Introduction: Stormbreaker V2

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Fusion Projects »

In my sophomore year of high school, I made a life-sized, 3D-printed, replica of Stormbreaker from Marvel's Avengers Infinity War (Stormbreaker introduction scene), the newest weapon used by Thor. However, my finished model had a lot of issues; it wasn't structurally strong, it was too top-heavy, and it was made in Tinkercad (a basic design program that wasn't suited for a large-scale, long-term project like this). Since then, I've greatly improved my skills with CAD, so I decided to make a second iteration of Stormbreaker that fixed the issues from my previous attempt and included a few new improvements. When designing this, I took inspiration from Kaz Oomori's fan-made Endgame poster by using the red, white, and black color scheme. This project was made using resources from Ms. Berbawy's Principles Of Engineering class. If you want to check out other cool projects from her classes you should check out this website.

**Note: The numbers that you see throughout the instructable correspond to the numbers tagged on certain pictures.**

Supplies

As a part of Berbawy Makers and Ms. Berbawy's POE class at Irvington High School, I was able to utilize her tools and materials to complete this project:

Tools:

Materials:

Step 1: Blade

Creating the Blade:

  1. To create the initial shape of the blade, I created an outline that I wanted for the ax in one sketch and lofted it to a point above it. Then, I split it using the split body tool and mirrored it. To create the white LED sections, I used the split body tool again and used the shell tool to make it hollow. The dragon that I made (at the end of the video) was drawn using Adobe Illustrator Draw on my Ipad Air 2.
  2. I needed a way to attach the LED case to the blade without using a permanent adhesive. So, I used rubber bands to do this. I made notches in the LED case (2) and holes in the blade (3) so that I could wrap a rubber band around each notch and tie it around an 'anchor' at the bottom (4). To understand this better, you can see pictures 5, 6, 7, and 8. This way, if I ever need to access the LEDs after I put it all together, I can just pull over the case or cut the rubber bands at the bottom.
  3. The anchor has 2 bolts coming out of it with rings down the middle. The bolts are there so that I could attach the hammer to everything without glue. The ring down the middle is for the wooden dowel I was planning to attach in the future.
  4. Putting everything together was a little difficult. The rubber bands needed to be short in order for the tension to hold everything in place, but because of that, I wasn't able to pull them to the bottom and tie them to the anchor easily. To do this, I took long pieces of string, tied them at the ends of the rubber bands, fed them through the holes, and pulled them out the other side. This took a lot of patience in order to get it right.
  5. When 3D printing the final product using the Ultimaker 3, I first printed the Fire Engine Red PLA for red and the Hammer Gray Copolyester for the black parts using dual extrusion. I printed the white sections after and used the 5-minute epoxy to glue it on.
  6. I printed the LED case separately as well. For the dragon design to come out well, I printed it in dual-extrusion with the main part printed in transparent PLA, and the dragon printed in black PLA (9 & 10).

Step 2: Hammer

Creating the Hammer:

  1. The initial hammer was made using two lofts. I had a little trouble with keeping the planes parallel since the dimensions got slightly skewed when I was scaling, so if I made the hammer again, I would have only scaled the part after I completely finished the design.
  2. I couldn't make the red part of the hammer with only one body because it was too tall for me to 3D print. To fix this, I split it into two parts and made notches for them to attach together later on.
  3. For the LED case on the hammer, I again used rubber bands to attach them. The section analysis (11) shows this clearly. I used a small hole and made a sweep going through the top red body, the case, and the bottom red body. I repeated this on the other side as well. After printing, I was able to attach all four parts together by tying a single rubber band (fed through the paths I made).
  4. Finally, I created 3 holes on the bottom (12), one to feed the wires through so that I could put LEDs on the blade, and the other two to allow the bolts from the anchor to come through.
  5. The Assembly of these parts was pretty straightforward and easy. When printing the parts using the Ultimaker 3, I used the red and white PLA for dual extrusion

Step 3: Mid-piece

Creating the Mid-piece:

  1. This is the most important part of the entire build since it attaches all the other parts together. To create it, I first made a simple octagonal prism in the middle of the two parts and used the chamfer tool on the edges. I used the split body tool again and made the edges red. To get the impressions of the blade and the hammer, I again used the split body tool.
  2. To create the designs that say 'Storm' (13) and 'Breaker' (14), I used Adobe Illustrator and the Nordic font by Yana Bereziner.
  3. The inner structure was created to allow space for the wooden dowel and the anchor to come through (15). I created this by using the split body tool, and by extruding a projection of the anchor's bolts into the mid-piece.
  4. Attaching all the other parts to this was easy. However, I had to attach them in this order for it to work: the assembled blade, the handle using the wooden dowel, the wiring, then the assembled hammer (attached with nuts).
  5. When 3D printing on the Ultimaker 3, I first printed the red and black parts using dual extrusion. Then, in a separate print, I printed the 'Storm' and 'Breaker' parts, which I glued on afterward using the 5-minute epoxy. (16 & 17)

Step 4: Handle

Creating the Handle:

  1. This was the most difficult and longest part of the design. In the video, you can see me trying out different ways to create the handle. Finally, after trying multiple designs, I came up with the complicated swirl and color combination that you see in the video and in picture 18.
  2. To make the initial shape of the handle, I first created a 2D outline/extrusion of how I wanted the handle to look. Then, going down vertically from the top of that extrusion, I created around 20-25 sketches of ellipses. I made sure that the ellipses at the middle of the handle were dimensioned somewhat similarly and the ellipses at the bottom went outward and inward to create the spherical shape. At the very bottom of the handle, I made a small circle too. After making all of these sketches, I lofted the entire thing. If I noticed that some spots were less defined than others, I deleted the loft in my timeline and added another sketch with another ellipse, then redid the loft (19).
  3. To create the swirl and the separate colors on the handle, I used a combination of 2D and 3D sketches. I created multiple planes that went down the handle, used them to split the handle into vertical parts, and made sketches on each of the flat faces that were created. In each sketch, I put down a point that alternated from the top, right, bottom, and left of the ellipse outline. Then I created a 3D sketch, and projected all of the points that I made, and used the fit-to-point spline tool to connect all of the dots. Using this, I swept a small hole and created the swirl (21).
  4. To separate the parts into their colors, I projected the 3D sketch onto a 2D sketch, used the split body tool to make them separate parts, and colored them accordingly (22).
  5. When printing on the Ultimaker 3, I needed to split all of the handle parts by white & black, and white & red. Most of them did not have a flat surface to print on, so I used rafts and supports while printing. After 3D printing, the assembly of the parts was fairly simple. Most of them were friction fit and went down the dowel easily.
  6. Assembling the handle pieces was tougher than expected. Unlike the prototype, some parts in the final build were hard to fit together, like in picture 23. For now, the parts shown are simply glued onto the dowel, but in the future, I plan on using white caulk to fill in any gaps between parts and fill in any cracks that formed.

Step 5: Final Assembly

  1. Before assembling the 3D printed parts together, I placed the wooden dowel into the mid-piece and drilled a hole through the opening made for the wires on the hammer side. To do this I used a 7.7 mm drill bit.
  2. I used velcro to keep the battery pack stationed inside the hammer. After that, I cut 2 strips of the LEDs to the length of where the LED case was covering over the top part. Then I soldered the battery case to the LED strips (19), fed them through the holes that I'd made previously during the CAD process, and stuck them onto the side of the plastic using the sticky adhesive on the back of the strip.
  3. I did a similar process on the blade side but was able to feed wires through the mid-piece/dowel because of the hole I had drilled previously, and solder them to the wires coming down from the hammer

After completing my second iteration of Stormbreaker, I finally feel comfortable calling this project finished. I was able to accomplish my goals by creating a new ax that solved all of the previous version's issues as well as having an improved design and better portability. Although I'm done with this project, I plan on making many more movie props and replicas in the future!