3d printed Chewbacca Bowcaster

 

Catching up on my posting - last year I printed myself a Bowcaster for my Chewbacca costume.

The costume was pretty simple.  It started with a onesie I bought at target a while back on a whim.  I added the talking Chewbacca mask and it was pretty much done.  All I needed was the bowcaster.

I found some STLs on Etsy Designed by MysteryMakersStudio - Custom digital DIY Bowcaster with stand stl file(digital download) and I was off and running.   As an aside, Marko Makaj, the designer has a reasonably well priced patreon  as well if you want more than just one model.  It's important to note it's makers plural.

Anyway was off and printing on my new Ender-3 Max Neo 3D Printer.  I don't think I mentioned that yet - should probably post about it too.   I bought it because I wanted the large build area 300x300 and the NEO line with the SonicPad was supposed to be a game changer.  Meh. It prints.

The parts all came out pretty good.

Next came all the gluing.  So. Much. Gluing.   It went together pretty well.  The polarizers (the balls on the end) are a bit heavy for how thick the actual bows are.  I managed drop it and break them off more than once.

One of the tricks I tried in this build was to use UV Resin from my resin printer to fill in the layer lines.  It's very effective but smells pretty bad when you cure it with the UV flashlight. 

fully assembled! (It did drive me to drink.  A little Smith and Cross rum there on the table).

One of the resin printed lenses cracked when I took it off the plate.  I left it as is for "authentic battle damage!"

Primed.  I later used rattle-can gloss black and then some Rub and Buff silver to to make it look metalic.  Came out good enough for me.  

Lots of lessons learned, could do a lot better if I did it all over again.  Now I just need a place to store this bad boy.