Right. I should have known this was going to happen. I was working slowly and carefully with the foam! I knew that the knife can dull from the foam and stick and get dangerous! But doing a slow type skinning procedure seemed to be working well for removing the textured surface...until the knife went into my left thumb.
Although probably one of the worse self inflicted injuries I have gotten, it stopped bleeding pretty quickly and I was able to use a bandaid to hold it together, no stitches needed! Hopefully it scabs itself over pretty quickly and I can get back to having two thumbs again.
So those mats I bought because I didn't have enough? I had enough. I had two pieces left from the original four! I only used two pieces to create 90% of two dreadblades! So now I have too many mat mats!
With the new mats though, I traced out the pattern for four inner gold raised sections. I was able to get them all from one mat with a 1/4ish of the mat left over. I did not learn my sharpie lesson though and forgot to let the marker dry. Blue hands it was!
I opened my new mats to cut out the pieces for the second Dreadblade and the gold pieces and THEY SMELLED SO BAD, so they went outside for a couple of hours. The fumes seem to have disappated so cutting them tomorrow!
Had some unplanned free time today as tutoring ended early, Harbor Frieght was nearby so I stopped to get some more mats for my sword! With the four original squares I had bought I was able to make about 90% of a Dreadblade so I purchased two more, one for the other sword and then one more for finishing off the pices + hilt mats
I couldn't find any relevant coupons but the mats were $9 a piece which isn't bad at all. There were a TON of people there for almost 1pm on a Thursday though!
what happens with html?
Cut the foam out for the gold layer to check on the thickness, it looks like it will work well! I will probaby need to figure out some way to uniformly taper everything -> need to investigate that
For the PVC structure/removeable handle, the hole in the sword prevented it from going straight through. Trevor suggested bending it and with my heat gun and a few minutes I was able to easily bend the PVC! And it stayed their nicely. Eman suggested flattening it to make it thinner and stronger, that will be the next step!