Written by 1:21 pm 3D Printing, Cosplay, Movie Props, Star Wars

3D Printing a Mandalorian Helmet on a Small Printer

A long time ago in Central New Jersey my friend, James Hannon, author of many books including his most recent hit, Anatomy of a Cosplayer, asked if I’d make him a custom Mandalorian helmet.

After sitting down with him to figure out what he wanted, we went with a Deathwatch-style helmet with a visor.

Now the challenge is, I only have a Prusa MK2.5s so my print bed can’t handle a one-shot Mandalorian bucket. So I had to cut it up into pieces uses Meshmixer. I’ll leave a link to my tutorial on how to do that in the description, and up here. It’s very easy to do and it allowed me to chop the file up into manageable pieces.

To learn how I cut up the files to fit on my printer, check out my tutorial on cutting large objects below!

Other Things You’ll Need

Things to Point Out

Glue Up

Use a generous amount of CA glue on one side, and then spray the other side with your accelerator. Once you join the two pieces together you need to work fast as the accelerator works almost instantaneously. You may want to do a dry run before actually gluing these up.

I created some flat supports in Prusa Slic3r to help provide some stability when gluing everything together.

Smoothing the Prints with Bondo and Fix It

Bondo has a relatively quick working time of about 3 to 5 minutes and is sandable in about 30 or so. I use my wax carvers to put the Bondo on but you could just as easily use your finger. It’ll be messier and less controlled but it may go faster. To each their own on this one.

After the Bondo cured, I ran over it with a 120 grit sandpaper to help smooth it out.

And then we repeat!

The FixIt is great for larger areas. It’s a little on the stiff side, almost like hard clay. I just rolled it on and then smoothed it out with my fingers.

And then we sand again. For the FixIt and to speed up smoothing down some of the larger areas I broke out the orbital sander with a 220 grit.

This whole process goes on and on until all your seams are as perfect as possible.

Once I get this into a decent spot I go over it all with a few coats of filler primer.

After letting the primer fully dry for several hours, I came back and did a wet sanding with 220 grit paper.

I like doing this at this point because the wet sanding liquifies the filler primer and helps really get it into the tiny tiny layer lines better.

Thanks for watching and good luck with your print! If you have some additional tips and tricks to share please leave them in the comments below!

Credits

Intro Music; Straight Through by Groove Bakery | https://groovebakery.com

Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com

Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0)

Disclaimer

The product links above are affiliate links so I get a few cents to go towards funding future projects (so THANK YOU!)

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