Cyclops – Step 2

“Don’t anybody move!… I lost my contact lens.”

OK so here it is, I’ve finished 3D printing the 4 pieces of my X-Men Cyclops goggles (read about my initial design of them here) and glued them together with superglue. Pretty cool if I do say so myself! You can see the settings I used on my Up! Plus 2 printer below – I kept things nice and slow to minimise print errors (an ongoing problem with my printer that can result in the print shifting or skipping – see my previous post on this issue). As a result, the ear pieces took 5 hours each, and the lens pieces 4.5 hours each, resulting in a total print time of 19 hours. Of course this could be cut down quite a lot depending on the settings of your own printer and the layer thickness you end up using.

Now that the glue is drying my next steps will be to prime and sand the goggles ready to spray paint. I don’t know yet how much effort I’m going to put into smoothing the visible layers, I’ll work it out once I start getting my hands dirty and see what they look like. Perhaps a bit of acetone prior to painting will work (see my previous results with acetone) or just a few steps of spraying undercoat and sanding. The pieces have aligned very well using the locating notches I designed into them, just some very minor differences in surfaces where the lenses come together in the middle. Should be relatively easy to clean up with some sanding.

Overall the fit is pretty close, once the glue dries completely I’ll get a better idea of whether a little bit of padding might be needed either in the nose area or around the ears to keep them securely in place. I also need to still figure out how I’m going to add the lens and some sort of lighting effect – if you’re going to make something, you may as well go all out!

– Posted by James Novak