In the series, they’re blue when activated, and the arm that came with the suit had a space for a costumer to install their own electronics. One of the details I’m most proud of is the arm rockets. After that, we worked out how to strap it on: elastic straps with velcro helped with the thighs, and the shoulders and chest parts used snaps. We painted the handplates a different color, and made the shins out of leftover vinyl and EVA foam and painted them brown. They weren’t 100 percent smooth by the end, but it was good enough for this costume.Īfter that, we laid down a couple of layers of primer and then silver paint to get them to the right-ish color. I took sandpaper to each of the parts, starting with a coarse, 80-grit paper and worked my way up to a finer 200-grit paper. It’s not a terribly strong plastic - it has to be melted (keep them away from radiators or other heat sources), and as a result, they’re easy to sand down. 3D printing leaves print lines where each layer of plastic is fused together. Once the armor was in hand, we had to process it. The parts that he hadn’t printed out were easy to replace: Thingiverse has plenty of free models that people have uploaded, and a fellow Green Mountain Squad member, Patrick Ormiston, kindly printed them up for me. He offered to pack up the armor and send it to me just for the price of shipping. He told me that he was just over five feet tall, and I figured that if he printed it too small, it would be just about the right size for Bram.
It turns out that that was absolutely the case: I posted up asking if anyone had parts that they weren’t going to use, and hit the jackpot: one member, Elias Chun from Singapore, had printed out most of the parts that he needed, just a bit too short.
Some subset must have printed out parts that were too small for them, right? But I realized something as fall crept up: the Mandalorian costume group that I was a part of that has literally thousands of members, many of which are printing up their own armor. I’d planned on creating each piece myself out of a stack of EVA foam floormats that I had kicking around, and even started to carve one out earlier in the year. The armor itself was also the product of a larger group effort. While it’s a little bigger for Bram, padding it made it sit nicely on his head (and a slightly too-large helmet doesn’t look quite as noticeable when you have the rest of the armor on, I’ve found.) A friend of mine, Amie Dansby (of Lego Masters fame!) is a 3D printing wiz, and printed me up a helmet earlier in the year, something that I’d planned on using for myself at some point. The first component I acquired was the helmet.
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