Captain America – Shield Update

Captain America – So if you’ve been following along on my Instagram, I have been designing my own take on Captain America’s shield in Fusion 360. I’m finally putting my engineering brain to the test and designing my first proper large-scale cosplay prop model. 

Progress

So far I have printed the outside ring of the shield. I have printed 10 pieces in total, with each piece taking around 11 hours to print. It’s been a bit of a marathon to print and has taken well over a week to print these parts on my Ender 3. I’ve been using a 0.6mm nozzle to speed up the printing process, and it’s actually doing a very good job of striking a balance between the detail and printing time.

Brims have been a lifesaver during this print, my first attempt at printing the outer ring failed when it started to lift at the back, so I used brims to keep all the edges firmly attached to the bed. Any lift at all will ruin the piece, when you slot it together with the next piece there will be a large gap that will then need to be filled later on. So it’s best to catch this early on and restart the print with a brim to stop this from happening.

I’ve been printing the pieces at a 45-degree angle, corner to corner rather than straight down the middle, this ensures that it fits on the bed.

Settings

Below are the current printer settings I’m using to print the Captain America shield pieces. I use the same setting for the remainder of the pieces to get the same layer height and detail so I can apply the same amount of sanding throughout the shield.

Nozzle size: 0.6mm

Layer height: 0.32mm

Brim: Yes

Support: Yes

Coming Up

This week I’m planning on printing the remaining star pieces, so at least the front of the shield will be completed then. The back will be the final part which I still have to do some final design and fitments tests. But I can only do this once I have the front of the shield completed.

I’m hoping to have all parts completely printed together by the 14th of May. This will give me enough time to print and do some mods for the design. Once I know it all fits together and I’m happy with how it turned out I will then make it available.

I’ll be posting more updates this week so keep an eye out on Instagram.

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