OddViking
New Member
As often happens at certain 501st Legion troops, we find ourselves trooping without a blaster. I wanted to find a general prop I could troop with that gave me something to do with my hands, and to interact more with the environment. I found an .stl file for some Clone Trooper Electrobinoculars kit on Thingiverse (called "Clone Trooper Macrobinoculars" link: Thingiverse Electrobinoculars stl files).
Reference from Attack of the Clones:
It was already broken down to fit easily in my Elegoo Saturn resin printer. Because I love adding lights to props, I modified it to have the red light and figured out a sort of lit screen insert.
I need to tune my printer settings, because there is some faint banding, but nothing like the sanding required from a filament printer. I am just loving resin-printed props.
I also tried something new on this, in the files there was a file of it all assembled, which I printed small as a sort of Maquette model so I could check where things go and at what angle.
I cut out one side into the hollow interior, in preparation for my view screen. I also cut in a slot for changing the battery and connecting the electronics, as well as a toggle switch that replaces a button detail on the outside.
Next, designing my viewport window that will have some depth and lighting inside. I thought through several ideas, before settling on a sort of back-lit box insert with a HUD in front from cut vinyl which ended up being an elegant solution that is removable. To get the retro screen look, I took some ribbed plexiglass and put two layers one way, airbrushed it with some thinned transparent acrylic (Phthalo blue), and then cut a third layer with the ribbing at 90 degrees, which created the square look.
To get the HUD look, I looked at a bunch of examples of Electrobinoculars in Star Wars, and most have a similar layout (markings on one side, range at the bottom, and two black side "prongs") and adapted it to this very wide shape in Adobe Illustrator. I took that vector file saved as an .svg, and I cut it out of black vinyl on my Cricut, with green for secondary number details at the bottom. These letters were so fine, it is about as tiny as you can get with that cutter. Super hard to remove those tiny letters, especially anything with a hole in it. Then I glued gels behind (red is self-adhesive brake light cover, green was glued with white glue to avoid fogging.
Because I knew I was going to install a light deep inside, I kept it separated until I mounted it in to make it easier to glue in place deep inside. I found a hard wired 12v light bar that was perfect (well, I had to grind a few mm off each side), And running a 12 V light off of a 9 V battery usually works pretty well for this kind of thing. It’s just a little dimmer than it would have been at 12v, which is fine.
Originally I figured I would glue the box in, but I realized that I would not be able to access the light bar ever again if I did. So instead I put two small stoppers at the back of my insert, and laid the screen in an then created these two half-round tabs to hold the screen in, making the whole unit removable if needed:
Video: view screen insert video