Forums > Beginner Staff Moves > Building a staff... sorta

Posted: 9th Feb 2005
Looking lovely! It does look like it'll be quite heavy - I can't quite figure out the scale from the pic - but it should look fantastic.

Suggestion wise, it'd be tempted to not make it a fire staff, and just have a really pretty wooden one. Although that said if the wood chars in a nice way, that could be gorgeous.

Is that your shopping list next to it, or things that you're going to try staining it with?

monkeys ate my brain

Posted: 9th Feb 2005
That's actually a recipe for handy-dandy-tasty fake blood

As for the pic, the rounded out section in the middle is roughly a foot long, as are the twisted sections on either side so its about 3' (.9 meters) total in the picture.. I'm still debating about making it for fire or not..

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Posted: 9th Feb 2005
as a piece of advice, i would drop the steel rod in the moddle in favour for something less heavy

maybe a hard dowl rod?

if you have glued all eth sections together then it will just require some support, and that steel rod, will make it very VERY heavy

no matter what size you make the rod, nearly a meter of rod will make it vary heavy along side all teh wood

...

also maybe you cuold turn the rounded section down to free up some more wieght, adn make a rather nice turned grip so that you dont need to worry about a tennis grip or anything else for it


as for it being fire, if you are goingto do atht i would suggest once you have varnished it, seal it with PVA glue so that it does not burn the wood or leave dirty soot marks on it.........

if you use a wooden core, you could just flash the outside of the wooden tube and make it into a fire staff, with some wick on teh falshing

i have just knocked an image up in paint, ill upload it to my gallery for you to have a look

would be interested in what you think to mo-seph.

Step (el-nombrie)

Posted: 9th Feb 2005
looks nice
if you make it for fire .. do some cathedral-stack at the end-tips

Mech> PVA glue .. what's that .. where do you get it?

Posted: 9th Feb 2005
Wow, serious lightning fast ninja paint skills

Looks good - I agree about the wooden core - steel's a bit heavy and bendy. Fibreglass might be good...

I wouldn't have thought of using the flashing, it's a good plan.

I think if you're going to burn it, you want to think about what it'll look like when the wood gets charred a little, and try and design it to use this effect.

monkeys ate my brain

Posted: 9th Feb 2005
pva glue

is just like athe basic white wood glue you can buy it from hardware store, if you go in and ask for Polyvinyl acetates you should get what you need


and thankyou for teh ninja paint compliments, its how i work on smost of my staff designs first to make them on "paper"

i like the idea of making the wood all teh way to the end

fiber glass i think wuld not give the same support as a wooden core

as firber glas shas more of a tendency to bend and flex, while not breaking, as he is using a laminate piece then it might lead to splitting of the laminate, and thus snapping the staff?

Step (el-nombrie)

Posted: 9th Feb 2005

Written by: mech

---

fiber glass i think wuld not give the same support as a wooden core

as firber glas shas more of a tendency to bend and flex, while not breaking, as he is using a laminate piece then it might lead to splitting of the laminate, and thus snapping the staff?

---

yeah, I think you might well be right - it's stiffness that's important rather than strength. Composites are wierd and tricky and I suspect depend on all sorts of funny things e.g. how well the outside bonds to the core, the resilience of the bonds between the wood.

monkeys ate my brain

Posted: 9th Feb 2005
when i was looking at the staff the only thing i coudl think of would be pinning the woddend core at the end of the wodden handle, as there would be no way of ensuring a glue would bond all the way down, as it would push most of the glue out, as it would have to be a tight snug fit.


im loving that riser (handle) though, i may make some like it, but a lot smaller and turn it down to make the handle i was talking about....

my old man has a eally good wood lathe in the garage i might be able to use to do it with

Step (el-nombrie)

Posted: 9th Feb 2005
Thanks for the input guys

I'm not sure if i'll be able to get the steel rod out once I'm done. I used it because I had it laying around and it was the only thing long enough for what I wanted. its only 1/4" thick though so there is not really a whole lot of weight in the rod alone. Mostly it was a simple guide for my laminations, since clamping it otherwise would be nearly impossible. As for strength of the laminations, the glue itself is stronger than the wood, so I'd be more worried about the wood cracking and breaking than the joints..

Anyways, its 5am and I need to be up in 4 hours... Thanks again

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Posted: 9th Feb 2005
that was my point

the wood will be theing to spilt, most modern glues are stronger than nails. so you have little to worry about.

I only use nails as part of good practice....

the steel rob no matter how thick will add to teh end weight, and that where it will e killer for you

the heavier the weight of your staff the more it wnats to do its own thing

Step (el-nombrie)

Posted: 9th Feb 2005
yo lurch

It looks beautiful, the start of a nice peice of work



so the next bit you don't want to read



it also looks very heavy and fragile

lots of weight no strength



Wood generaly has a 20 times greater tensile strength along the grain than transverse to the grain, and ALL your loading will be transverse.

additionally each of your laminations is like a mini-crack already in the staff, so its already much weaker than the bulk material strength.

ie Your staff is a lot heavier than a standard stick, and a standard dowel staff with the grain along the sticks is at least 10 times stronger when applied with a bending load.

I broke one of mine last year.



preloading may help, by that I mean thread the end of the rod at each end, put on a washer and crank on 2 nuts at each end, do them up as tight as you can without damaging the wood.



The preload will convert a lot of the stress in the staff to being compressive, rather than tensile helping to prevent delamination. but I think that the preload will reduce over time as the wood inside creeps.



keep it as a showpeice of craftsman ship and only christen it once

and don't throw it, It will delaminate if you drop it.



Sorry Lurch, You probably didn't want to read that.



For future reference, to make this shape, it would have been best turned out of a single piece of nicely envirnomentally harvested from a sustainable forest or reclaimed hardwood, and yes you can turn helix's, its just not obvous how you do it. (hint think thread cutting)



Glass

(Who works professionally as an industrial designer, a product designer, a design engineer and a mechanical engineering consultant, and occasional does stress analysis while eating his breakfast, plus he's pretty practical and make a lot of stuff and staffs, and probably knows what he's talking about, although occasional bullsihts )
EDITED_BY: Glåss (1107957249)

Posted: 9th Feb 2005
*jaw its florr*

now that i was not expecting

thats most of my worries about the laminates, really well explained in a way i cant explain

thankyou glass

Step (el-nombrie)

Posted: 9th Feb 2005
Haha, all the things I was worried about

Looks like it'll be a staff for lookin not so much for spinning..

In case you're wondering why I'm building it this way it's because I've got some weird personal goal to get through this class without spending any money specifically on my projects. Strange goal, but I'm broke and there are a lot of free scraps to be had around here..I had the plywood from before so I just started building.

Thanks Glåss, I guess I'll just focus on the looks and not worry about its spinability (is that a word?)

Form over function eh?

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Posted: 13th Feb 2005
*sniff* well You guys were right, and just as I feared. I was hoping the rod would give it enough support to not let it flex so much but obviously that didn't work out so well. It's developed a couple cracks throughout, (not at the laminations just through the wood). It didn't really surprise me, it's just a bit sad that it didn't hold up better. It's just large enough to be noticable, but not big enough to be easily fixable. So I'll probably just end up finishing it up to look pretty and leave it as show only. No more playing :'(

I'll post a picture of it once it's done if you guys are interested.

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Posted: 13th Feb 2005
Yeah id like to see
Shame you cant spin it:( the first pics you put up looked nice

Drawings by chalk minds, strech between the stars

Kyle Mclean-
Contact without dance is like sex without wiggling.
A) it does feel as good
B) it does not look as good on film

Posted: 17th Feb 2005
For those of you want wanted to see what it looks like finished, you can sneak a peak Here.

I can't seem to keep my hands off it and always want to be playing with it which is bad and causing more fractures throughout So as of now it is display only... I'm tempted to remake something similiar to it I actually like it quite a bit.. if it was stronger anyways.

Final length is ~4 1/2'

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Warning: Please Do Not Jump On The Seals

Posted: 17th Feb 2005
Wow, that's really nice

Shame it's not practically spinnable though

But there's no sense crying over every mistake. You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.

Posted: 17th Feb 2005
It is incredibly good looking.

That should satisfy anyone.

Even if it isn't spinnable, I still want one.

"the now legendary" - Kaskade
"the still legendary" - Kaskade

I spunked in my friend's aquarium and the fish ate it. I love all fish. Especially the pink ones. They are my bitches. - Anon.

Posted: 17th Feb 2005
i think i might steal your design and start making them in the uk for all those who wnat one in the uk

Step (el-nombrie)