Iron Man Mk III Bust

thingiverse

Printing: I printed this design on my heavily modified Solidoodle 2 at a layer height of 0.2mm and 20% infill. Painting: The head is sanded to smooth out any rough edges, then I hit it with Krylon 18 CT gold paint. After that, I sand it again and add another coat of gold, making sure not to worry about masking the eyes. Any detail lines are carefully picked out with a fine-pointed tool called a scribe. The sections that need to be red are lightly sanded, then the gold areas are masked off before airbrushing with a combination of Iwata com-art acrylic paints to get the exact color I wanted. After sanding again, I add another coat of paint and finally remove the masking to scrape away the paint from the eyes until I'm down to the bare ABS. A thin brush is used to run a line of black around the eyes and into some of the detail lines to give them more depth. The base is assembled after wiring (see below) and then painted flat black. Electronics: The electronics consist of two 3mm white LEDs wired in parallel, with the positive wire connected directly to a CR2032 Button Cell Battery holder and the ground wire connected to a single-pole dip switch, which is then wired to the ground of the battery holder: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E0IXQPY http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007QAJRQA. I run both LEDs and wiring through the head before routing them through the base. The base contains enough room for me to route the wires and solder them directly to the switch and battery holder. The battery holder is glued firmly in place, while the switch fits snugly. Print Settings Printer Brand: Solidoodle Printer: Solidoodle 2 - Pro Rafts: No Supports: Yes Resolution: 0.2mm layer height Infill: 20% Notes: I used simply3d to slice the design. How I Designed This I created this design using a combination of Blender, Sketchup and netfabb. First, I pulled an STL from another source into Blender, where I simplified the vertices and removed some issues with the mesh using limited dissolve. I exported it as .dae format and imported it into sketchup, fixing up small problems, hollowing out the head to make room for wiring, and designing the eye tunnels for LED lighting. The base was created from scratch in sketchup, based on the dimensions of a battery holder and switch that happened to be lying around. Both were exported as .stl and then repaired using the free version of netfabb.