madmanmick
New Member
Hi all,
I recently decided to build a Halo 4 Spartan helmet for cosplay purposes. I decided to do this project using 3D printing, as I picked one up in January and needed a good project to do. I used Big_Red_Frog's 3D model available on Thingiverse (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:158120) as a base for this project... turns out that doing it via 3d Printing is a very slow and finnicky process, but I ended up with a result that I thought was pretty good.
Seeing as I have already finished the helmet some months ago, I thought I would post here about my journey and experience in 3D printing and then molding/casting in resin. Maybe some other people who are looking to go down this road will gain some insights from what I have been through!
When I first commenced this build, I had ABS plastic loaded into the printer, so I decided to stick with it... that was a mistake. I had so many troubles with warping and shrinkage, temperature banding and such. Many of the pieces that came out at the end had heaps of defects that required many hours of repair to get the final helmet looking good. I'll start with some pictures of the printing process:
Some observations about this process:
1) Don't use ABS for large or long prints. It was extremely hard to get the plastic not to shrink, lift off the plate, warp, band with temperature changes. I'm using a Flashforge Dreamer, and I know there is a design flaw with how it measures temperature, which can cause banding and defects on long ABS prints.
2) Gluing the parts together is easiest done with ABS paste, which is basically abs filament or offcuts dissolved in acetone. Works great, sticks fast and dries hard.
3) Aligning all of the parts together was a huge issue, because many of the parts had deformed along the joints during the print. This took ages to fix, using a combination of ABS glue and Bondo/Rondo to fill cracks and joints.
4) Some of these pieces take 10 hours to print. This is despite using 200 micron resolution and only 15% infill. All up I reckon there was around 70-80 hours just to print the parts.
5) I probably put another 40 hours into joining, filling, sanding and refining the printed helmet. The lesson here is to make sure your prints come out as close to perfect as possible... also, print at 100 micron. 200 micron leaves ugly looking contours on the print which are awful to fill and sand out.
If I had to do this again, here's what I would do instead:
1) Print in PLA plastic. Since the helmet is being molded and casted, it doesn't matter how durable the plastic is long term. It also has very few issues with banding, warping and NO SHRINKAGE!
2) Cram as many pieces onto your build plate as possible, to minimise the time spent printing.
3) Get your filament from a reputable source. I once had a jam in the filament, because it had been wound too tightly on the spool. Luckily I was home and heard the printer straining... basically the filament had locked to itself on the spool and wouldn't release. I had to cut it off, and unwind around 20-30 metres of filament, then re-wrap it... but after that I had no lock-ups.
4) Get your printer settings right with some medium sized test prints before going straight to the parts.
5) If you see a piece warping on the plate early on, cancel it, fix your settings and print it again. Throw away the part with warp.
Here's what the helmet looked like once I had finished the printing and joining, and after sanding and filling. Note that I was silly enough not to print the chin piece that came with the M10 bolt holes, so I manually cut them myself, re-filled, and mounted M10 bolts. This sucked, because the chin piece is essentially hollow, and cutting through it makes it awfully unstable, and you have to fill a huge volume very slowly with bondo to get the holes clean.
After this, there was a HUGE amount more of filling and sanding. I used a combination of bondo/rondo/spray primer/spray primer and filler to get the helmet smooth. Also, the 3D print was missing many of the small details on the helmet, which I had to sculpt in DAS clay or use plasti card and the glue to the helmet.
I think I've hit an image limit, so I'm going to to post the rest of this in separate entries.
I recently decided to build a Halo 4 Spartan helmet for cosplay purposes. I decided to do this project using 3D printing, as I picked one up in January and needed a good project to do. I used Big_Red_Frog's 3D model available on Thingiverse (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:158120) as a base for this project... turns out that doing it via 3d Printing is a very slow and finnicky process, but I ended up with a result that I thought was pretty good.
Seeing as I have already finished the helmet some months ago, I thought I would post here about my journey and experience in 3D printing and then molding/casting in resin. Maybe some other people who are looking to go down this road will gain some insights from what I have been through!
When I first commenced this build, I had ABS plastic loaded into the printer, so I decided to stick with it... that was a mistake. I had so many troubles with warping and shrinkage, temperature banding and such. Many of the pieces that came out at the end had heaps of defects that required many hours of repair to get the final helmet looking good. I'll start with some pictures of the printing process:
Some observations about this process:
1) Don't use ABS for large or long prints. It was extremely hard to get the plastic not to shrink, lift off the plate, warp, band with temperature changes. I'm using a Flashforge Dreamer, and I know there is a design flaw with how it measures temperature, which can cause banding and defects on long ABS prints.
2) Gluing the parts together is easiest done with ABS paste, which is basically abs filament or offcuts dissolved in acetone. Works great, sticks fast and dries hard.
3) Aligning all of the parts together was a huge issue, because many of the parts had deformed along the joints during the print. This took ages to fix, using a combination of ABS glue and Bondo/Rondo to fill cracks and joints.
4) Some of these pieces take 10 hours to print. This is despite using 200 micron resolution and only 15% infill. All up I reckon there was around 70-80 hours just to print the parts.
5) I probably put another 40 hours into joining, filling, sanding and refining the printed helmet. The lesson here is to make sure your prints come out as close to perfect as possible... also, print at 100 micron. 200 micron leaves ugly looking contours on the print which are awful to fill and sand out.
If I had to do this again, here's what I would do instead:
1) Print in PLA plastic. Since the helmet is being molded and casted, it doesn't matter how durable the plastic is long term. It also has very few issues with banding, warping and NO SHRINKAGE!
2) Cram as many pieces onto your build plate as possible, to minimise the time spent printing.
3) Get your filament from a reputable source. I once had a jam in the filament, because it had been wound too tightly on the spool. Luckily I was home and heard the printer straining... basically the filament had locked to itself on the spool and wouldn't release. I had to cut it off, and unwind around 20-30 metres of filament, then re-wrap it... but after that I had no lock-ups.
4) Get your printer settings right with some medium sized test prints before going straight to the parts.
5) If you see a piece warping on the plate early on, cancel it, fix your settings and print it again. Throw away the part with warp.
Here's what the helmet looked like once I had finished the printing and joining, and after sanding and filling. Note that I was silly enough not to print the chin piece that came with the M10 bolt holes, so I manually cut them myself, re-filled, and mounted M10 bolts. This sucked, because the chin piece is essentially hollow, and cutting through it makes it awfully unstable, and you have to fill a huge volume very slowly with bondo to get the holes clean.
After this, there was a HUGE amount more of filling and sanding. I used a combination of bondo/rondo/spray primer/spray primer and filler to get the helmet smooth. Also, the 3D print was missing many of the small details on the helmet, which I had to sculpt in DAS clay or use plasti card and the glue to the helmet.
I think I've hit an image limit, so I'm going to to post the rest of this in separate entries.