Results of the Staff
Well I spent quite a few hours sanding and polishing the gem.
I used a buffing attachment fitted onto a hand drill and clamped that to the base of my drill press. Thoughts about buffing plastic: As a general rule plastic does not dissipate heat well so unless you are careful you could cause parts to melt. Use your bare hands whenever possible when buffing because if it gets too hot to hold then you need to stop buffing and let it cool.
In between letting the gem cool I painted the staffhead.
When I originally poured the gem I placed some fishing line at the top, bottom and both sides with the idea of using it to hold the gem in place on the staff. This turned out to be useless. First, the line does not bind with the resin so it can be easily pulled out. Second, since it does not bind with the resin, the line has a different refraction than the resin so, as light passes through the gem it hits the line and is reflected differently. This causes the line to show in the gem. Third, as I sanded the gem I was not able to cleanly sand around the line and keep the shape of the gem so I ended up having to cut it and sand/buff over it.
There is still some of the line in the gem. I just tell people that its human hair caught up in the process of shaping the gem from their blood.
I finally decided that in order to attach the gem I was going to have to give up the idea of trying to make it look like it was suspended in the staff head.
I figured that I could go with the wire wrapping technique that some people use in jewelry. It worked for the moment but it wasn't perfect. Note: the gem stayed in the headpiece until I got it home where it promptly fell out :)
Here is how the headpiece looks attached to the staff. Its simply a 6' piece of 1-1/4" closet pole. I would have preferred something around 2" in diameter but was not able to easily find one.
Note that the bottom piece looks a bit large for the staff cause I originally sized it for a larger diameter. If I'm able to remake the staff I'll have to adjust things accordingly.
How the staff looks as a whole. I used some red leather rawhide and wrapped it around the staff at the juncture point of the headpiece and lower as a handwrap.
I used a buffing attachment fitted onto a hand drill and clamped that to the base of my drill press. Thoughts about buffing plastic: As a general rule plastic does not dissipate heat well so unless you are careful you could cause parts to melt. Use your bare hands whenever possible when buffing because if it gets too hot to hold then you need to stop buffing and let it cool.
In between letting the gem cool I painted the staffhead.
When I originally poured the gem I placed some fishing line at the top, bottom and both sides with the idea of using it to hold the gem in place on the staff. This turned out to be useless. First, the line does not bind with the resin so it can be easily pulled out. Second, since it does not bind with the resin, the line has a different refraction than the resin so, as light passes through the gem it hits the line and is reflected differently. This causes the line to show in the gem. Third, as I sanded the gem I was not able to cleanly sand around the line and keep the shape of the gem so I ended up having to cut it and sand/buff over it.
There is still some of the line in the gem. I just tell people that its human hair caught up in the process of shaping the gem from their blood.
I finally decided that in order to attach the gem I was going to have to give up the idea of trying to make it look like it was suspended in the staff head.
I figured that I could go with the wire wrapping technique that some people use in jewelry. It worked for the moment but it wasn't perfect. Note: the gem stayed in the headpiece until I got it home where it promptly fell out :)
Here is how the headpiece looks attached to the staff. Its simply a 6' piece of 1-1/4" closet pole. I would have preferred something around 2" in diameter but was not able to easily find one.
Note that the bottom piece looks a bit large for the staff cause I originally sized it for a larger diameter. If I'm able to remake the staff I'll have to adjust things accordingly.
How the staff looks as a whole. I used some red leather rawhide and wrapped it around the staff at the juncture point of the headpiece and lower as a handwrap.
posted by Unfriendly Pedestrian at Wednesday, November 02, 2005
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