How to Make a Khopesh Wooden Sword

I first saw this sword being made on Forge in Fire and I thought it was the dumbest design ever. I made a small version of the sword as letter opener, just as a wacky thing to make, but after finishing the mini version I fell in love with the shape. It grew on me and I got the itch to make a full size wooden version. The best part of this project was that I used material I had lying around and left over pieces.

I found a picture of a Khopesh on Google. I copied and enlarged the image before printing it out on multiple sheets of paper which I then taped together. The overall length is about 24 inches. The template in the picture is the cleaned up version of the print out.

The wood I used for the blade is mesquite wood flooring that was given to me as payment for another project.

I taped the template to the wood and traced the outside edge. I try to follow the line as carefully as I can, for some reason I thought a silver colored marker would show up better.

The silver marker didn't workout like I had planned but you can still see the shape of the sword.

I used my band saw to cut out the rough shape of the sword. If you don't have a band saw you could use a jigsaw or if you want a work out a coping will do the trick as well.

You can see my cut lines aren't that graceful, that's why when I make the cut I stay on the outside of the marker line. It gives me more room for error.

The last picture shows the rough shape of the sword.

The wood flooring has some ridges on the bottom that I had to sand off.

If you use store bought lumber you can avoid this step. It takes a little while to sand off the ridges but the belt sander works well for this process.

The last pic shows the sanded handle.

More sanding and smoothing all the lines. I used the curves of the belt sander to clean up the curves of the blade.

Some spots were just to tight so I had to sand those by hand. Here I am using a wooden dowel wrapped with sand paper to clean up the inside of this tight little curve.

Once every thing is cleaned up, it was time to add the bevels. First I had to find the center of the blade and make a mark down the entire length. This time I used a black marker.

Then its back to the belt sander. While keeping the blade at a slight angle I work the sword back and forth working my way up to my center line mark. I repeat the process for the other side.

The bevel is starting to take shape.

The most time consuming part of the making this sword is the sanding there is a lot of sanding. I eventually switched to hand sanding to clean up any marks left by the rougher grits. Here I am sanding with 220 grit sand paper.

After sanding it was time to make the handle. I don't know what this wood is, its very soft and a dark chocolate brown and smells really good when I cut it. I traced the shape of both sides of the handle on to the wood.

And yup I used the silver marker again for some reason.

Here again I used my band saw to cut out the handle.

The wood was pretty thick so I decided to split this handle in two instead of cutting another handle.

The last pic shows the two rough pieces cut.

I made sure to sand one side of each handle flat so that there won't be any gaps when I glue them to the sword.

Next I add glue to all the surfaces.

I sandwiched up all the pieces and clamped them tight. I let the glue dry overnight.

The final pic shows the sword after the glue dried.

And time for more sanding. I used the different curves of my belt sander to do the majority of the work and clean up and shape the handle.

I finished off the handle by hand sanding it. I ended up sanding everything up to 600 grit for a really nice and smooth finish.

After wiping off all the sawdust I applied about 4-5 coats of Danish Tung Oil per the instructions on the can.

The camera doesn't really do the wood justice, it really is very pretty with a lot of figure in the blade.

Like I said earlier the shape of this sword really grew on me and I know it won't be the last one I make. Thanks for reading my Instructable and I hope you found it helpful. See you next time.