If you’re dressing as Astrid from How to Train Your Dragon, you’re going to need an axe. According to Instructables user Kion Designs, you can build one with a small budget and a free Friday night. She used a sheet of foam about 5 cm thick and sketched the general shape of the axe on it. After she cut it out, she smoothed it with an X-acto knife:
Use an X-acto knife or cutter to sharpen the axe’s blades.
I used a 6x100cm round wood as the handle and glued both sides of the axe to it using hot glue.
Support the construction with a little bit of tape!
After the shape was right, she sanded the surface to make it smooth and covered everything but the axe’s edges with a thin piece of foam to add support. You could probably also do this with glue. Once it was covered, she sprayed on dark gray paint and touched it up with some silver paint to create a metal effect. She added some authenticity to the axe’s handle by added some notches and scratches with a scissor to make it look like it’d been used in a battle.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
