With the Disney+ original series, The Mandalorian, being one of the last of the new shows before the lockdowns of 2020 it stayed fresh in my brain as halloween was coming up. When a friend wanted to dress up as the Mandalorian I offered to build the character’s main weapon from the show, an Amban phase-pulse blaster. Google and Youtube turned up a lot of good results but one popped out, this custom build on myminifactory. Reading up on the description most of the prop is 3d printed with just 2 carbon fiber tubes. Ebay was not the place I would think of going for a part like this but from what I found on Google, and remembering a few youtubers, sponsored by ebay, talking about the basic materials sold on there I was pleasantly surprised with the results and picked up a few of each to get started!
October was a tough month with my primary phone’s camera being out of service I felt limited with what I could document but I struggled through. With what felt like a solid week of 3d printing I had 34 different 3d pieces all printed out on my FDM Prusa i3 MK3s, the description of the prop mentions how some pieces would come out better on an SLA printer but I didn’t have much trouble with the resolution. One of the pieces did have a layer shift but it was a simple enough fix of snapping the piece at the shift and reattaching back together. Before starting on any of the priming/painting I did a basic sand and decided to attach a fair bit of the prop together. The black carbon fiber tubes would need to be painted as well and I could tell from the 3d prints the tolerances were too much that any paint would scrape around during assembly. So with some CA glue I got all the 3d printed pieces assembled to the carbon fiber tubes and could start painting.
From this point the project turned into most any other 3d pieces I’ve finished, tons of primer filler coats with sanding in between. Once all the seams were looking good I did an overall black coat and layered on top of that for the other colors. By starting with the black coat it keep everything a darker hue and added to the finished look. The back stock is supposed to be a wood like material and I thought I would try adding some faux grain into the piece. With 0 experience I’m happy with the outcome but think in future projects I can practice more and have a better realistic looking part.
After the final clear coat the final step was weathering. This was my first time weathering a piece and with a friend’s help we gave it a shot with some water mixable oil color paints. We covered the Amban phase-pulse blaster giving all the nooks and crannies a nice layer of dirt added on. This was one of the faster projects I’ve ever done and while I know I could do better in a 2nd iterations (Halloween 2021?) I’m proud of how it looks and what I’ve managed to make with my 3d printer.
Mando’s blaster next to the Lego Razor Crest