Fair enough... I guess it all comes down to how many of these things you want to make. After grinding three or four.thousand blades I would never want to go back to hand-filing. After making a couple hundred wooden scabbards I would never want to do without the router. For one thing... it allows you...

Having long been interested in crafting artifacts of Middle-earth, and being a "metal" kind of guy, I've long pondered the mythical metals of Tolkien's world. I have only found three of them: Galvorn, the black metal of the dark elf, Ithildin that mirrors only moonlight, and of course Mith...

I would usually use 5-minute epoxy. It holds pretty good if the chape fits well, but if you need to take it off to work on the scabbard you can heat it up a little with a butane torch and it will let go.

Nice looking scabbards! I used to do a lot of the same type work. One suggestion: I found it useful to use a router to rough out the shape of the blade... that is... a narrow round point bit to cut a single line the depth of the thickest ridge of the blade, and a flat bit to rout out the profile of ...

search eBay "thumbler tumbler" ... the small black rubber ones not the larger "heavy duty" red barrel. I think we have one of the two barrel and two of the one-barrel types.

We have a series of large tumblers going over here almost 24/7. We have one VERY large one (holds about 30 gallons of parts/media) and seven medium size that each hold about three gallons of parts/media. The medium size ones are rolling almost all the time, so it's easy to toss something in. Tumbler...

I play clarinet, it's the only instrument I've played with any regularity, and I haven't touched one in years, unfortunately. Pull it out! Start playing it again! In the book version of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING there were clarinets and other instruments the Dwarves brought along. They would proba...

I have a little Washburn "Rover" travel guitar that I carry around... I love it because it sounds pretty good and it's got a very small body. It's easy to play in the front seat of a car on long road trips. I also play flute and sax but I have to say that I really prefer the Boehm system m...

I gave up on using coal... the stuff I was getting around here was so high in sulphur that the steel would become brittle. I wasted a lot of effort making bad iron. Charcoal is by far the better fuel for a forge. Better yet is gas... the gas fired forges are super-clean.

Beautiful! It looks like a place that sheep would like to graze in summer. A bota of nice red, a sharp cheese, a baguette, and a stick of hard salami and I'm there!

There were some lovely scenes, but an awful lot that was cringe-worthy. Before I get into specifics I would just like to opine that my biggest complaint is the stultifying effect on fan-art. We had dozens of renditions of Galadriel before PJ... now they all look like Cate Blanchett. Being a craftsma...

....This is where I carry thinks like a lump of rather pure copper I found in Michigan's Upper Peninsula years ago,...' Ah... good call! Copper from the Copper Country! That is where I got my geology degree (Michigan Technological University in Houghton) and where I did a great deal of rockhounding...

...Little trinkets seem like the best option. A pewter cast of one of Elleth's stars or Thorin's key from the Hobbit Movies would be the most likely candidates for what I'd hide. Any sort of costume jewelry would serve.. I like the idea of Thorin's back-door key, but please, not the film version! I...

...Little trinkets seem like the best option. A pewter cast of one of Elleth's stars or Thorin's key from the Hobbit Movies would be the most likely candidates for what I'd hide. Any sort of costume jewelry would serve.. I like the idea of Thorin's back-door key, but please, not the film version! I...

Good catch! Hmmm. I wonder...gold is a fairly soft metal - would it even be able to hold up to the structural stresses of a fully-strung instrument? Pure gold is very soft, true. But some alloys of gold are quite stiff. 22k gold (22/24 or .916 fine) is commonly used as coin gold. There was an old t...