This is supposed to be a convention-safe weapon, after all! The string itself is elastic and provides enough draw to pose with the bow, but not enough force to fire the arrow more than a few feet. The serving on the bowstring was a macrame knot done with more jute, and was strung in a way to hold the arrow nock in place even when not being held. I wrapped the fletchings and arrowhead with jute, though this is really ornamental since they’re superglued in place. The arrowhead is laser cut acrylic and the shaft is stained the same mixed color of the bow limbs. Since there wasn’t time to make a quiver, I only made a single arrow to pair with the weapon.
It’s remarkably non-canon, which isn’t typical of me, but I like to be inventive every now and again when the mood strikes. I’m not much for soft materials, but I do like the braid/knot thing I came up with for the cover. The tape was laid out on a piece of leather then cut to shape. To pattern the grip, I wrapped the handle in masking tape and cut along one side. Tape removed! Quite pleased with the results. I’ve got tons of this stuff sitting around. The paint used here is Rustoleum hammered silver. This produced a fairly clean edge, and any slight misalignments were fixed with a bit of weathering later. I found the fastest method was to wrap the wood areas in tape and then trace along the edge of the filigree with an exact blade. Speaking of painting, the masking on this thing took forever. These were laser cut from some 2mm craft foam so they could be easily glued onto the compound curved areas of the bow after painting. There’s little Nightingale emblems that fit into the open wood areas on the front and rear near the grip. The cavity in the buttress was done with a set of hand files after the clay had cured. This is a rough sculpt, which I cleaned up later by sanding the cured surface.Īfter one half cured, I repeated the process to the second limb. Some time with the Apoxie later, here’s one limb detail section nearly complete.
#Skyrim nightingale free#
I have a bunch of Smooth-on’s Free Form Air, which I used as a sort of sub-structure to fill in the larger voids. I was planning on sculpting all the shapes with Apoxie Sulpt but a chunk this big would have been heavy and expensive in material costs. This was mostly done with a few patterns trimmed out of the printed blueprints and a few curves done by eye to blend those shapes together.Īt the base of the limbs there’s a large amount of detail and raised metal parts. I traced the pattern on the bow onto the limbs so I had an idea of where to sculpt the filigree. There’s a recessed hole at the front to hide the bow limb mounting screws.Įach limb was secured to the handle with a 3″ long wood screw and a lot of wood glue. Once assembled these parts were superglued together. I trimmed the pipe ends off at an angle first, then drilled holes in the MDF at a matching angle on my drill press. The grip and arrow rests were a combination of MFD and PCV pipe. By mixing them all together I had juuuust enough to coat the bow limbs. I had three cans of various dark colors that each had just a few ounces left at the bottom. The bow arms each were brushed with two coats of a polyurethane/stain mix. This was about 6 hours of work to get to this point. Another benefit of this wood was the weight a sanded piece weighed under half a pound.īoth limbs sanded and shaped. Here’s a contrast of a finished bow limb next to the raw cut piece off the bandsaw. Thankfully the whitewood is little denser than urethane foam, so this work went quickly if a bit messily. There was a lot of shaping after this, mostly done with a heavy rasp and a heavy tooth grinding drum. To expedite tracing, I cut out one half of the bow from my printed blueprints and used primer to mark an outline. I clamped two halves together and let them cure overnight. These were chunks of a 1×12 I had sitting around from some shelves. I started off with some very light whitewood. I haven’t ever made a bow before, and after scrolling through the wiki a bit I decided that the Nightingale Bow had the perfect combination of aesthetic qualities and construction materials for what I wanted.īlueprints were done in Adobe Illustrator. There’s no shortage of cool things to make from Skyrim, but I had only had three days to devote to the project and I wanted to use as many existing materials as possible. I decided to build a weapon as a companion piece to the Ancient Nord armor built for DragonCon 2013.
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