A buddy of mine decided to get into painting miniatures and checked with me about it.  He wasn't sure what to get and since I have over 500 miniatures I said I'll send you ten or so miniatures.

He spent a whole week going on about it.  I showed him the Bones listings on Reaper's Store and then he asked for a minotaur to represent a character of his so I bought him the Reaper Bones Minotaur.  He wanted the minotaur to have a maul.

With no real thought put forth, I figured, I could make a maul and put it in the minotaur's hand(s).  I pulled out my minotaur and looked him over...

Reaper Miniatures - Bones Minotaur with Battleaxe and Cleaver
Two weapons to one two-handed weapon. Piece of cake.

I pulled out some Sculpey Clay and made the very simple maul head and baked it.  I dragged some tools over it to carve out some raised wood grain and dug out a split in the wood in the front of the maul head.  I wanted it to look used.  I then spent some time thinking about how to brace a maul head for use as a weapon and decided on a sort of t-strap for it.  I drew this just now to illustrate...

Maul Head Sketch

Here's the initial pieces I assembled and the results after I removed the axe and the cleaver.

Minotaur with Initial Pieces

I put a Heavy Gauge Floral Wire through his hands. Which required that I pop his left arm free. That maul head is about as basic as it gets before sanding and "carving." Then after drilling a hole through the maul head I created the wood grain and dry fit it all for a look at how he's holding it.

The old axe handle is at the end of the haft for the maul
The old axe handle is at the end of the haft for the maul but I wasn’t sure I would keep it or if it was too long. There’s a major split in the head from whacking some tough critter hides. But I still had a lot of detail to add to the maul head and I needed to wrap the haft with Kneadatite Green Stuff to make it more hefty.

 

Sanding and more sanding on the haft and the head got even better results. So I then pushed to add the wood flaring from getting beat up and adding the decorative pieces over the weld points on the maul head straps.

Some proper photos taken in the studio:

A little more sanding took place after the photos above. Mainly on the maul head but a little more on the handle. The next step will be to add some ballast to the base to match the integral base and prime it for my buddy before shipping it all to Iowa. Really the primer step isn’t necessary except for my own sake. I just want to see if I need to clean anything up.

A fun project since I created the maul from scratch and got to try some techniques out.

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