I wasn’t able to get as far with Siegfried’s sword as I’d initially hoped last week. The main construction is done, and the first coat of fiberglass is on, but I still need to reinforce the edges and add the crossguard and pommel.
When I fiberglassed the overall shape, I covered the entire sword with fiberglass mat, taped in place, then applied the fiberglass resin. This more or less worked, but for the edges, I’m taking a slightly different approach, brushing the resin on small strips of fiberglass mat, then pressing those in place. This is partly because the resin wasn’t always soaking all the way through the mat taped in place, which I fear may leave soft spots on the shell. I reinforced the tip and part of one edge this morning using that technique, and will see the results this evening.
Part of the delay on the sword was because my girlfriend and I started planning the armor on my body double, by taping on paper and tracing outlines of the parts we saw on reference images. Tonight I will be getting some thin foam packing sheets, to see about building up the armor shapes out of them. It’s a different approach to what I’ve tried before, but a lot about this costume is experimentation.