The owner sent it to hilt-assembly-and-scabbard-making guru Christian Fletcher, who fashioned this beauty of a scabbard of hand-carved poplar and covered in hand-dyed and tooled leather, complete with Urnes-style Norse artwork of his own design.
As this design is the type of artwork I love and spend hours drawing, I asked Christian on Facebook how he tooled that leather, thinking I could do something similar. He shared this picture with me, where he had carved artwork onto a piece of polycarbonate and made a die to press into the leather.
I whipped up this design on what looked to be a piece of polycarbonate I found in the shop scrap bucket. I then scratched it out with a scribe, and tried my untrained hand at engraving it, which turned out slightly repulsive.
After I "carved" it out, I soaked a piece of leather in warm water, wiped it of water, and placed it against the polycarbonate die between two wooden discs and clamped it tight. We'll see tomorrow what I looks like!
Also, using the new three-wheel belt grinder Don built, I'm working on establishing the geometry on the blank of a Russian "kindjal" shortsword I designed and had him help me draw on CAD. It was inspired by this original piece:
It's not very ornate by the standards of some kindjal, but I think it looks pretty cool. Mine will hopefully have the offset fuller, the rivets, and similar washers under the rivets. Here's the blank I have so far:
It's 3/8" thick and only mild steel, but should give me some good practice at grinding out the geometry. First I'll either mill or scrape out the fuller, and then grind a distal taper (graduating the thickness of the blade). Then I'll work on the bevels, although it'll probably be more lenticular in cross-section than diamond.
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