gurdymonkey | Tsukamaki project (Reply)

5/21/21: Yesterday my rapier-legal wakizashi arrived from Castille. The tsuka (hilt), machined out of brushed aluminum, was left bare as specified, because I want to wrap it to match my katana. The blade is 18," which means it's a dagger by SCA rules, but it's got some heft to it, enough that it should be just fine against C&T weapons.

Quick backstory: I bought a katana at Great Western War several years ago from James the Just, who had mounted a Castille blade in a wooden tsuka. We discovered the tsuba didn't hold up to cut-and-thrust combat a couple years back, at which time I ordered a steel tsuba from Castille, stripped the original lacing, and wrapped the existing wood core with rayskin and green silk ito.

The tsuka profile of the wakizashi is more oval than the rectangular grip on the katana (also by JTJ), so they were not going to be perfectly matched, but it will pass muster from a few feet away.

For reference information, I used the hiramaki pattern from Thomas Buck's The Art of Tsukamaki. Free for Kindle with diagrams and full color photos, it's an excellent manual.

5/22/21: I soaked the ray skin in a dishpan for about half an hour or so to soften it up, took a pattern off the waki tsuka with some watercolor paper, then patted the ray skin dry with a paper towel. This skin was smaller and a little thinner than the one I used for the katana - in fact, the reason I have it was that I'd ordered it for the katana and it wasn't long enough. Anyway, this time I was able to cut it with shears instead of an X-acto blade. I left it a little long in case of shrinkage, wrapped it around the tsuka with a few old hair ties and let it dry for 24 hours.

5/23/21: After several false starts that I wasn't happy with, I realized that part of the problem was the curved shape of the tsuka was making it hard for me to get the lacing even. The other part of the problem was that the smaller ray skin wasn't quite grabby enough to get the silk to catch on it. I took a break, had some iced tea and a think and then dug out the double sided craft tape I use for my war fan. I know, heresy, but a strip down each side was just enough to allow me to get a more even wrap.

I also decided to skip the menuki. The handle on this is so short that the menuki was going to run into the beautiful natural rayskin node and I didn't like how it looked. (Since I didn't strip the katana tsuka yet, I won't have to redo that one with new menuki to match. I had to buy two new sets since I couldn't find any to match the old ones, but they were inexpensive alloy reproductions and perhaps I'll use them as special tokens to give to people.)

I was running out of ito as I neared the end - there was not going to be enough to do a more traditional end-knot over the top of the end cap. Ultimately I finished the wrap off with a neat square knot, trimmed the ito and clamped the ito ends under the end cap. It looks neat, it's not going anywhere, and I'm not going to have to untuck and untie a complicated knot if I ever need to unscrew the end cap again.