EXPERIMENTAL TOOL: MULTI-BLADES

This time I want to share a little idea for new sculpting tools: The Multi-Blades.

In fact they are more a kind of “sculpting aid” than a real tool.

The basic idea behind that is to place some hobby knife blades side by side to each other, to they will produce exactly parallel cuts.

I call them “experimental tools”, because by now, I’m not so sure about them. So if you like, just play around with them and maybe you will get some nice results. At least, I got some :-)

Here are some examples:

While sculpting miniatures, you also have to sculpt belts and other kinds of straps sometimes. For doing this, there are basically two ways:

1.
You make a separate “belt” by flattening a piece of putty, cutting out a belt of that and fix this to your miniature.

2.
You sculpt the belt right out of the miniature without adding new putty by making two parallel cuts directly on your miniature (the putty have to be fresh of course) to form the basic shape of the belt and refine this to form a real looking belt.

Usually I prefer the first method, because in my eyes the results look better most of the times. That’s because it’s not easy to get perfectly parallel cuts right on the miniature itself, so a separate cut belt looks more convincing. But sometimes, there’s the need to form the belts and straps right out of the putty that is already placed on the miniature. That’s especially the case for very small belts and straps.

So I thought about a way to ease the way to “cutting a belt right on the miniature” and I came to the idea, to get a small knife with two parallel edges. So you have to press this knife only once into the putty and you’ll get two perfectly parallel cuts simultaneously. That’s all.

To realise this idea, you just have to get some of this blades for Hobby-knifes, like x-acto, Martor, Ecobra, pro edge etc. You don’t have to use new blades. In fact it is better to use and blunt blades for that, because it’s not good, if the edges are too sharp. Too sharp edges would cut too easily through the putty and form too sharp edges. If the blade is a little blunt, it will drag the putty a little down on each side of the cut when you press the blade into it. This helps to get the right shape.

I made two versions of this double-blade, a thin one and a very thin one :-).

1.

The first “very thin” version will do two cuts with a distance of less than a mm. So this is for very tiny straps or for cutting strands of hair!

You just need two hobby-knife blades. From one of this blade cut away the lower part of the blade that usually sits inside the knives handle. You can do this also by breaking the spare part off of the blade, but be very careful while doing that. You have to use two flat nose pliers for that to hold the blade tight while breaking it. And be sure to protect your eyes while doing that.

If you managed this, just glue the remaining part of the blade to the side of the other complete blade with good metal glue. You have to be accurate at this part to place the two edges exactly on top of each other.

On the following picture you can see the stages of creating the double blade:

You can place the finished double blade into the handle of the hobby-knife, like any other blade. That’s the reason, why you have to cut away the back part of one of the blades, because two blades wouldn’t fit into the handle at the same time. At least that’s the case with my hobby-knife handles. If you got a handle that can hold two parallel blades at the same time, you don’t have to cut away anything, just glue two blades together and you are done.

But if you haven’t got such a handle, just do it as described.

2.

Ok, the first double-blade makes quite thin belts. So I made a second version which makes a slightly broader belt/strap.

For doing this, you need three hobby-knife blades.
On two of them cut or break away the back parts just as I’ve described before.

On the third cut away the sharp edge over the whole length of the blade. Remove about two mm of the edge. Look at the following picture to see better what I mean.

Then just glue the cut blades on each side of the remaining full length blade, like explained before.

On the next picture you can see the different stages:

That’s it. If pressed into the putty, this double blade will do belts / straps that are twice as broad as those formed by the first version of the double blade.

After doing the two “Double-Blades” that I’ve described before, I just do a third version, this time a “Triple-Blade”.

The idea behind such a triple-blade is to use it for sculpting fur. You can make a series of small cuts into the putty (drag the blade out of the putty at the end of the cut) to make a nice fur structure.

The building process of this “Triple-Blade” is nearly the same as for the second “Double-Blade” except that you don’t have to cut away the edge on one of the hobby knife blades.

The next picture shows exactly, what you have to do:

If you got the idea behind that, you can easily make other multi-blades with other distances between the edges. You just have to glue “something” between the blades to form the distance and get the whole thing on a kind of handle.