Accessing events from animation blueprint inside another blueprint

Okay, so I know this topic has been done to death but I am sincerely lost on how to approach this.

The ultimate goal here is to create a melee attack which registers the overlap of my weapon’s collision box and an enemy; this works fine. Now I want the event to fire only when my attack animation is playing. I have set up two notifies in my attack animation which essentially bracket the time frame, in the animation, in which I want to do damage. These are "BeginHitPeriod and “EndHitPeriod”

So my implementation theory is as follows:

  1. Set up “BeginHitPeriod” and “EndHitPeriod” as events within the event graph of my animation blueprint
  2. Somehow access those events inside my weapon blueprint
  3. If the weapon’s collision box overlaps with my enemy during the time between “BeginHitPeriod” and “EndHitPeriod”, the hit will register; at which point I can establish a new event for that “Hit”(or whatever, I suppose I’ll cross that bridge IF I can get to it.)

My problem is with section 2. No matter what method I try, I cannot seem to establish communication between the Animation blueprint and the weapon blueprint (which is just a basic actor blueprint.) I have tried casting to the Animation blueprint from within the weapon blueprint but can never get the target node set properly. I have tried an interface between the two but frankly I’m not sure I have a solid grasp on how interfaces are supposed to work. I have also tried to cast to the weapon blueprint from the Animation blueprint and set up corresponding events inside the weapon that way.

I don’t have any pictures because I have no Idea which direction to go with this

So TL;DR:
Can someone tell me how to fire my anim notifies inside my weapon blueprint?

-Further Information-
Due to the nature of these blueprints, they do not exist in the level editor for me to reference so I can’t just save the weapon as a variable for the anim blueprint.

I’m relatively new to this but I’ve been able to think my way through every single issue until now. Any help will be MUCH appreciated! Thanks.