3D
Creative Studio
Dan's DIY Design
CAPTAIN AMERICA SHIELD - MOVIE REPLICA
Below you'll find all of the project's pictures starting with the most recent ones. Check back regularly for more updates!
At this point, the star is still not attached to the surface of the shield. I still need to apply a coat or two of lacquer before I attach it.
Here you can see that the star is, while not attached to the shield, bent to be more form fitting. I plan on attaching the star with Scotch heavy duty foam tape which claims to be able to hold up to 20 pounds of weight.
At this point, the star is still not attached to the surface of the shield. I still need to apply a coat or two of lacquer before I attach it.
Update: 3/9/2014
At this point, the star is still not attached to the surface of the shield. I still need to apply a coat or two of lacquer before I attach it. Furthermore, before I apply the lacquer I need to touch up the paint job where the blue meets the red with a fine paint brush. You can pretty clearly see the fine line of silver between the two colors where the tape shouldn't have been covering. I plan on attaching the star with Scotch heavy duty foam tape which claims to be able to hold up to 20 pounds of weight. In some of the pictures you can more clearly see the detailing on the star with the grooves. Those were actually much easier to do than I thought, I just used a utility knife and a ruler to carve them in. Over the next few weeks I won't have the time to make any more updates or work on the shield at all really, but I do still plan on finishing it before the movie premiere on April 4th.
Update: 3/8/2014
This post just shows a couple pictures of the star while I was cutting it out. I first bought a sheet of aluminum (about 0.025" thick) and printed out a picture of the star that I created in my 3D CAD software to use as a template (the star fits into the center circle of the shield with radius 9.5"). I taped the printed star to the aluminum sheet and carved some shallow reference grooves into the surface along those lines with a utility knife. I then removed the paper, and began scoring deeper and deeper following the reference lines with a ruler. Once the groove was deep enough I just flexed the sheet along the score line until it came apart. It was just a simple matter of repeating that process until the whole star was free.
Update: 3/8/2014
With the whole paint job done I could then remove the tape from the silver and blue areas of the shield and bask in it's beauty. It really ended up coming out a lot better than I ever could have hoped. There is the small issue of touching up the paint around the blue circle where it meets the red, but that shouldn't be too difficult if I can find the right brush. The trick with the tape is just going as slow as you possibly can while removing it. I was relieved to find that there was no peeling whatsoever while I removed the tape covering the blue circle.
I'm thinking that I might go back over the summer and redo the paint job so the red-to-blue transition will be seamless without having to touch it up, but for now I'm sticking with it as is in the interest of time. Just under a month left before the movie premiere!
Update: 3/8/2014
After finishing the blue circle it was time to move on to the red. I was quite daunted by the notion of doing this at first, but after figuring out the technique for cutting the tape, I found that it was much easier, but still time consuming all the same (it couldn't be worse than the polishing process though. Thankful for that). There turned out to be no need to remove the tape I had already laid down before the blue paint coat, so no wasted tape there. One thing that I wanted to be extra careful about was not peeling up the blue paint with the tape, so I just cut a rough circle out of wax paper and taped it down just on the very edges of the blue circle. Hopefully it won't peel up. Fingers crossed!
Update: 3/7/2014
Finally finally FINALLY the polishing, buffing, and sanding are finished and the shield is ready for the final stage in the preparations for the paint job. It took a little while to get the method down, but after a short while I was fairly easily able to cut out the circle in the tape for the coats of blue paint. After placing four pieces of tape in a square around the center of the shield, I took the same ruler that I used for the circular sanding process and made a sort of DIY compass. I started by drilling a hole through it at the appropriate radius and I then rigged a scratch awl so it could be secured into the hole. Then it was a simple matter of carefully pushing the awl around the the shield just once so I'd have an accurate reference shape to cut along. Then it was simply a matter of carefully cutting out the circle I had made with a small utility knife. The paint came out looking very nice. It's a little more light blue than I would have liked but oh well.
Update: 3/2/2014
Having pretty much just started the polishing process, I can already tell that this is going to take a LOOOONG time. The shield blank that I ordered from the Windrose Armory website arrived a couple days ago, and it's in pretty rough shape as you can see in the picture. There are lots of dings, knicks, and scratches that need to be sanded out while still maintaining that nice, uniform spun texture to the surface. I've already been sanding for about 6 hours without stopping and I've barely made any progress on the scratches. It's gonna be a long week that's for sure... You can expect for it to be a long time before the next update.
Getting Started: 2/2/2014
About a week or so ago, I was talking with a friend about dressing up for the Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie premiere on April 4th. She's going all out for her costume and I've resolved to 1up her if I can. I don't anticipate having the time to make the full costume, but at the very least I can make myself a replica of the shield from the film. So I've spent the last week or so doing tons and tons of research into what can be done with the time I have left. My plan is to make the shield using a spun aluminum shield blank from an online retailer. It won't be cheap by any stretch of the imagination and I'm pulling lots of helpful information from many sources online that I'm sure will be essential in finishing this project. I haven't committed to the project quite yet, because I'm waiting to ring up a budget, so for now I'm prototyping every single part using Autodesk Inventor 2013 to get an idea of what the project will cost me. The next update won't be until I get my hands on the shield blank and get started. See ya then!