Arrakis Method

Materials Needed

• Bandpole or Thick-ass walled bamboo
• Black Cloth Tape
• Strapping Tape
• Gorilla Glue
• DAP Contact Cement
• A disc of something stiff and tough (armor-grade leather, high-strength plastic)
• Blue Camp Pad or other medium-firm closed-cell foams
• 3/8" Ensolite (Yoga Mat)
• 1-1.5" Ensolite (Thermaseat)
• 1/8-1/4" PE, Volara, or EVA (or a willingness to have a fatter spear head or shave down bluefoam with a knife)
• cloth for a cover

Instructions

The spear produced by this tutorial is a weird creature indeed. It seems to hit exactly the same at Light, Medium, and Hard, full two-handed, with hips on it. Something to do with the marine foam striking surface... Beware that this WILL get stiffer in the cold (but then, you should be wearing heavier garb when it's cold, so...).

1. Prep your core. Measure it.

2. You want to make a Pre-Compressed Cylinder (see my Javelin Tutorial for more on these) to fit this size core. I used a piece of conveniently sized PVC to do my pre-wrap for this core size:

3. Gorilla Glue that Cylinder onto the spear core.

4. Add whatever type of haft padding you prefer on your spears. I've used a simple bluefoam hot dog/taco roll affixed with carpet tape and hockey tape, because I was feeling lazy and this is a dang shortspear, not a high performance monster. On my good spear, on seven feet of bandpole, I covered the spiral-wrapped blue haft padding with a tightly-fitted cloth cover before I affixed the pommel, to save weight.

5. Prepare another Cylinder and Gorilla Glue it over the first Cylinder. Make this second Cylinder long enough to cover the join between the first Cylinder and the haft padding.

6. Strapping tape X over the tip. Wrap of tape around ends of strips on shank of head.

7. Affix a slightly undersize disc of rigid material (here, I have used armor-weight leather) to the tip of the spear. Cross it with strapping tape.

8. Cut a disc of bluefoam to cover the tip of the spear. I typically hollow out the underside of this first disk some, to prevent the leather from causing a bulge in the middle of the tip. Strapping tape it, wrap the join with hockey tape.

9. Attach another disc of bluefoam.

10. Attach a disc of ~3/8" ensolite. A Gold's Gym or other ensolite Yoga mat is an excellent source of this foam. Strapping tape it, wrap the join with hockey tape.

11. Now, to get this critter up past minimum dimensions, I've wrapped mine in a single layer of 1/4" 2# PE. Feel free to use whatever medium-firmness closed-cell foam you have on hand (Volara, EVA, Blue, a half-thickness layer of Blue) to get it up as far over 2.51 as you are comfortable with. This one is 2.9something.

At this point, you can finish the head in at least a couple of different ways.

12.a Add a piece of 1.25-1.5" thick marine foam, reinforce with strapping tape running both axially and circumferentially up to within half an inch of the tip. This seems to hit equally hard at everything from a soft Medium to a crazy hard Hard. It's really quite fascinating.

12.b Add a piece of 1" thick marine foam and a piece of .75" thick POOF or other high-density Open Cell foam and reinforce similarly to above. This should hit nicer on Light and Medium hits and not significantly worse on most Hard hits and, being "softer" is possibly more likely to be passed by checkers who've never encountered the joys of a 100% closed-cell spearhead before. Too, it's probably likely to to pass more easily in chilly weather, especially if you use a REALLy dense closed cell (denser than POOF), so that it adds more than superficially to the padding of the spear.

On this little guy (final length looks like it'll be around 54"), I'm going for the all closed-cell head, but have not yet affixed it and taken pictures. My longer spear uses the all-closed head, as well. My sewing machine is down (broken drive belt) and I know once I finish this spear I'm gonna want to just stab stuff with it and I also know that if I do that without a cover, I'm going to jack up one of a) my weapon or b) my pell/walls/couch/self, so I'm going to wait to finish it. Final step pics to come.

Anyway, put on a cover (cylinder+cap-style) and a pommel, then, and you're in business!

Shout out to Mekoot Lobo for inspiring this design with his version of a marine-tipped spear.