#reys staff

Now that I had more time before the con I decided to do Rey’s staff!

It is made out of a pole vault pole, craft foam, worbla and hard plastic.

My dad gave the pole to me months ago “Maybe you can do something with this”, like parents tend to do. And it is 1 inch in diameter, just like hers is suppose to be. So that was perfect.

I sawed of a bit to make it 15 cm longer than me, what I’ve heard it the best dimension. Buut messed up and it was only 5 cm longer. but I fixed that by extending it it both ends with a bit of wood pole. It was to be covered anyway.

I started with drawing out where and how long each of the parts were gonna be. Which I completely missed at one place, but I had changed it around a lot so guess I got confused over the markings.

This is one of the sides. I used EVA foam for the widest parts and used stripes of craft foam to keep the shape when I covered it to. If I had been more meticulous I could have painted this and called it a day.

But I wanted it a bit neater so covered it in worbla. At the top bit with the blue stripes, the stripes were not as noticeable as I wanted but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

For the fins I pondered a bit of what they would be, I had no room for worbla, I could only have foam but it could easily be deformed. I could have just worbla, either made and molded my scrapes or to flat put together.  Then I thought of cardboard, but just as foam it could be miss formed to easy.

So what I went with ended up with hard plastic, I used the plastic “glass” from a pictures frame and cut out 12 fins. I glued them together two and two and hot glue is reeealy effective.

And about hot glue. I used it for the entire staff, but Bubblefish warned me about using worbla over it. cause ya know, hot glue get loose if it get’s heated up. I did not have any problem though. But she had with some project and it is worth having in mind.

This is a awful picture but this is how I made the hand grips. I took craft foam and cut lines in it with a knife, but not trough it, just a incision. They look a bit different so for the top ones and the vertical I also made the grooves more noticeable by heating it up with a heat gun (the ends separate and make it look cooler).

Then I spray painted it, first with black and then I went over it with gunmetal(same as my Hawke armour) and then mixed it with a bit of both to make it not to black but not silver and I think it is pretty good colour.

A last tip would be, use craft foam in the same or close to the colour the prop is gonna be. as You can see I used purple and orange for the grips and the paint did not want to get into the grooves to easily. If I had used black it would not have mattered so much, but orange slipping trough? not so nice. The reason why I used these colours was becasue the cheapest site I have found only do mixed packs and this the scraps left.

-Marlin