I'm Kerry Stagmer and we are the blacksmiths of Baltimore Knife and Sword
we're going to be building some of your favorite
things and fantastic objects you've never seen before this is Man at Arms Reforged
on today's episode of man in arms we're going to be recreating the gaffi stick of the Tuscan
raiders now this is a very specialized weapon it's a war club in the book of Boba Fett's series the
Tuscan raiders teach him not only how to use the gaffi stick but how to create one himself and each
Tuscan warrior makes their own gaffi stick which is personal to their own use and fighting style
now we're not going to be making an exact reproduction of Boba Fett's weapon
instead i'm going to be making a gaffi stick giving it my own stylization and form
the way i would want to make it if i was a Tuscan raider
rick goes out to our trusty walnut tree it's it's right behind the shop i think at this point it's
given up so many limbs for so many different builds we might as well just call it root
you can see here that i've stripped all the bark off the outside of the piece of wood that we're
going to use for the handle to make our gappy stick now the next step is i have to begin to
remove material and shape it down to its form in order to do that i'm going to use this tool
here this is called a draw knife it's sharp on the inside edge has two handles it's basically just a
bent bar of metal with a blade in the center you hold both sides and draw it across the material
smoothly and evenly and it pulls up curls of wood in the serious book of boba fett
you can actually see him doing this the tuskins hand him a tool which is very similar to this
and you see him working the wood down into shape to get it to the form he wants it to be in
i'm doing the same thing right now
right now we're going to get started making the spiky end of the gaffy stick which i'm
sure everybody's familiar with going back to the original star wars film weapon of choice for the
sand people i'm going to be making the spear end of it which is essentially like a pile long spear
we're gonna start it by hand at the one end and we'll move to the bradley bit of a lighter
touch than the 2b we don't want to overdo it so we're going to get started right away
kevin creates this point by hand but he takes this big stock to the power hammer
to kind of draw out the center section it's going to be a little bit smaller
and smoothed out that's where we're going to be laying in the flanges for the mace section
so
rick continues to carve on the walnut handle he's using a chisel and cutting in kind of to
accentuate where the hard turn is on that corner he specifically selected that so that he'd have
a larger knob at the end that would be turned off to one side but by carving he can actually
kind of increase the visual of that turn beyond what was there just by using the wood that exists
derek and kevin are now forging out the flange section that will be
rolled to become the socket that's going to take a little bit of time you've
got to get that very thick material driven down to where it's thin
but it has to be in the directions that allow you to then wrap it around to become a socket
now they have enough material they're going to go to a swage block or a formed die block that's
going to allow them to create the v shape to get it started then they can bring the sides around
close them make the socket true it up and take a weld
now i'm going to go to our cnc plasma table and cut out the designs that we have for the flanges
these flanges will get attached directly to what
we referred to as the spear shaft essentially that pileum looking ended piece that has a taper
once those are attached this piece will be heat treated and it'll be ready to do some damage
so you can see i've made some good progress on creating the handle portion of the gaffy stick
but it's still not quite where it needs to be yet i'm going to do a little bit more work
and then it's going to be exactly the shape i want it to be and we're going to fit it to the
metal part of the staff now before i do that i'm going to go in and neck in around here where it
comes up to the head of the mace um now i'm going to use a technique which is kind of frowned upon
sometimes i'm side cutting against the grain instead of going this way and then lifting
up a curl and then cutting it free but if you use a very sharp chisel with a very narrow edge
you can actually achieve good results using this technique and i'll show you how
to make sure that we can locate all these flanges evenly
and get a very strong weld we're going to use the milling machine to cut a slot into this forging
we're getting set to do the other metal piece to the gaffy stick
the short end and i found a nice old piece of a very old square file so it's made out
of really good steel i've already put a point on it by forging i'm gonna make it
a little nicer on the grinder then we're gonna waste it down a little bit put some flutes in
it make it look really nice once we're done with that it'll be ready to go on the stick
kevin turns some ridges into this tapered spike that's really just so that the pitch
or glue that we're going to use to set this into the wood is a good place to bite on
the steel if you don't do things like this it can work its way out once we've put these in
the glue will be able to be absorbed into the wood and physically lock that spike in place
john now goes to the tig welder to put the flanges on the side of this
the nice thing about the tig is that it will allow you to
not only add material but you can blend the existing material that's there so the forging
the metal from the forging will actually blend into the metal of the flange becoming one piece
so
with 90 of the shaping done on the head of the gappy stick now i'm going to go in and i'm going
to take a chisel which is v-shaped and begin to cut channels in for the knurling boba fett's staff
has knurling on the top and the bottom some of the goffy sticks just have it on the sides
that's where i'm going to do mine i'm just going to put mine along the sides here
and put some nice deep grooves in here but i need to cut some initial channels with
that chisel first and then get in with a file and open it up a little bit more
it's really fantastic to work alongside so many multi-talented artists rick designs
does all the metal work that you see in the shop there's there's really nothing that he can't
do in the shop it spreads out so you have many hands to help with any task to make it lighter
but it's definitely something where his skill set crosses almost every different type of material
that we can work with from the forging to the wood you've certainly seen him paint and do finish
work for us and of course the sketches that you saw in the beginning were sketches that he made
of a design that he wanted for himself to build this pretty fantastic if you ask me
now that the entire carving portion of this job is done for this piece the next step is to go ahead
and drill a hole where we can seat the spike that attaches to the front of the mace on boba fett's
he just carved the wood all the way up to a very fine point with the root barrel that i had here i
didn't really have that much of a good material to work with so i decided what we would do is just go
ahead and deck it and then put this on to the end of it essentially it's just a metal fluted spike
same thing a tuscan raider might do they didn't have enough material to work with created
rick uses a tool that we we actually don't use very much
after he drills that pilot hole he takes a variable sized bit that that cone will actually
cut that cone down into the piece he doesn't want to overdo it because it's more extreme
than the actual section of that spike but he'll get it close and then we'll be able to fill it in
we use the torch for multiple things one is of course the look we like that burnt finish
it's got a really nice thing brings out the character the wood
there also is the belief that it will harden the wood it certainly does that
to a certain degree but you have to be very careful lots and lots of hours in this at
this point and if you get too crazy with that flame you can destroy the whole thing
rick is now applying stain it has a couple of purposes of course one of the things is to get us
the kind of finish that we want it also preserves the wood and allows it to soak this oil and this
stain in we will wax and and oil this as well as we go but this is going to give us the color
darken the whole piece kind of give it an aged look and uh it'll be very pleasing to the eye then
from rick's personal concept drawing to the tree we call groot
to the forging and finishing we now have this finished gaffy stick directly from the mind
of rick janney let's get it out there to the testing grounds and see what it'll do
so
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