So…we have  a 3D printer at the office.  That poor thing has been going pretty much non-stop since it was put together.  I, of course, decided I wanted to print something big and test how far the printer can go.

I started perusing grabcad.com and found a full-size Boba Fett file.  In no time I had it fired up in Blender and was gawking at the awesomeness.

However, it was too tall (and almost too wide) for the printer, so the dome was sliced off and printed separately.  The dome took 15 hours to print, the bottom face mask 31 hours (there were also a lot of false starts while we adjusted the position of the mask and printer settings…maybe another 4 or 5 hours involved.)

The result is below.  It’s a perfect skeleton for a helmet.  The next steps are to reinforce it with fiberglass (after reattaching the dome) and then a coat of Bondo on the outside (and maybe inside) to smooth it out…then of course painting and decorating

Still have to print the ear caps and other helmet gear, but this is a great start.