Final Fantasy VII - Buster Sword pendant [2-color, gluing required]

General

A nice two-color pendant version of the famous Buster Sword.

Based on an original model by Jesse Baumes, released under CC BY-NC 4.0. Credit him if you create a derivative work from this one.

I've made several modifications described in the appropriate section. The idea is to have a model that can be printed in two halves with one material change - so that you can have a shiny “blade” portion in the middle.

Because of the modifications made to make the two-color print easy, the blade is not pointy anymore. For a necklace it's OK though. Also there's less chance of getting stabbed by accident :)

Slicing and print preparation

You can use the provided 3mf file. If you're importing the STLs into a slicer yourself, the dimensions I've used are:

• Set scale to 50%
• Set Z to -2.01 mm
  • This sinks most of the extruded part of the blade
  • Note that the torus will not be sunk to its center position. I prefer it this way, but if this bothers you, you can modify the source data in Blender

There's the base STL and a mirrored one. Previously I've used a single STL and mirrored it in PrusaSlicer but for some reason (some small numerical error?) the two copies sliced slightly differently around the hilt buttons. I've found out that mirroring in Blender first and exporting a mirrored STL fixes this problem.

I've used this STL repair service to fix the final STLs. On Windows with PrusaSlicer you can use the built-in Windows STL repair tool but I wanted to upload files that work on other OSes as well.

Printing and materials

For the blade, you should use some shiny material. That one is printed first.

My pictured prints use:

• Prusa My Silverness PLA + Prusa Galaxy Black PLA
• Prusa My Silverness PLA + Print With Smile Violet Sparkle PLA

both printed on a Prusa CORE ONE.

You can also opt for more rusty looking materials in both cases :)

For the materia, I've used melting beads (NABBI neon, EAN 7393968002975)

After printing, you will need to glue the two halves together. Therefore a smooth-ish sheet is recommended.

While you can use PETG, it's not that great for the rather small details and with some materials I had to lower the print speed significantly, otherwise parts of the handle would melt into a clump. It's doable but not really recommended.

Assembly

Glue the two halves of the sword together. I've used a sewing needle to apply the glue. This of course ruins the needle for sewing :)

You can then optionally add materia. I've used melting beads, cut a thin portion out and then used skewers to both push them inside the sword and also squish them into shape. I think using colored foils between the layers could also work. Or some other plastic materials, or even a piece of filament string.

Then you just add the ring for attaching to the chain and you're done.

• Hidden the materia
• Raised a part of the blade to allow easy two-color printing
  • The blade is no longer pointy
• Rotated the blade slightly
  • This creates a more visually interesting texture after slicing
• Extruded the blade to allow sinking with arbitrary adjustments
  • Also allows printing in two halves where each half lies flat on the print sheet
• Raised hilt button 5 to be in line with the other buttons
• Replaced the decorative handle with a rectangular one, for structural integrity
• Added a torus at the end of the handle so you can attach a ring