Forging with Plastic
My friends are all great people, and they’re all nerdy in their own ways. Some love trading card games, some love fantasy fiction, and one of them loves cooking. He’s all about it, and high fantasy too, so it’s no surprise he loved the Netflix show “Delicious in Dungeon”. For those that aren’t familiar (like myself), it’s an animated show about a motley group of people who help an adventurer find his missing sister. She’s been kidnapped and dragged deep into an underground dungeon made up of several levels, each with its own gargantuan monster. As we all know, fighting monsters is hard, so it leaves our adventurers with big appetites afterwards. Luckily they meet Senshi, a kindly chef living inside the dungeon who not only helps guide them and slices up monsters, he even cooks the monsters into delicious meals for them! It’s a lot of fun, and they even give some real world cooking advice while they’re at it.
The chef character Senshi happens to bare a striking resemblence to my chef friend, so he wanted to dress up as him at for a local RenFair. He had found someone selling a 3D printable file of the character’s distinctive helmet, but no one to actually make it. Knowing I have a 3D printer, he enlisted my help. Much like the show’s characters, I embarked on a lengthy quest that would take me to places I hadn’t imagined were possible.
It started with purchasing the 3D file, which luckily came sliced into parts for smaller printers like mine. It consisted of four parts for the main helmet dome, two halves for the neck guard, and two separate horns. It also included a fit check piece, something like a thin headband, which I used on my friend. It was a little too small for his head, so I had to enlarge the whole helmet by about 10%.
In bringing all the individual pieces into the Cura slicing program, I found the neck guard halves were still too big for my printer bed. I had to cut these into two pieces each before printing. This might be the time most folks would load the pieces into a fancy 3D program like Blender and perform a cut that way, but I couldn’t figure out how to make that work. I instead went to TinkerCAD, a free to use browser-based 3D program, to make the cut. All I had to do was load two copies of each piece into a new TinkerCAD file. This allowed me to line up the two identical copies over one another, and use the “hole” function to remove the opposite halves of each. It might be a little round-about, but the program didn’t have any problem doing the job and it takes a lot less loading time on my laptop than a program like Blender does.
After that I got the pieces printing. I hadn’t printed something this big and complex before, much less had to glue it together and bring it to finish, so I kept waiting for some issue to spring up I hadn’t even considered at the start. Nontheless, the printing gods must have been on my side that day, as the pieces came out great.
(Pieces on printer bed)
I took this as a good sign and ran ahead with printing everything out. After a few days I had the entire thing printed and taped together, and it was already looking pretty good.
As I started gluing I began to see a problem I hadn’t accounted for. The pieces were thin with very flat edges and, being standard PLA, they were quite flexible. I had to glue this thing together into something that would take being worn and handled. I used E6000 to glue the individual pieces together, as my research had told me to do, but this was a little flexible also. The result was a helmet that, when the two sides were squeezed in on, would stretch apart slightly at the seams. It seemed solid enough for wearing, but I’m sure it wouldn’t take too many drops before the pieces began ripping themselves apart.
To give the seams a little more strength, I cut apart a plastic ketchup bottle into thin strips of plastic and glued them along the seams from the inside. It wasn’t a lot, but I hoped they would work with the glue to give the pieces a little more staying power. It did seem to make it stronger overall, although the seams on the brim edges were still separating when pushed on.
The neck guard was by far the worst offender, with three seams that were very ugly and prone to separating. I tried using filler to hide them, but unlike all the other materials it isn’t flexible. It ended up just cracking and mostly flaking off, especially when sanded.
My justification for this (as time was running short and I couldn’t do this all over) was that my friend wanted it to be a beat up helmet anyway. Maybe it’s damage sustained in battle and repaired in less than ideal circumstances. Maybe it’s something I can cover with paint. My biggest takeaway was that, should I ever do this again, I need to engineer some flanges, or nesting connections, or some other means of connecting these pieces together beyond gluing two thin edges together.
Anyway, that’s it for Part 1. Next up is Part 2 where I’ll be finishing painting.