Had a little time tonight to do some more on the model. Here's an update. It only took about 45 minutes to texture the handles so I'm pretty confident that I'll have a decent looking model by the end of the month . . . in case anyone was having doubts that I'd finish (hehe).

I tried artRage but it's extremely limited and for this challenge seems pretty useless for most part. So I made the handle texture in Maya, saved it as a jpeg and then used it as a color and bump.