HI, All,
It’s been a long time since I have broken out the woodshop tools and actually built something. Instead, I have been deeply immersed in my other hobbies – model rocketry, LEGO, and music, allowing my woodworking to languish.
Not this week, though !!
I received a request from my twelve-year-old grandson to help him build an interesting project.
As with a lot of kids his age, he is into anime. One particular series he likes is titled ‘One Piece’. This show features a character named ‘Ussop’ who is this pirate-kind-of sniper. His weapon of choice is a slingshot called a Kuro Kabuto.
I had to navigate the Wonderful World Wide Web to edu-micate myself on all of this.
Anyway, here is a picture of the said weapon (Leon Animation):
The young lad spent Labor Day at the handsawgeek home and we descended to the Secret Basement La-BOOR-atory to embark on this project.
Since I am only going on the animated illustrations of the slingshot, I had to estimated the dimensions. The choice of material is 3/4” thick birch plywood. Should be plenty strong enough. I arbitrarily picked 9” as the outer diameter of the frame.
I used my big paw as a measuring device to come up with the length of the handle.
Once the numbers were established, I broke out the box of drafting and layout tools.
With my guidance, the young man did the lion’s share of the layout on the wood. He learned a bit if practical geometry this day, that’s for sure.
Since he doesn’t get to spend a lot of time at the house to work on projects, I had to forego the hand-tool thing. That would eat up a lot of time. So out came the power tools to sacrifice some electrons in the name of Kuro Kabuto!
Today, my grandson learned the safety rules and techniques for cutting curves in thick plywood with a saber saw:
I had to help on this one a bit. His arm got tired after a short while.
Next, it was time to cut out the internal form of the slingshot – curving around five 3/4” wide plywood prongs.
This operation called for the scroll saw, again in the name of expediency.. He was reluctant to try this one, so I did most of the cutting.
A problem occurred right at the very end of the long curvy cut. The weapon’s handle didn’t clear the back of the scroll saw!
I ended up having to remove the piece from the saw and finish the cut the old school way – fret table and coping saw.
So there was a little bit of hand-toolery going on here after all.
Once the blank was completed, the next step was to start rounding things off and smoothing things out.
The first job was to form an oval shaped handle. I don’t yet own a spokeshave, which would probably be the best tool for the job, so I resorted to a wide chisel and files. While using the chisel, I got a little bit of a knuckle buster that put a little spot of ‘grandpa blood’ on the handle. It gives it a bit of heirloom patina!
After the handle was completed, we decided to knock off for the time being. Progress went way further on the project than what I had initially anticipated.
We did take a trip down to Lowe’s to purchase a bag of humongous 3/4” wide rubber bands from which to cut the slingshot’s bands at a later date.
Here is a pic of the happy lad with his almost-new toy:
To be continued….