When I ran ranges for the AF out here at Buckley AFB, we'd hired on a young man named Ron Kless. He was a pretty good shot coming to us, and a natural instructor, but what really amazed me was his ability to focus on almost any subject until he reached near perfection. Within 4 years of joining us on the range, he'd not only scored expert with every weapon in our inventory, but had completed the Army's Scout Sniper School and had started a multi-branch Scout Sniper School up at Camp Guernsey WY. Ron remains to this day, one of the most professional NCO's I've ever had the priviledge to work both with and for.
Ron retired last summer, and Tim, another of my instructors recomended that we do something special for Ron. So Tim bought a US Army NCO Sword and asked if I could build a case for it. It's still a work in progress but here's what I have so far. This is going to be a combination display case and a free standing rack.
The rack arms supporting the sword and scabbard.
The rack base.
These bevel cuts were interesting to say the least. All at 15* and as is normal with Cherry, a bit of scorching. I've got some scraping to do.
Rack arms on the base.
I'll route open dado's into the base that the rack arms will set in, the 15* bevel of the base will blend to the 15* slope of the foot of the rack arms.
Not shown here is the top of the rack which will also be the top of the case, and the case bottom and sides, which right now just look like nice cherry boards. I still have to make the back to the case and a top frame piece to hold in the glass. The case can either hang on a wall or set on a shelf, and by lifting off the top of the case, the sword in the rack can be removed and set on a table as a stand alone unit.
I'm headed up to WY tonight and plan to do much of the routing while I'm up there, so I'll have more pics next week.
