Foam Smithing – Spear progress Pt 2

Have had a couple of very busy evenings trying to get the spear finished.  Had a mini disaster when gluing the foam on the spear shaft.  I was doing this in the garden where I’d been banished because of the fumes.  Trouble was, and I’m guessing here, that the cold air was affecting the glue so as I was applying it to the foam it was not sticking and just rolling up into big gluey bogeys!  So I had to wait until my partner (bless her pom pom socks) had retired for the evening and I could shut myself in the kitchen with the windows wide open.

To the latexing.  Which was about the point when I realised something was missing.  The spear was missing a ferrule (at least I think that is the right word).  So that was the next step and after it was added I carved a exagerated wood pattern into the spear shaft and then began latexing with a black undercoat.  I tend to build this up quickly with a lot of layers as I’ve found in the past that if you leave it too long to dry the new layer doesn’t adhere to the previous layer properly.

With the softer open celled foam you need to build up quite a few layers as the foam does absorb some of the latex.   You can mitigate this somewhat by covering the foam with a layer of glue, but I found that the glue was disolving the foam a little and so this was not ideal.  In the end I used latex thickner to get the latex to a consitency that was not being absorbed too much.  This worked fairly well so after it had all dried I started on adding the “bronze” latex to the spear head.   I’m pleased with the result.  The spear doesn’t look brand new but has a sort of battered appearence which I hope suggest age.   The photo to the left isn’t great but then it was taken early in the morning b.c. (before coffee!).

The next stage is to add colour to the spear shaft and then seal the whole thing.  I’m in for a long night I think, which is ok as I have the day off work tomorrow but do need to get up at a reasonably early hour to get every thing packed for the event this weekend.