Project Fancy Lumberjack – the Fully Upgraded Leviathan Axe

I usually think of my cardboard blacksmithing journey to have begun with Can Jian, the first multi-week project. However, six months prior to that, I had joined Ting in making a few of Kratos’s weapons during winter break. This Leviathan Axe took 3 or 4 days, which was 2 or 3 days longer than I had planned to spend on it. Assembled mostly from a wrapping paper cardboard tube and a LEGO set cardboard box, with some free-handed paint job, it was among the most sophisticated things that I had ever crafted. I felt proud to call myself a serious God of War fan.

A couple years later, my crafty skills and patience for project scope had leveled up a few times. The axe on my weapon rack started to look rather basic and somewhat out of place. It was a nice display of progress, but I started thinking about an upgrade.

Instead of remaking and replacing what I had, I thought a poetic approach would be to give it an upgrade. In the game’s context, Kratos’s primary weapon evolved with experience accumulation from a normal-looking northern European axe to a regal piece of art. Back in 2022, I preferred the rustic look and couldn’t have pulled off a more complicated design, anyway. Now, well, things have changed. I had my eyes set on the fully upgraded Leviathan Axe.

Challenge #1 – the Handle

The main problem I had with the old project was its handle being too straight. Kratos’s Leviathan, just like any axe you could buy at Home Depot, had a curved handle. First I thought it was just a matter of aesthetics, but then I read the anatomy of an axe and learned about how those curves had practical purposes in the context of a swinging motion.

The design made sense in a real axe. The crafts person just had to carve the wood into the right shape. In my scope of working with cardboard and PVC pipes, though, the curves were extremely difficult. The pipe wouldn’t bend, and the cardboard wouldn’t have enough integrity to support the grip or the weight of the axe head. Before I committed to really making this Leviathan project, I’d have to successfully create this handle. I spent a long time imagining different ways to piece together this puzzle.

After some trial and error, I made it happen as follows: (1) for the more significant curves, I connected short PVC sections with angled cardboard connectors and super glue; (2) I layered cardboard slices outside the PVCs to increase the strength; (3) I varied the number of cardboard layers to create the illusion of the more subtle curvature; (4) I wrapped additional cardboard outside for a rounded finish. The end product had a rough, organic look to it, and felt as strong as wood.

Challenge #2 – the Pommel

The ornate piece of metal at the end of the axe handle did not have a functional purpose as far as I was aware. The game provided quite a few options, each enhancing the weapon’s properties in different ways. I never cared for them, though I had to make a decision now.

Some of the pommels from the game were pretty simple and easy to make. However, pictures of the fully upgraded Leviathan Axe often came equipped with “Haur’s Lucky Knob”, which looked like a bird’s head with a pointed beak. I did not rule out the easier stuff as backup options, but figured I’d give this fancy schmancy design a try first.

The first issue with this pommel was its long and pointed shape. Corrugated cardboard doesn’t hold shape or have enough integrity at this level of detail. My solution was to use plastic – not just the Gift of College kind but also some thicker ones like the credit card material. Good thing I had recently acquired a bunch of Disney gift cards, which I put to good use. Four layers of interlocking card pieces later, the pommel had a very solid core.

The second issue was that, in addition to those sharp points, the pommel had curves rotating about all three axes. I knew how to do one but… 3? I tackled this problem by taking a page out of those Eugy animals and using layers to form a sculpture. It took a lot of guesswork to approximate a 3D contour from eyeballing a 2D screenshot, but it turned out alright. Then I wrapped the whole thing up and painted the patterns.

Challenge #3 – the Crown

Above the axe head there was a ring with four prongs sticking up and around the eye (the wood part sticking above the axe head). Not sure if there’s a proper name for this feature so I’m referring to it as the “crown”. It’s absent on normal axes and the basic version of Leviathan, so I assume that it’s mostly decorative.

This was the most delicate element on the entire Leviathan Axe, and fragile = headachy. I thought about gluing shapes directly onto the outside of the eye for simplicity, but ended up relying on gift cards again to make these curvy and pointy shapes.

Forging the Blade

Outside the three challenges, everything had been done before and was just a matter of putting in the time. For the blade, I used some of my remaining pieces of wood-like cardboard for the axle to maximize strength in the connection to the handle. The innermost layers of the blade were once again Mickey and Elsa, which made a hard edge possible and allowed for the sharp point at the top of the blade.

Decorating the Blade

Adding colors to the axe blade involved some of the most fun and some of the most tedious tasks. I relied heavily on 1:1 printed CGI images, and developed a few techniques to faithfully transferring the pictures onto my project.

The squiggly pattern on the blade, which I believe represent the skill tree in the game, was too irregular to be measured out and too skinny for a stencil. I solved this by stabbing holes on the printed image, using those holes to pencil down the core structure, connecting the dots to form the pattern, and then etching it deep into the paper. Because the etched pattern remained visible after a few layers of black paint, I was able to trace it once again using the chrome marker.

Carving those intricate patterns on the back (“butt”) of the blade and along the cutting edge (“bevel”) wasn’t something I quite signed up for, but it trained me for a different aspect of hand-eye coordination. Just those strips on the bevel took about four hours to make!

Decorating the Handle

Decorating the handle was weird and unrewarding. Why did Kratos even have these random metal trims on the wooden handle? Didn’t it hurt his hand? But alas, it was fine.

My favorite part of this whole project was the metal extension down from the axe head clamping on the sides of the handle. The shape was fascinating and each side had two gems that I was a big fan of. Much of making these details just had to do with thinking through how the pieces will fit together in the end, and in what order I must glue them.

Embedding the gems into the extensions was a lot of work but fun to do. What gave me a surprising amount of trouble was adding the square and triangle shapes onto these gems – I tried four ways before settling on the most basic painting approach.

Final Assembly

Ta-da!

The Cost

I spent $8.74 on a can of spray paint for the handle (though the color was too red and I had to paint it over), $7.65 for a bag of blue rhinestones, and $10.93 for a set of liquid chrome paint markers. Subtotal was $27.32 for everything purchased for this project.

The Fully Upgraded Leviathan Axe

It took four months and a week of virtually continuous labor to finish this axe. I was rather proud of how it turned out. With the help of digital rulers (e.g. measuring lengths on a picture using PowerPoint) and a printer, I managed to craft it with proportions faithful to the source material.

Throughout this project, I kept thinking about the quote from American Sniper: “If you aim for a shirt button, you might miss by two inches. If you aim for a shirt, you might miss by two feet.” In making of this 3-foot project, I spent so much time agonizing over 0.5-mm precisions. At the end of the day, while there are plenty of issues with fit, colors, and glued edges when sufficiently zoomed in, on the whole the axe looked rather sophisticated.