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!