Shield Widening

I decided that the previous attempt at a shield back-face wasn’t good enough. I feel like there were little sloppy areas here and there, and the mystery of what happened to require me to rearrange everything still bothers me. So I decided this time to make the detail by cutting it out of multiple thin layers. This time around I also refined the pattern a bit, rounding the corners to 45 degree angles and adding detail to the bottom layer.

I think this approach has advantages over the other ways I’ve attempted: it’s much easier to cut through a .3mm sheet rather than a 1mm sheet, and it’s easier to get things lined up properly when the guide is directly attached to the plastic. Plus this time around I drew the guides in pencil, rather than pen, and this gave me finer lines. It was actually pretty easy to get the cuts to be rather good, too – using a ruler as a guide to make the straight cuts, there were only minor variances which, in theory, will cancel each other out when the layers are joined.

I still need to clean up the parts a bit, but I think this will work out nicely in the end.