of urethane back in once it was dry and sealing it off with my old standby, hot glue.

This photo really doesn't do justice to the mess but it shows a little of the crap that had to be carefully scraped off the spikes.

After that I glued rings of paperboard around the top and bottom of the shaft to begin to simulate the metal grips. Then it was time to mask and paint.

The middle part of the handgrip was made of the same paperboard but painted black and wrapped in mesh sandpaper before being spray painted silver with the rest. Mesh sandpaper or sanding screen is designed for sanding sheetrock because it lets the dust come through the screen instead of getting trapped underneath. I have little concern for its designed purpose though, when I'm not using it as a grille for small computer fans it makes an interesting effect when spray painted through.


I tried out a new "hammered" spraypaint, which uses several colors with dissimilar solvents to create a distressed look. It's supposed to hide surface flaws, like those baseball stitches you can see clearly here. Yeah... so much for truth in advertising

On the plus side, the trick with the screen sandpaper worked well.

A little black paint drybrushed here and there helps lead your eye off the stitches and makes it look like it's been through a couple fights in its day.

Thanks for reading!