Wooden Broken Straight Sword (DS3)

Do you hate yourself and love dying in video games over and over.. and over and OVER again? Congrats, this is my video game contest entry and tutorial on how you make the both amazing and useless Broken Straight Sword from Dark Souls, so that you can experience this game in real life.

You're going to need:

• Wood (I found some extra maple lying around)
• Wood Stain
• Lots of Sandpaper
• Lacquer
• Fabric
• Screw with O-Ring
• Paint ( if you want a metallic coat)

Total cost: < $30

Step 1: Making the Handle

Grab a 3 foot piece of wood, I chose maple, and section off 14 inches to be your handle. I turned my handle on a lathe but you can just as easily use a chisel.

• Taper the handle from 1.75 inch at the top to 1.25 inch at the bottom
• The handle is made thin to we can wrap it later.

The remaining portion of the wood will be your blade.

• Glue two pieces of wood to give the blade width.
• Put them 1.75 - 2 inches higher than the handle
• Let dry.

Step 2: Sharpening the Blade

Our blade is momentarily unable to stab people, lets fix that.

1. Using a knife cut an indention along the middle of the blade (Blue on photo)
2. Repeat on the other side
3. Cut out the rough shape of the "broken" part seen in red
4. To age the blade further I mimicked pitting by roughing out the sides.

The last step is to sand, cut, and smooth out the edges to a point.

Step 3: Hilt Time!

This part isn't that bad, just a little trial and error.

1. Cut two matching blocks that fit in between the handle and blade
2. turn into a triangle
3. Remove the inside
4. Round out the edges.

Continuously test the hilt on the sword

You want it to be a tight fit!

Step 4: Staining and Aging

Most broken things are a little dirty, so go grab your stain and a washcloth.

Begin by darkening spots that seem would have seen a lot of wear. On the hilt i made plenty of streaks to further make the sword looked aged.

Step 5: Glue the Hilt

Glue on the hilt with as many clamps as you can. Preferably to make it seamless.

Then to make the pommel i drilled a hole in center and screwed in the screw.

Edit: I personally dislike the way this looks, so I'm going to update this with a better pommel later.

Step 6: Polishing and Other Stuff

Start coating this bad boy in lacquer or shellac or whatever you want, polyurethane works just as well too. After every coat sand it down with a plus 1500 grit piece of sandpaper.

Don't worry too much about the handle, we're covering that in the next step. (Yo I didn't even mean for that to be a pun!)

Step 7: Can You Even Handle This

I stopped by a Joannes to look for some leather-esq stuff. I cut it into the worlds longest strip of whatever and wrapped my shaft up nicely.

1. Fold one edge over to avoid loose threads and add some tape to hold it in place
2. wrap it around your handle
3. I used a knife to jab the ends into the small gap between my hilt and handle

Step 8: Stab Someone

I gave this to my roomie as a birthday present, but you can just go chasing your dog or something. Enjoy.

This is also my entry for the video game contest. If you think this sword is cool, or you just like me as a person vote for me!