Gàn Jiàng and Mò Yé

The making of the two legendary Falchion dual wielded by Archer from Fate Stay Night. Please bear in mind that I am a complete novice in sword making and modeling; fingers crossed that they turn out awesome...

The dual falchions are comprised of Yin and Yang (Black and White). There is an interesting story about the blades which I should cover at a later time. Basically they represent Male and Female; hence the swords are a pair which work together to Triumph Over Evil.

This will be part of my costume for the Animania 2010 event in Sydney.

We start with two ordinary pirate swords that actually make awesome noises when you press a button on the handle. These are made of plastic and are rather flimsy. I got them from one of those bargain stores in Cabramatta (I think the name was New World or something like that).

Using this as the base, we do a 'trace' of the sword onto cardboard. My sister did this part; using her Engineering skills to super-impose the image of the swords onto cardboard to fit the size of the swords.

Here we can see the original image where we obtained the rough model from. Next we took some cardboard boxes that were lying around; ones big enough to super-impose the sword with the Falchion model. The results are as follows:

So the cardboard will form the outline of our Falchions. At this point everything was ok, and the swords looked pretty good with the cardboard outline. Then I decided to make a cutout of the cardboard to slide them in around the blade (you can see the outline of the blade above). The result was as follows:

Here I thought I screwed up the project ... Problem is that cutting out the cardboard to fit the sword severely weakened its structural integrity. But I persisted. After adding backing masking tape to the blade to attach the cardboard the sword actually turned out quite sturdy.

The rubber bands are merely for show... I was intending to use them to hold the sword in place but it was completely unnecessary. The next part was to actually 'reinforce' the blade by analysing its internal structure and applying a wire frame around it to strengthen it. This was the most boring bit and most time consuming.

As you can see I basically created a reinforced wire mesh around the sword to strengthen its shape.

It looks a bit wonky, but the shape actually holds quite well. The important bit is to ensure that the edge bits and general shape are reinforced by the wire mesh.

That's sword 1 almost complete. Its general structure has formed and it is looking quite nice. The next step is to apply shiny aluminum foil over the entire sword and then paint it. I want to make the Yin blade first because personally I think the dark blade looks the most awesome.

Hopefully it turns out awesome; stay tuned ~.o