I love the show The Mandalorian. Great to see some amazing stories in the Star Wars universe and so many of the characters are fantastic. A very popular project people have picked up (include a lot of cosplayers/creators) is the Mandalorian helmet (pictured below).
It looks cool and is a fairly simply design and quite easy to print. I went to Thingiverse and searched through a few looking at reviews etc. I ended up with The Mandalorian Helmet which includes the helmet in one piece, then the "ears" and back grill separately. At the time of printing I only have my Prusa Mini printer and it is too big to print in one go. The main issue with printing larger pieces is that they can take a very very long time, in this case it would be a few days solid printing. The second issue is if you did print it and it didn't fit your head you would be equally annoyed. The first thing I did was to take a "slice" from just above the visor and printed that out in 4 pieces and glued together to make a halo ring to test against my head. Image below shows completed ring on top of MacBook Pro 16" for scale.
I used masking tape (1) and some glue (2) to hold this together. I always have lots of masking tape available as its super useful to hold pieces together and doesn't leave a mark/sticky residue once removed. I also use clips/clamps (3) to further hold some pieces together so that they stay in alignment and hold together until the glue fully dries.
I tested this and realise I have to scale up slightly so therefore any pieces I print need to match the same scale otherwise they won't fit together. The ears and back grill are already separated pieces so I scaled up and printed straight away, nice and easy.
Since the helmet is given in one single file I have to split it up into smaller parts as my printed can't handle it in one go. With using a Prusa I use the PrusaSlicer software which converts 3d files into files that the printer understands how to print. I'll cover this in more detail in a future post so only covering what I did to get this working for me for now.
One of the most useful tools I have found using PrusaSlicer is the cut tool. This allows you to "cut" the file in half along the Z plane (If you imagine placing an object on a piece of paper on a flat surface and imagine if you could move that piece of paper upwards through the object, then that is the direction it cuts in). This results in two pieces (you can choose where the line is, it defaults to half way) which you can then rotate and cut again and again as many times as you like. The images below show the full object, and then splitting up until they are small enough to print. The software makes it very obvious once a piece can be printed as it changes colour as seen in the last image.
I did this repeatedly, exported all the files out and then started the long job of printing many pieces one after another. The image to the right shows how long one of the larger pieces can take (11h, 48m). The parts underneath the pieces are supports and are there to literally support the piece during printing. They are generated if a piece is not set flat to the print bed or has any steep angles. I orientated the piece slightly to generate supports to give the print more stability once it got higher up and it worked great.
Once all pieces were printed I was able to glue together using the glue, masking tape and clamps all linked below. The clamps helped massively to ensure the parts were as closely aligned as possible. The final piece (without the ears attached for now) is shown to the left.
The next step is filling in those gaps between where the pieces are glued together, but that's for another post.
Affiliate Links
(1) Masking tape - https://amzn.to/3oT7o0i
(2) Gorilla Glue - https://amzn.to/39C56fD
(3) Spring Clamps - https://amzn.to/3bKMD3b
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