This week I have diverted from finishing work on Mushi’s sword in order to bring my daughters new set of Axel’s Chakrams up to the same finishing status as the two Mushi swords, so that I can begin airbrushing all three of these projects at the same time.
In addition to the chakram work, I have been printing out the parts to the third version of the Mushi sword but I ran head on into a problem with the 3D prints. It was hot here in California when I first started the prints and I had just run out of the light grey filiment for the 3D printer. I changed over to a half roll of dark grey filament I had left over from a different company. At first the prints were coming out ok, then as the weather cooled unseasonably for California I started having real problems with the prints. Little by little, the prints were getting weird. They were coming out with large gaps and instead of being strong, they were brittle and fragile, looking more like see through fishnets than sword parts.
I had used this filament a lot in the past without these kind of problems, yet I recognized the pattern of the problems from previous prints. Turns out the tip of the Mushi sword gave me an excellent calibration tool to experiment with, far better than the test cubes I used in the beginning of my 3D printing experience. I worked with the extrusion multiplier first, thinking I was not extruding enough filament. When that reached an inconclusive plateau, I started bumping up the extruder head temp by 5° per print. After running seven experimental prints, last night I got a perfectly printed sword tip. Yahoo!!! Used up all of the dark grey filament performing these calibration prints, just in time too. Just received two rolls of gold filament from the same company who made the dark grey filament, so hopefully now that I have that brand dialed in, I can print out a good set of parts for Mushi sword Version-3.
Now onto the chakrams. The chakrams have already been assembled from a 48 part kit I printed out two months ago. My daughter got the first set of chakrams I made, they were spray painted and there were some issues with the paint chipping and flaking off. Rather than sanding them down, I figured someone out there would like to have them because they were still pretty good looking chakrams, and I was correct. The person who bought them was wanted them for the June 28 Kingdom Hearts concert in New York for which he was cosplaying Axel. He had experience with foam built chakrams that kept having tips break off . . . and was thrilled to get a strong pair of 3D printed plastic chakrams even with the paint chipping and flaking off in places (he wrote to me that no one would notice at the concert). I hope that he and his girl had fun at the concert.
The stage these chakrams are at is what I call the “filling and sanding” stage. There are over 500 separate surfaces on a pair of chakrams, each of which needs to be sanded initially, then filled with Bondo putty and sanded again. This is just like shampoo, apply, rinse and repeat. The first four pictures as shown from the top down show the chakrams on their second application of Bondo putty. From the 5th picture onward are the chakrams after I sanded off that second coat of Bondo. The darker reddish areas are places where the sanding block did not touch the dried Bondo putty, those areas need to be filled again.
Currently, I have sanded off the 2nd coat of Bondo from one entire chakram and applied a 3rd coating of Bondo onto the exposed low spots. The second chakram as of this writing has 1/2 of one side sanded down. The total sanding and resanding of surfaces in preparation for painting a pair of chakrams means that I will sand over 2000 individual surfaces before these chakrams are paint ready.
The goal is to have these chakrams ready for painting by next week, when my daughter arrives for her annual week-long summer visit. She also has some airbrushing gear somewhere at home, I’m hoping that my learning curve on airbrushing will be instructive and helpful for her to see in person.
