A gift for a good friend, the seals were printed on my Form2, sanded, airbrushed, and given a dirtying pass with some muddy black paint. The flag of the seal was made from a disused work shirt with an iron-on print then stained with coffee. This was then hot-glued onto the back of the seal itself. May make some more of these in the future, they were fun to make.
WW2 Captain America Shield
To be updated with more info and photos, but this is about a WW2 Captain America ‘heater shield’.
My good friend Jack asked about making one for his Captain America cosplay / airsoft outfit, and I figured “why not?”, and went about it. Jack helped source some great reference material (mental note, dig that up and link it here).
I had just enough leftover 1/8″ thick aluminum sheet metal at work that I was able to CNC machine out the shield shape. The grade of aluminum (I want to recall 6061) proved too difficult to roll / bend by hand, even with myself and another friend literally leaning over each half. I ended up getting the sheet metal shop that my work does business with to put it through a manual roller which proved to do the trick.
Then came the longest part to tackle – the design. We looked into paint, powdercoat (whole shield’s got a base coat of white powdercoat), ‘dry’ cerakote, wet cerakote, vinyl decals, vinyl masking… everything either ended up taking too much skill, space, or free time. We ended up contracting with a friend-of-a-friend who does custom vinyl work as a business, and he printed and placed the design as seen on the shield. Between the durable vinyl and the powdercoat base, it’ll take a beating no problem should it ever see action on an airsoft field.
As of posting this I still have to fabricate and adhere on the arm strap mounting strips. I’ll update the post as that moves forward.
Mirror & LED ring clock
After seeing this post on the laser cutting subreddit, I was pondering ideas for a mirror clock that wouldn’t have a mechanical clock in the middle. It occurred to me that the solution would be to make use of some large and small NeoPixel addressable LED rings and an Arduino controller.
I have the rough dimensions for the LED rings I’d want to use, next step will be to source some small round and / or square mirrors and test laser engraving them to see what results I get.
Update 2/6/21 – Stopped by Michaels, found some 7″ diameter mirrors for just a few bucks, also found some 4″ square ceramic tiles which I should be able to test engraving as well.
The backlighting has a few design stages I’d like to test:
- LED ring lights up for each numbered position on the clock
- LED ring transitions between each numbered position on the clock along with a secondary ring for minutes
- LED for each numbered position on the clock changes color based upon time of day (transitions between bright yellow-white midday to orange sunset, white with blue for moon at night, then orange sunrise, etc).
- This would essentially be a 24 hour clock, I’d probably want to generalize morning / evening off an average time.
Beskar Ingot Phone Case
Recently upgraded to a Pixel 4a and wanted to customize the case some. Seeing as I know you can laser cut / engrave leather (both real or “PU leather”), I decided to grab a couple of wallet cases.
I’d been provided with an art file of the beskar ingot pattern from The Mandalorian, and scaled / resized it to fit across the entire opened case.