My daughter Tracey is a Sci-fi fan and loves the show Star Trek so I wanted to make her something special for her milestone birthday of 40 years old coming up in September. Also, Star Trek has many different shows and movies besides the original series from the late 60's and she likes most of them.

Now Star Trek Next Generation introduced having a Klingon as a main character for the first time and his name was Worf. If you're not familiar, Worf is a badass dude that doesn't take any crap and is a warrior where he comes from. One of the weapons that Worf uses on the show is called a 'Bat'leth' (pronounced Bat - lith) which is a four foot long curved blade with four spiked protrusions on it which is really cool looking.

Anyways, I'm going to be making this Bat'leth for Tracey and send it back east where she lives. But I hope it doesn't get damaged while in transit because we all know how that can be.

Concept

What you see below is a drawing that I found online and looks to be the same shape as the one on the TV series. I say this because I found many pictures that didn't look like this at all, so I'll be using this one as my model. I say model because I need to make my own drawing of it and to do this I printed this one out, which is how I started this project.
 

With my picture now printed on a normal size sheet of paper (8 1/2 X 11), it's time to do some measuring. I needed a reference zero to start out with so I chose the middle for X zero and top of the arc for my Y zero. I used my six inch scale to take all of my measurements with, wrote them on the paper below and then used those numbers to draw it in my CAD system. Once I had all the dimensions and with everything looking correct, I enlarged it to the size I wanted, which is 44" from end to end. Yes you read that right, it's going to be 44" long but that's about the size of the one on Star Trek. Anyways, this took me about three hours to draw over the course of a couple of days but I think it came out great so let's get started.
 

Once I had my CAD drawing finished, I called R & I Industries in Ontario, CA. to see if they could cut this out with their plasma torch. I've used this company before on other projects and they do a great job. In fact, I had them cut out all the gears for my daughters Escape Room a few years ago and one other project.

After talking to them for a few minutes, I sent them my CAD file and they said yes they could cut this out for me. Now I could have tried using a jigsaw to cut this out myself but that would have required a lot of hours on my part and I'm sure it wouldn't have looked this good. The material here is mild steel and is 1/8" thick, and I'm very happy with the work R & I Industries did for me again. Now it's time to start refining it.
 

Next up, a lot of hand work using my file. I thought about using my Dremel here but I have more control using a hand file in this situation because I'm rounding over all the sharp edges here. Now the areas I'm addressing are the three open areas that your hands will be placed (my file is resting on one of them) along with the large convex radius I previously used my belt sander on. This is a slow process but a necessary one.
 

The next day it was time to do some dirty work using my grinder so I hung up two tarps to help contain all the flying metal dust. What I'll be doing is putting an edge on the reminder of the weapon (about half of it) so I put on my dust mask and ear protection that are sitting on the mobile work bench and went after it.
 

Here you can see where I started grinding my first of many edges. I'm using a 120 grit flap-wheel with the project clamped to my work bench (blue clamp behind the handle and one at the other end not shown).