Baymax Cord Lock

TL;DR: A cord lock for Tiff’s hat broke… so I made a replacement shaped like Baymax since I had white material installed in my printer and I was too lazy to change it, haha.

Tiff got a great sun hat from a friend’s beach birthday party last year. I use it almost every day when walking Bailey. I noticed that the cord lock was starting to break, so I decided to make something useful while scratching my maker itch now that the need for PPE has declined.

Since I currently have black TPU (an elastic material not really suited for this application) installed in one printer, white PLA installed in my other, and a severe lazy streak, I needed to design something white and ovoid.

White? Check. Ovoid? Check. Fun? Check Check Check.

With proper source material in place, knocking out the design was straightforward for me. I decided to use the sculpting tools in Fusion 360. Sculpting is great for quickly making organic shapes that don’t require a lot of exact dimensions. Fusion makes it super easy to combine sculpted forms with parametrically defined features as well. I split Baymax’s body into two parts, one main body and a removable front plate to install the spring and legs.

Sculpt and boolean tools in Fusion 360 made designing and cutting the parts up for 3d printing a breeze!

Since the part was very small, I initially had some troubles with Cura deciding some areas (primarily the cut out for feet to retract into the body for cord installation) were so thin that I must not have wanted material there. I solved this problem by reshaping the Baymax body a bit and scaling the parts up by roughly 15%.

Functional? Check.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the results… despite it looking slightly terrifying, IMO… like Baymax lost a fight. Maybe I should have gone with some sort of squid ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

As always, hope everybody is staying safe and healthy!

UPDATE: 7/25/2020:

Looking at the Baymax cord lock I made last week depressed me because it looks like his body is getting pierced by some sort of tentacled foe. I decided to replace it by designing a Blooper (the squid thing from Mario games), since it is also white, but looks natural with long arms:

I think Blooper looks better than Baymax cause the strings are tentacles XD

I used all the same tools I used for Baymax to make Blooper, but it was much faster the second time around. While I like this cord lock looks better, but Tiff doesn’t like it because of all the legs, hahaha ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Ironman Figurine

TL;DR: I uploaded my first Thingiverse share! I improved the design of an existing Ironman model by adding pegs to allow for articulation and adhesive-less assembly.

I went on a work trip to Phoenix in early November. Fortuitously, my best friend growing up lives there and loves Ironman like I do. I decided to squeeze in a quick design and print project to gift him.

I found a decent looking Ironman figurine on Thingiverse here. This model is actually a remix of another project—the remixer made the part easier to print by separating the limbs. While this was a good step forward for printability, I further improved the design by adding pegs between the extremities and the main body:

The pegs I added are in red. They allow easy assembly plus articulation.

The boolean tools available in Fusion360 make it incredibly easy to complete simple changes like this. I undersized the peg in the CAD model, but small variations in print settings and nozzle wear and tear make perfect fits a bit tricky. In fact, it took me a few tries to get the pegs working really well, but the prints were short, and the results were worth it:

Assembly in process

Given that this project originated directly on thingiverse, I thought it was only right to give back to the community and share my very first remix here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3998580. The number of views and downloads of this model pleasantly surprised me, given the simple and obvious nature of the change I made. I’ll probably consider sharing more stuff going forward… we’ll see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I think the assembly with articulation turned out pretty well—the yellow looks vaguely gold-ish, so the only thing missing is some red paint:

He just needs a paint job

Infinity War Masks

I waited 10 years and 18 movies for Infinity War, and as a superfan with a movie club, I obviously needed to watch it opening night. I bought 22 tickets in the center of the theater within 15 minutes of their availability, but unfortunately, Alamo Drafthouse’s site wasn’t ready when I was. Alamo is by far my favorite movie experience, and the moviegoers there are true fans. It’s pretty normal for opening night premiers to be filled with people dressed up (scroll down far enough and you might see a familiar face :P).

I managed to cajole a few members of my movie club to join in geeking out and dress up for the premiere at AMC. As somewhat expected, we were like the only group dressed up there, but whatever. We had fun and that’s all that matters.

I continue to be pleasantly surprised at the utility of my cheap little 3D printer. This was the first project I completed that involved painting post-print. I found some decent STL’s for Ironman and Black Panther on Thingiverse. While these base STLs worked, there were some changes I wanted to make but didn’t have time to do so, cause of course I procrastinated. I didn’t start making the masks for Abaho and I until 5 days before the movie.

The first part I printed was the faceplate for the Ironman MK50 (Bleeding Edge armor that debuted in Infinity War) helmet. I measured the space between my eyes and scaled everything accordingly. I tried it on and it seemed to fit well, so I continued with the rest of the helmet. It turns out that my head does not have the same proportions as that of the guy who originally designed the model, so I couldn’t get the skullcap on:

At this point, I only had 3 days to print and paint 2 masks, so I decided to cut and print only the front part of the Ironman helmet to save time and ensure wearability. It was pretty easy to make planar cuts of the mesh files using Fusion 360, which was good.

I noticed that the STL I was using was not perfectly symmetric, and the parts didn’t actually fit perfectly together. It’s definitely something I’m going to address before I make my next print.

I needed to do a decent amount of work to prepare the Black Panther mask for printing. First, the raw STL had a ton of unnecessary detail and sharp edges on the inside of the mask, which would have increased the print time and made the helmet more uncomfortable to wear, so I did lot of simplification and smoothing of the inner surfaces. Next, I needed to slice the helmet into a bunch of parts to both fit on my printer, and print in time (I only had about 36 hours cause I ended up printing TWO Ironman masks). Initially, I was worried about having visible weld lines in this mask, but luckily, I bought some BLACK GLUE STICKS a few weeks earlier at Daiso (I didn’t know these were even a thing) to hide them perfectly.

Here’s a gallery of the build process:

Painting the Ironman masks was a huge pain since I needed to cover quite a bit of surface area using three different colors of paint (gold, silver, shiny red). To make the shiny red, I needed to mix a metallic copper paint with the basic red I bought (the red was too flat and bright to match the gold). The Black Panther mask in contrast was ridiculously easy to paint… the mask was already printed in black, so only a few raised areas needed to be highlighted in silver.

I was incredibly happy with how the finished helmets turned out. I added a fabric strap to the back of the Ironman helmet with some hot glue for wearability. It turns out that Abaho’s head fit perfectly within the Black Panther helmet with no additional modifications needed.

Next up, I’m going to be printing out and attaching parts of the Black Panther mask we removed earlier. I’m also going to fix the model symmetry and adjust the dimensions to fit the proportions of my head.