Hei's Dagger (Darker than Black Cosplay)

thingiverse

This is a combination project I did as an example of manufacturing processes for my Mechanical Design class. It also happens to be a really cool cosplay prop. The blade is cut in two identical halves made from 0.125" 6061-T6 aluminum plate milled on my X-Carve, polished and glued together with epoxy. The hilt is printed in PLA and glued in place with epoxy, sealed with resin and spray-painted. The Sheath is printed in Filaflex to give it toughness without absolute rigidity. Print Settings Printer: Flashforge Creator Pro Rafts: Yes Supports: Yes Resolution: 0.2mm Infill: 20% for hilt, 10% for sheath Notes: My X-Carve has the 24V silent spindle. I found my sweet-spot cutting with a 1/8" 2-flute milling bit to be 10in/min feed rate and 0.003in depth per pass. Each half of the blade took about 6 hours machine-time. Post-Printing Polishing the Blade Using the attached SVG file uploaded to Easel for the cut-out left the blade flat. I polished the edge onto it using a belt sander and file set. ** This is a toy, not a weapon! The edge is blunt and the point is rounded off! Becareful not to make it sharp. Aluminum will not hold an edge anyway. Epoxy the blade halves Used JB Cold Weld to glue the halves of the blade together after polishing. Be sure to rough and clean the surfaces before applying the epoxy. I wiped mine down with Acetone to make sure that it was clean of cutting oil and metal shavings. Clamp for about 20 minutes (or whatever the set time for your epoxy of choice is!) and be sure that the halves are lined up nicely. Gluing the Hilt After the Blade epoxy is set, you can put on the hilt. Clean all the surfaces of the blade. remove any excess epoxy from the blade. Wash the blade again to make sure that it doesn't have any residue (Acetone is your friend). Epoxy the hilt over the tang of the blade and clamp it. I used an epoxy for this that is specifically for bonding plastic to metal. Clamp it and let all the Epoxy cure to its full strength (Probably 24-hours). Spray Paint! Sand all the surfaces of the hilt and apply a resin sealant that will let the spray-paint bond nicely. Let the resin cure (mine takes a couple of hours). Sand the surface of the resin again and wipe it clean (No Acetone this time!) Spray paint in thin layers for the effect you want. Use painters tape to keep the blade covered while painting the hilt and vice-versa. Similarly for the blade--except I do use acetone to prep the blade! How I Designed This Solidworks! I drew up all the models in Solidworks. To transfer the blade model to be able to cut in easel was a challenge though. First step was to export a DXF file of the outline sketch in solid works. Convert DXF to SVG for Easel The DXF file can be opened directly in Inkscape. Since I did my drawings in Imperial units, the scale factor for the import in Inkscape is 24.5. From there, you have to make sure that all of the endpoints of segments are joined so that the outside of the blade is a continuous poly-line. Save the image as a Standard SVG and then you can import it perfectly into Easel.