Wand of Witchfire: The Next Day

On the second day of shaping the Gabon ebony into the Wand of Witchfire, my goal was continue sanding down the rounded block until it looked more like a wand than a club.

Here's the club shape:

(Reminder: the original wood has been left at the tip of the wand until I have in hand the stone to set in the tip.)

Not only did I need to remove just as much wood as I did the first day, but now I had to pay special -- extra super special -- attention to keeping the shaft of the wand as straight as possible for 13 long inches. That's a long bit of wood to keep straight when working by hand.

I was still undecided about the final shape of the hilt, so for this day I planned on shaping a thick ring at the top of the hilt, a thinner grip and leaving room for a slightly wider pommel. I used a pencil to draw the shape of the ring around the wood.

AND, I wanted to destroy as few sanding bands as possible so I had to keep the Dremel at about three-quarter speed. Slower, adding hours -- not kidding! -- to the project. At top speed the hard black wood can chew through a sanding band in about 15 minutes. Since the only place I can buy them now is on Amazon, I forged ahead at subspace speed.

I used a pencil to draw the shape of the ring where it would sit at the top of the hilt, and then used the sanding bit to grind down the wood on the outside of the lines (the inside being the ring) until the shape of the ring appeared.

From there, I sanded the remaining shape of the grip down to the pommel. Those three inches took closer to an hour, removing about a quart-inch of wood all the way around.

The shaping of the shaft ate away the rest of the afternoon, and while there wasn't much tapering down to the un-formed tip, the wand was beginning to emerge.

I didn't take anywhere near enough photos of this stage. The wood was so difficult to shape, I focused on keeping the sander moving instead of stopping every half-hour to fumble with my phone.  And my gloves, and fogged-over safety goggles and face mask the silky-fine black sawdust that had to be dashed away before exposing the electronics for photographs.

The wand already looks good, though.