Doorgaan naar hoofdcontent

Roman playing sword with my maker-girl

My girl has a classical Roman name "Diana" and with school visited the German city of Xanten.
Xanten was a Roman settlement for about 400 years, starting about 15 years BC.

She bought a wooden sword (inspired by the Roman Gladius sword).

We decided to make it more realistic, I call that some good quality time with my girl.


I had seen this youtube video some time ago by Adam Savage.


And what he can do, we can do too we decided ;-)
We gathered the materials, the aluminium tape and the 'fake' leather. 
Grandmother had some stuff in stock.


We covered the 'blade'
(in Dutch 'Kling van het zwaard' of ook wel 'lemmet' of 'blad' genoemd)
with the thin metal foil that is sold for repairing ducts, it costs about 2 euro for 5 meters and it looks very realistic.
After we carefully applied it, make sure you do not stick it to itself ;-) 
We used some scotch-bright (Dutch : keuken schuursponsje) to dull the glare, it was very shiny.



We found some 'fake' leather and made a strip for the 'grip' (in Dutch 'Greep van het zwaard' ook wel 'handvat' genoemd)



My girl applied some masking and spray-painted the 'pommel' (that is the knob at the end) and the 'guard' (that is the part between the blade and the grip. (Dutch : stootplaat) 


We used some Bison-kit to cover the back-side of the 'leather' strip and let it dry just enough to make it very sticky. Then leather strip was applied to the grip in one continues motion and we were done.


(my girl holding a wooden playing sword) 

The pommel was decorated and personalized with roman writing by my girl with a very sharp wood-chisel. A sheath was made to carry the sword.

Reacties

Populaire posts van deze blog

Denon DHT T100 DESIGNED TO FAIL : bad caps (ceramic caps this time)

A friend gave me a Denon DHT-T100 to look at. Do not spend much time on it.. ok. It had a problem, it started clicking and ticking after power on, and after some time. (a so called intermittent problem) Sometimes it did not tick or click, but it was basically not usable. The clicking had a sharp click in one channel and repeated after about a second, then sound recovered and it would click and drop out again. He told me, do not spend any time on it, yeah, right. ;-) like I would give up after 15 minutes. I wanted to know what was going on with this thing, I found some schematic online and started measuring the usual things. The power supply, 24V did it drop down when a tick occurred ? Difficult to find out because sometimes the thing would play for hours without a glitch. I eventually found out the 24 V PSU, the step down SMPS on board and the LDO's were all ok, all power rails remained within spec, but it still glitched sometimes. (while power was ok) I investigat

Fixed voltage on cheap buck converter (MP1584) conversion with single 0805 resistor

Everywhere I look on the Ali and Ebays I see these step down converters based on MP1584. I bought a couple and actually they are not bad at all. The output voltage is set by the trimming-resistor in the left top corner of the picture. This works OK, but.. it is dangerous because it is rather sensitive to the touch. I decided that I wanted fixed output, so I had to figure out how this thing worked. The datasheet looks like this : R1 in the datasheet is what I call "R feedback" in my image. The value of R2 is mostly 8.2K Ohm in the boards I have seen.  So to set some common values for output voltage: change R1 to 27K for 3V3 output (actually 3.4 volt, but 27K is a standard value) or change R1 to 43K0 for 5.0 Volt output. (43 K is a standard value) A standard 0805 size resistor fits precisely, how convenient ;-). Make sure the other resistor is really 8.2K because that determines the feedback ratio. This way you can not burn up your circ

DPS5005 power supply, remote control using python serial port modbus

Just a short one. I bought one of these things. It can do 50 volt 5 Amp, I have not looked at the quality of the output (noise, overshoot all unknown to me)  but should be alright to control a lamp, a battery or a strip of LED's is my guess. You can easily control the current and voltage output using a serial port. (a usb-serial-rs485 was provided) I seems to talk modbus protocol. To change the baud rate and modbus-slave-address, keep POWER button pressed during power on, this will enter you into the configuration menu. register list here : Register Map for this device. Function Description Number of bytes Decimal places UNIT Read/Write Register address U-SET Voltage setting 2 2 V R/W 0000H I-SET Current setting 2 3 A R/W 0001H UOUT Output voltage display value 2 2 V R 0002H IOUT Output