Palutena's Staff

After the release of Super Smash Bros For 3ds I sort of took a liking to the characters of the Kid Icarus series despite having never played any game in the series. 

After a while of thinking which of the three character's weapons to make I tried making Dark Pit's Staff but I stalled on that and shelved it for a later day.

I decided on Palutena's staff, it offered some challenges but I considered it "Medium" on my level of challenges.

I wanted to try making a fully 3d printed prop this time since I had been messing a lot with SketchUp and I have up until now only had sections and parts I couldn't make myself printed.

Here's a video of what I did for the top end

For the bottom piece I did a lot of the same so I'll spare the details.


After making this piece I began struggling to make the two "wings" that stick out from it. I tried making them in SketchUp but I realized Basic Sketchup hates making curves easy. I ended up having to draw the wing by hand.

Not the prettiest image but it works, I took this and loaded it into SketchUp and lined up the images and traced the wing into the model.


When I was tinkering with the thickness of the wing I originally thought 1/2" would be good but it was too awkward so I settled on 3/8". I realized the size of this would be large and I thought most printers wouldn't be able to handle an approximately 10.5" wide print as a single piece so I added a puzzle like connector for the wings to fit onto the rest of the base.

You can see it coming together here. I did some finalizing on the looks of it and decided to send it out to a 3D Printer via 3DHubs.com, An amazing site for someone like me who doesn't have the money for his own printer but likes to do 3D models exclusively meant to be printed. After about a week or so I received my 4 pieces in the mail and tried putting them together and... Well they didn't fit! Why? I didn't factor in that in order to fit inside something else the item has to be slightly smaller. So I sanded the pieces to make them fit easier.

They fit together so well this is actually them without any epoxy. I took them back apart and painted them gold and blue. 

Why yes that IS a Digimon towel, I'm glad you asked.

After painting I needed to reassemble the pieces with Epoxy and then place them on the shaft I chose. It happened to be a broken curtain rod someone was throwing away and I snagged out of the trash and cleaned up and painted.

When all was said and done I came out with this I left the ball unpainted in this image but eventually I gave it a blast with the same blue as the rest. I intend to later make a transparent one and light it up.

If anyone is interested in one of these I am willing to discuss a deal of a second making of it for the right price. I did this mostly for myself.

Also while I was working on this I got side tracked with another project... be sure to watch out for the next inter-dimensional portal opening near you.

Believe me, it's coming soon.