It has been a busy autumn, though sadly not much of the busyness involved wood. But calloo callay, my beloved nieces are coming to Europe for Christmas, so I will get to see them for the first time in about 2 years. Knowing well their doting uncle, they asked for Harry Potter broomsticks. Nimbus 2000s to be precise. With the gold writing. To be transported back to Peru, and there both hung as decor, and to be played with. Hmmm.
Some internet searching later got me here: the instructables website, where a genius fellow has made a seriously good repro… and I realised there was no way I could do all that fiddling about and a) get them to fit in a suitcase, and b) make them flat enough to hang well and c) dammit, it's so complicated!
So I decided to make them in a take-down version, with flattened brooms, and without the footrests. Because the footrests are only needed in flight. When the kids can make them fly, I'll add the rests. Seems fair to me.
So, having got an idea of the basic shape, I set to finding bits of wood that would do the job, and settled on some offcuts of cherry (from the cot, scroll down to see) for the sticks (the real one is mahogany, the official repros are stained beech), and some pine for the broom bit, for lightness.
I eyeballed the shape of the first one, and copied it reasonably closely for the second. I downloaded an image of the official repro on the trusty ipad:
Some internet searching later got me here: the instructables website, where a genius fellow has made a seriously good repro… and I realised there was no way I could do all that fiddling about and a) get them to fit in a suitcase, and b) make them flat enough to hang well and c) dammit, it's so complicated!
So I decided to make them in a take-down version, with flattened brooms, and without the footrests. Because the footrests are only needed in flight. When the kids can make them fly, I'll add the rests. Seems fair to me.
So, having got an idea of the basic shape, I set to finding bits of wood that would do the job, and settled on some offcuts of cherry (from the cot, scroll down to see) for the sticks (the real one is mahogany, the official repros are stained beech), and some pine for the broom bit, for lightness.
I eyeballed the shape of the first one, and copied it reasonably closely for the second. I downloaded an image of the official repro on the trusty ipad:
Then to make the brooms. I realised that by adding a bit of 2×2 to a bit of 2×4, I could make the mortice before glue up, and save some time. There is a real deadline for these! Shipping to Peru would be a fortune. So, having cut the tenons, I cut the mortices, then glued the pine together with hot hide glue (the best glue in the world, bar none!).
When they had both dried, I eyeballed the outline on one, and laid it out to cut.
I took that shape and transferred it to the other, after cleaning up the outline with a spokeshave:
Then I shaped them both, with my trusty spokeshave, and the awesomely fast Japanese saw rasp. Time for assembly, to check the overall lines:
Not too bad. So on with shaping the sticks, and getting the end right for the all-important logo. Here they are during sanding.
I found a good black and white model of the logo from the instructables article above, which I then printed out in various sizes, cut out, and checked against an outline of each stick's head:
Then print out the best on photo paper, and cut it out with a scalpel:
This was not fast, but lead to a just-usable stencil. Some test sprays later:
And it turns out my spray paint, bought for the purpose, is crap. In the end I used a gold pen for this bit. By far the most difficult and least successful part of the process. In the meantime, I had of course stained the sticks, and sealed them with shellac. I put more shellac over the gold after it dried. Before this I did some more research and found the mottos for the Hogwarts houses my nieces belong to. Yes, really. If you know your potterverse, you'll get their houses from these inscriptions:
Then carving the brooms to look more broom-y: I did this entirely by hand with gouges. It came out ok, I think. This rare action shot courtesy of Tomas Suazo, a student from Chile who is visiting the school for training in the Art of Arms:
Then I stained the carved brooms, you can see the effect. I mixed the colour out of the mahogany stain, and added yellow and blue. It looks better in person!
Once dry I gave them a single coat of shellac, and left it matte. The natural way to hold them for drying:
At this stage, the elves came to inspect the work so far:
Thankfully, we passed. So on to the gold bands. I cut strips of vegetable-tanned leather and sprayed them gold (that otherwise useless spray did the trick), and glued them on with epoxy, and added staples. Fortunately the elves had a break in their pre-Christmas rush and came by again to check for flight-worthiness:
We passed inspection, just. Fortunately, these elves have no idea who Harry Potter may be, and so are not clamouring for broomsticks of their own!
Merry Christmas all!