I had been thinking about this specific armor for a while, so when a fellow cosplayer reached out on Instagram to see if I’d make it for her partner, I jumped at the chance. I only committed to making the vambraces, though, since I had several other projects going at the same time, and I wasn’t sure how long something like this would take.
Coincidentally, I had recently seen a couple of youtube videos that got my brain going in the direction of embossing metal using 3D printed dies. One was by Stuff Made Here, who used the technique to make parts for a tool. I can’t find the other video I saw, but it was similar to this one by Larkin Machine Co. who made an embossed nameplate. To test the technique, I used a small piece from Théodred’s armor. I printed positive and negative dies, and pressed some metal samples in my bench vise. For the test, I used the “solidify” modifier in blender to expand the original model and make the negative cavity for pressing. The results were promising enough that I felt that this technique would work, but I wasn’t satisfied with the solidify tool as the best way to thicken the model. It’s likely someone who understands it better could make it work predictably, but I eventually landed on a different workflow that gives me consistent results.
- Create an STL of the BUCK at the size I want the finished piece to be. I label this one “mid”.
- Bring the STL into Meshmixer (free software)
- Choose “Edit > Make Solid” and select “Accurate” Solid Type
- Max-out the Solid Accuracy and Mesh Density
- Set the Offset Distance to around half of the thickness of the metal, erring towards slightly more than half.
- Hit “Update” and save out the result. I label this one “large”.
- Return to the original STL, still in Meshmixer, and repeat the same process with a NEGATIVE offset distance, and save out as “small”. This is now the buck I will press into my sheet metal.
- Bring “large” back into Blender, and boolean it out of a cube/rectangle/whatever. This is now the cavity into which I press the sheet metal.
- Print the block w/cavity and the buck (“small”) in PLA+ using 75% infill.
I tested several types of sheet metal, and the one I chose to use for this project was 26ga zinc-coated steel. I probably would have used bare steel if it was readily available in this thickness, but the thinnest available was 22ga, and that did not give me enough detail when pressed.
The first step for me was to draw the main shapes in Illustrator, and print it out to help me determine scale. Then I brought those drawings into Blender to use as a guide for modeling. I curved the models slightly so that I had a head-start on the final shape, but I didn’t want to curve them too much for a couple of reasons. The pressing process would fail if there were any angles past 90, and the two smaller plates sit on an angle on the final bracers. So their curves would need to be mirror-images of each other, and I would need to print additional dies. Instead, I just curved them by hand after pressing. When I printed the dies, I thought alignment pegs and holes might be a good idea, but they quickly snapped off. I have not returned to the alignment idea since it hasn’t been a problem, but I have some ideas I might try in the future.
I also decided that pressing these in my bench vise might be putting too much stress on the tool in ways it wasn’t designed to be used. So I invested in a Harbor Freight hydraulic press. It took a lot of fiddling with the bottle jack to get it to work correctly, but once it did it worked great and I have been very happy with it.
The three main plates on each bracer have crowns and stars engraved on them, and all plates have a brass border. For the engraving, I originally wanted to electro-etch them, but was having trouble getting my masks to have the small detail that I wanted. Instead, I used a vibrating engraving tool to do it all by hand, using cut vinyl stencils as guides. I have since figured out ways to have still done it with etching instead, but this worked fine.
For the borders, I used brass that I had left over from Theodred, cut them out with snips, and soldered them to each plate.
The leather base was made of three layers. From top to bottom: a solid piece of black leather with no straps extending from it, a rolled leather edging that goes around the whole perimeter, and finally a bottom piece of leather that has the straps. I also decided to fill the interior of layer 2 with EVA foam to avoid the impression of the trim pieces showing through to the underside. The layers were first adhered with contact cement, then stitched together by hand. The last piece of leather is a small tab at the bottom that covers the ends of the trim, and has a small star shape stamped on it.
The final step was to rivet the plates to the leather. I marked and punched the holes in the leather, then used domed double-cap leather rivets to attach everything. I set all my rivets using an old drill press, and the setups for getting all of these positioned properly got pretty complicated. I had to do a few of them more than once because it’s very easy to accidentally get out of alignment, and then the rivet will not be secure. The pressure of your hammer or press needs to be perfectly in line with the shank of the rivets or they just bend diagonally instead of being set correctly.
This ended up being one of my favorite builds of all time, and I was overjoyed to be able to deliver it to my client at Dragon Con. I am going to revisit some things, such as the overall size and the etching, and hopefully make at least one more pair at some point.
