Have you ever been playing a video game and wish that you could be in the game yourself, or own part of a character’s outfit or the like? I know that I have! Since playing my very first Zelda game when I was a kid, I have always wanted my very own Master Sword. Over the last few years, I toyed with buying a plastic sword off of Amazon, ordering a nice forged sword from Etsy, or going through the process of making one myself, but I never did. I always had some kind of excuse for why I did not need a sword. It was not until my husband purchased a 3D printer for himself that I changed my mind.

The process of 3D printing is actually quite amazing! The printer that my husband purchased takes up little space, but can make quality designs over the course of a few hours, or a few days. If you’re unfamiliar of the process of 3D printing, a 3D printer takes material, filament, and constructs a three-dimensional object from a CAD file or other digital 3D model. The filament is extruded and built upon layer by layer until the object is formed.

There are a lot of awesome 3D designers out there, and we were able to find a Master Sword model on the website thingiverse. The website is incredibly cool, and it’s easy to lose a lot of time searching for awesome files there. My husband and I spent a lot of time searching for a sword design that looked accurate to the design found in the game, that was full size, and that had some good ratings. After comparing a few swords, we chose a design by ChaosCoreTech. The designer also made a design for the sheath, but we did not print that for this project. The sword itself is printed in 10 different parts. Since this was our first large-scale print job, there was a lot of trial and error involved. We ended up printing the pommel and the hand guard twice due to the print bed not being lined up correctly. This error resulted in the project taking a few days longer than expected, some wasted material, and the pieces not being correct.

 

As you can see, once we got the print bed level there was a significant difference in size of the pieces. The print bed being off was the only major hiccup in the printing process; from that point on, everything printed perfectly.

We did a lot of different research on what the best super glue to use for piecing the sword together would be, and in the end, we went with Loctite Super Glue. We tried Gorilla Glue on some other projects, and it just was not cutting it. As we glued pieces together, we taped them to get a good hold and let the glue cure before proceeding to sanding.

Unfortunately before we ever got the chance to sand the sword, it got bumped, hit the floor, and broke in two. Thankfully it was just the result of the glue not being fully cured, and there was no cosmetic damage. The filament that is used to print is very tough!

Sanding was my least favorite part of the entire project. This took the most time and effort because we wanted to get the sword as smooth as possible and also remove any extra traces of glue or imperfections. There were some spaces we fudged on, but in the end we did the best we could, and the sword had a smooth matte-like feel before paint.

 

When comparing pictures of the Master Sword, I decided to turn to Google to try and color match what I felt was the best. I had a lot of fun picking out spray paint, and to get that right color green for the pommel, we ended up going to two different stores to find that perfect shade. We did a matte gray for the base coat and let each side dry over a couple of hours before moving on to actual color. The pommel and hand guard were quite intricate, so I spent a lot of time taping up the small details that did not need to be painted blue. When it was time to move on to the green, I attempted to tape each small piece that was blue. Unfortunately, my efforts proved to be fruitless because bits of green spray paint still bled over on to the blue which resulted in me needing to hand paint over my mistakes with acrylic paint. At this point, I was worried that the project was ruined because the blues were just off enough that I could notice and I wondered if others could as well. After confirming that I was overthinking it, I moved on to the gold embellishments on the blade.

 

Originally I had my heart set on using gold leaf for the gold pieces since I happened to have gold leaf in my arts and crafts supplies. I watched a few YouTube videos, read an article on proper usage, and set to it. It was not working out well. I had a few pieces applied, and it got to the point where it was not taking to the plastic anymore. I gave this some solid effort and then swapped to hand painting the gold elements with some water based gold acrylic paint. This paint was rather old and thin, so it took about 4 coats to get that solid shine that I was aiming for. I used this same kind of paint to do the blade of the sword, and once that dried, I finished up the blade with some silver spray paint.

Once I was happy with all of the different painted elements, I took some clear top coat to protect all of my hard work, and to ensure that it would ready for display and safe for outdoor photo use.

Needless to say, I am incredibly happy with the results!! I had a lot of fun doing a mini-photo shoot. I also put together a little closet cosplay to get into the Hero mindset.

 

There are a few downsides to this particular sword though. Despite it being a full-sized Master Sword, it is not a great cosplay-ready sword. It is very fragile, and even after all of the work put into it, there are places where the sword has split from just minor prop use. You can also see the banding in some areas on the blade, but that is due to us having a small print bed and needing to print smaller pieces. The sword also cannot be swung in any heavy manor or the force is likely to break it in two. A way we could remedy this would be to edit the design to be able to run a metal rod down the entire center of the blade down through the hand guard and pommel. The sword is great for photos though and will be a display sword for my office.

I had a lot of fun working on this from start to finish! I can’t wait to 3D print some more fun Zelda items with my husband and hopefully show those off in the future.

What do you think of my 3D-printed Master Sword? Have you 3D printed any awesome Zelda designs? Let me know in the comments below.

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