I decided to give this a try, but no way I was going to make my first attempt ever on an actual hilt. So I used some scrap wood dowel I had laying around, to varying degrees of success.
At a quick glance, it seems successful.
However, as I got to the end, I messed up a bit.
Not enough overlap. I know I was supposed to leave a large overlap to make a better seam, but somehow I was quite inaccurate with my original cut and only had about half an inch or less of overlap.
Too much epoxy? I did fine for the most part, but when I got to the second-to-last epoxy spread I must have put too much on because even though I left an inch of leather with no epoxy so I could find and cut my seam, as I pressed the leather to the wood there was a spot where it squeezed out a bit and in one spot only left me with a quarter of an inch gap between my glued leather and my original seam! This made it very challenging to properly fit the seam.
Didn't properly stretch leather over my o-ring. While I was careful about initially lining up the leather on the wood, even drawing a line as suggested, as this wasn't a "real" project I didn't take the time to worry about any horizontal axis. What I mean by that is on a real US the grooves in the hilt are all parallel and it is easy to tell if you are drifting off track while wrapping the leather. I wasn't really paying attention to that so as I got to the end I realized I had a bit of a wrinkle formed over my o-ring. I realized that instead of stretching the leather over the o-ring as I went around the wood, I must have been
pulling the leather from one side or the other. So it appeared that I was doing a good job of forming the leather around the o-ring but at the end it would seem I had not. So I just used my knife to slice off the wrinkle, which exposes the ring and a little bit of wood. So that would have really boned me had this been a real saber.
Was my ribbon too tight? After letting the saber cure overnight I unwrapped it to see how it all worked out. It has now been several hours since I did so, yet I still see the indentation from the ribbon I used to wrap the project as it cured. I am concerned that the epoxy soaked into the leather so much that the impression of the ribbon wrap is now permanently embedded in the leather. I will wait another day to see if it slowly goes back to a smooth surface. If not, I may need to find something else to wrap it with as it cures.
Be more careful and deliberate when cutting seam. I need to make sure I make a nice, clean, cut. There looks like I have a few spots where the leather seam isn't as clean where I might not have cut 100% through the leather and instead kinda pulled it apart. It created tiny little "frays" that are visible.
Perhaps I pressed in with my fingernails too hard when marking the seam. I swear I can still see the indentation where I pressed the leather with my nail to mark the cut. I cut a little outside that as suggested, but maybe I cut too far and pressed too hard. Or the leather was too thin, and the epoxy hardened before the leather relaxed while the indentation was visible.
I think when I make my actual saber hilt, I am going to press the leather down into the grooves rather than inserting o-rings and putting the leather over them. It might be easier... Plus, this is for my nephew and he has smaller hands than me. Using o-rings kind of expands the "effective" diameter of the hilt and I think he'll have a better grip using the indented grooves instead.
Anyway, that's what happened to me. Curious if anyone else has any thoughts.
And this is my first real post too!
