Hello I'm Odin and today I'm going to make a
prop from the new Disney show Loki. I'm going to make a Time Baton or time stick. It's the time
manipulation billy club that the Minutemen carry. So this is a prop that may not have a whole lot
of foam in it I hope that's okay with all of you. So I want to make the Time Baton. I've also
called it the time stick it just seems to be the stun stick the time manipulation device that
the minutemen are using uh as they go out and do their reconnaissance field trips that they need
to do for the TVA. If you really look closely at the props both on screen as well as any production
photos, what it really really looks like is that the base is a good old-school type of heavy-duty
flashlight.
And it happens to work out that the barrel of this is pretty close to the size of
a… what is this one inch or three quarter inch? One inch PVC pipe. So I'm gonna go with that. I'm
gonna have the flashlight base. I'm gonna have a PVC pipe for the actual stick and then I'm gonna
3D print connectors that go between the pipe and the flashlight and then all the decorations that
go on the end. And I hope that my pieces that I make will be strong enough to be able to hold up
to all that. So we'll find out. I guess first I need to make some 3D parts. First thing I did was
load up Blender, it's a very powerful 3D program. You delete the starting block like always. Then
I got to change the mode to allow for object creation. It's, uh… That's up here. Oh yeah also
I need to adjust the size of the grid because it starts in meters.
I want centimeters, because
I'm not building something the size of a house. Now I can just add a mesh. What I want is a
cylinder. Next I go to the Edit Mode, because I plan on making the PVC pipe first. I know
the size that I want and it can help with understanding the size of the other parts that
I need to make. I just need to find how I see the size of the cylinder, because that was
buried like in an odd place kind of hidden. You know it took a moment but then I remembered
exactly what it was that I needed to do when I wanted to work with Blender. Tinkercad
is a free to use browser-based 3D program and in a short amount of time I was
working on my second variation of the parts. Bringing in basic shapes easily adjusting the
size by clicking the white control nodes and then typing in an exact number of what I want in
millimeters.
Easily grouping objects together to make a more complex shape and I can even make a
shape into a hole which then removes that hole shape from the grouped object. I made panel lines by
creating the shape that I wanted ,duplicating the main object, reducing the size a little, turning
that into a hole, positioning my new cutout, changing the cutout into a hole, and then
grouping it with the part I want. Panel lines! Okay it's still kind of complicated. Tinkercad
has a learning curve as well but it's nowhere near the amount of frustration and pain or maybe
I should say it has nowhere near the features that Blender does. But I can export a shape and
save it to my computer and then bring it into a slicer program to prepare the files that I created
to be printed on my 3D printer. And a couple of hours later I have the part I made using a free
browser-based CAD program.
I even printed some of my earlier versions even though I didn't really
need them. Since I really liked model kits as a kid, and honestly I still do, I made this one a lot
like a model kit with parts that fit together. And I printed the inner part from a translucent
resin so it can glow with a flashlight. And then I ran into an issue that I didn't really know
that I would have the parts didn't fit correctly. This piece is overall just too small I
was kind of thinking that might happen when I was doing into the computer I was
looking at going well mathematically this should work but I think overall this is
a little too small.
So I can increase this. Not that hard. What do you want to call
it there's there's elements of printing that are getting it to where the the near zero
tolerances that I built into it aren't working. There's a huge shock, again, not a big deal. I can
get around that. But for proof of concept I think this is going to be just fine. I mean this
will be painted it'll be PVC pipe in the way. That's pretty much getting me what I want. So
I'm going to need to redesign most of the parts. Oh I should see if it works with PVC pipe.
It is so close to fitting but just doesn't.
All right what if uh… The other end
has a bevel sanded into it. The part still doesn't go all the way onto the
pipe. This looks like it could be bigger. Oh that's looking fine. That's looking… It also really reminds me of the top of the
Thumper from the 1984 David Lynch version of Dune. But, um, all right. Overall I'm okay with this.
If I had to go to a con tomorrow, I could force this to work and I'd be fine, but I don't. So I'm
gonna go back and I'm gonna remake a few parts. And I'm gonna reset the
printer and get printing again. And see if I can't get parts that just
work the way they should.
Because that's always the goal right? So let's do that. While
the second round was printing I checked out the flashlight. Now I'm really sure that they are
flashlights that they use in the show. There's a character poster of one of the main Minutemen and
if you look at the top of their Time Baton hanging off of their belt, it's got the red button. It's the
red button that I've seen on so many flashlights . So I'm pretty sure it's just a flashlight
base so I have no problem using this and not completely 3D printing everything. But something
I noticed with this the the end where the light goes, it was threaded which I thought was
awesome. I could take it off, but as I did that, the wires that were inside totally got shredded.
But that's kind of okay.
I'm excited that I found wires inside the flashlight. That's going to make
it easier to solder a connection down a length of PVC, because I want the LEDs as close to the
3D printed part as I can get. But now I need to… I probably should take the batteries out. Oh they are out good. Now what I need to do is see if
I can't get into the rest of this to get the LEDs out, because this piece is
too big for every piece of the baton. Good. There it is. Okay, okay, okay. Awesome lens refractor,
everything else, the LEDs are freaking huge. Well not the LEDs, but the circuit board
that they're mounted to.
You see it's wider than any part of the Time Baton. Okay so I'm
concerned about the size of the circuit board because this is larger than any piece I want
to use on the baton. The the diameter of it. I was thought this was going to be smaller. And of
course there's the problem of these super bright LEDs. This is like a 600 lumen flashlight, does
produce a lot of heat, and this entire bell housing that I don't want to use is the heat sink.
So
what I might need to do is get another flashlight. I check the size of the led again
versus the size of the one-inch PVC pipe. Now I could grind the board down to fit, maybe. But
it's still gonna get too hot. And it occurred to me that there's one thing I hadn't checked yet
and that was the voltage of the broken wires. I don't know why I didn't
think about doing this before. You see the flashlight holds six double a
batteries and each one is one and a half volts. So the output of all the batteries is nine volts. But what about the output wires? Dude that's
only five volt. I mean it's not even five volt.
I don't have to use this LED. I don't have to use the hot LED. I have plenty of led strips that
all run off of 5 volt and generate no heat. Yeah! Are the LEDs going to be bright enough
to make the end of the time stick glow? Basically, yes it is. And right now I only
have a couple of the LEDs under each piece. So I think this is going to work. And it'll run
all day. Okay, I've got my lighting worked out and I think the print's almost done for the parts.
So let's make sure everything fits together. All right so the gray ones were my
first try.
These are the ones that it pretty much works but they're a tiny bit
off. So now I've got the black set. This is just the whole second attempt. Actually all of
these are completely remodeled. They didn't necessarily need to be I could have just increased
their size a little bit in the slicer, but I went ahead and made sure that I was getting sizes that
I knew that I was getting for repeatability right. So most of these are maybe half a
millimeter maybe three quarters of a millimeter bigger to try and accommodate
real world things so that they actually fit. Yeah and that's oh look at that all the way that's
what I wanted. Oh that's actually a much better fit than I ever expected it to be. Okay, so then
this piece still fits inside and then the rods still fit on top. Sweet now everything fits
together except one ring. Okay. So this ring doesn't quite fit over this
ring. Which way do I want to adjust this? Which is funny because that was
the one part that did work here. That was the one part that
did work there.
All right. I can print a new one but I can also just grind
away at some of the material and make it fit. I check the fit as I go and I do my
best to not force the fit to happen. I forced it. Well I'm bummed I broke it. I'm not surprised
I broke it. I'm bummed that I broke it though. Now it's covered in spit all right. But
all the pieces do fit together now and the broken bit can still be glued in place.
But how does all this look with a flashlight? Yeah that looks fine. Now the the pipe is
lighting up. I'll have to paint the PVC pipe of course but um, cool. All right. So one of
the piece that I designed was the connector that'll connect the flashlight to the piece
of PVC. So this should fit. Oh yeah it does. Oh am I uh? That O-ring is great. Not
that I need the O-ring but… Yeah that's it. Bottomed
out where I wanted it. Okay. And the wires… It's kind of a tight fit but that fits, okay.
I think I've got all my pieces so what I need to
do is figure out how long of a piece of PVC I need and see if acetone will take the markings
off the flashlight. I can always repaint it. I'm going to sand this a little bit. This is pretty cool. Ah. Some of those points were like, I'm almost done.
No actually I got all the assembly to do still but I think I've got all the parts
made. That's really kind of cool. Ah sanding. Well it still goes really quick with the
resin prints. I look at the length of the batons on screen and it looks like it's about 13 inches
or 33 centimeters. And that should be about right. So I cut a length of PVC and check the look
of it.
It's one of those things that once again like I always do it looks too small. It doesn't
look like the white portion is long enough, like it needs to be a little bit longer, but no, I hold it
up against the reference image I have and I just kind of look at how long it is versus how they
use it in the show, and the fact that it needs to hang on someone's belt, and no that's that's about
right. All right, what I'll do first is I'm going to primer the PVC, but I'm not going to use
spray paint primer because it is PVC. That middle magic word, vinyl ,that V in
the PVC. I'm going to actually spray this with the automotive vinyl spray paint.
Get a
can of that and tell you about it in a second. So the brand doesn't matter. This happens to
be Dupli-Color, but it's not, this isn't a brand specific thing. Go to an auto body store and you
can get spray paint specifically made to spray paint the vinyl seats of older cars. I don't know
if they actually make vinyl seats in cars anymore. But people used to want to paint the inside so
this is what you would use to spray, respray your dashboard, or the vinyl seats, or parts
of your bumper.
This will adhere to vinyls and dry. So I'm going to use this as my primer on the
PVC. The polyvinyl chloride, whatever it is. I'm probably saying that wrong. But vinyl's the V
in PVC. So I'm going to use this as my primer and then I can use regular pants on top of it and
everything's going to dry just fine. Most spray paints dry on PVC. It's pretty good anyway, but this
is one of those projects that you know it would bite me in the rear and it wouldn't dry the way
I want it to so I'm going to go the extreme route. So in addition to spray painting the PVC pipe
black as a base coat, I also went ahead and painted over the logos on the flashlight, since
they weren't going to come off with a with acetone. Now what I did was I applied tape and only put
spray paint in certain areas.
So why'd I bother doing that? That way I didn't clog the grip up
with uh with paint. That's still just the clean anodized metal. And in case the paint had any kind
of different look from the anodized metal I made sure to tape it off in places that were already
panel lines or already had a point of separation. Look it's black, and it was black, and
I painted it black, and it's still black. All right I'm going to
start gluing pieces together. The paint adds a little to the
diameter of the pipe but it still fits. A little bit of thin CA glue
inside to glue the pieces together. I can also stick on the adapter
that'll hold on the glow end. So nice. I should have just done that to begin with. There we are. Yeah. And that comes off.
Yeah, and maybe just a little bit more. There we go. Before I glue the flashlight in place, I removed
the broken wires and soldered in some longer wire. Now these are just strands from a CAT 5 network
cable because CAT 5 has eight of these little wires inside of it. And check the connections, we're good.
And make it long enough to fish through the PVC. And super glued the cap to the glow end base. Okay
all right honestly this part was kind of a mistake. I should have pre-painted all the parts while they
were still separate but I didn't. Now I have a lot of taping and covering of the parts that I don't
want to be sprayed with dark silver spray paint. A little while later and all the
3D printed parts have been painted dark silver.
I did let the paint get a
good amount of time to set up, because I'm immediately going to cover it up with tape
again and that way I can spray the PVC pipe brown. So what I did was I sprayed the black down almost
uniformly with a warm brown color and while it was still wet I came along with a darker like espresso
color, espresso bean I think it was called. And I did kind of a splotchy back and forth with that
that wasn't really perfect. Then it went over once again with the same light warm brown color,
very lightly at a greater distance just to get kind of a speckled mottled, not perfect yet
uniformly not perfect brown color. Anyway it's kind of what I wanted because it's supposed to be
sort of wood-ish. At least it's got, it has a wood finish to the look in the prop as well as they
make the sounds of sticks when they hit the ground.
I remove the tape very quickly after painting so
I don't want the tape sticking to anything and causing problems with the paint. It's going to take
a little bit for this brown paint to really set up and dry. I used a different brand it takes a lot
longer to set up so I'm just going to let this be for a while and then I'm going to weather it with
shoe polish and we can glue the thing back on the end. The next day I used black shoe polish to help
weather the dark silver and the upper part of the grip. I just put on a ton of shoe polish with a
paint brush and then wiped it off the higher areas. It'll dry a lighter color than it looks
right now but I do like the way it looks. I also brushed and smeared black shoe polish all
over the brown paint. I tried brown shoe polish at first but it was nearly impossible to see because
my spray paint it was pretty much the exactly the same shade of brown. And I decided to cover the
glow end as well I thought that if the shoe polish ran into the cracks between the layers it might
look good.
And you know it did but the shoe polish almost made the glowing part too dark. I ended
up wiping most of it off with lacquer thinner. Okay so my plan was to use these lights.
They've got the right voltage. They'll work with the flashlight that I've installed in
the base. But as I look at them, they're not… I mean they work. They'll do the job it makes them
makes it glow, but I wasn't convinced this was the right way to go. Obviously the the super bright,
that was fantastic, but it's just going to cook it so I don't want to use something that hot.
I found something different, something that I hadn't really seen before in LED lights. And that
is a continuous strip. They're so tiny that each segment has five little LEDs on it fused directly
to the flexible strip.
Well let's plug one in. The end result is way better. These are also a
warm white which is a much better choice for this particular project as opposed to the cool
white. And this seems to do a whole lot better for what I want. And what I was looking at was and if
I'm very careful… Now I don't overly stress it… And now it's starting to get
bright enough on the two sides. So if I was to cut this up, because you can
at every one of these little black lines that's a point where I can cut the strip,
so I can cut it down to just that little 12 millimeter 13 millimeter wide section and
light up just that little section if I want to. Now my plan is to take a small rod of clear
plastic and stick sections of led strip to it, and then re-solder the connections with CAT 5 wire.
I'm
going to need to make little jumper connections to get all the parts connected. I just use a small
amount of wire and about 14 sections of LED strip. Yeah that's great. Back side too, yep everything. Awesome sauce. And it all
fits inside the half inch hole that I put into the glow rod end piece. This small amount of LEDs
will probably run all day on those six batteries. Remove the testing wire and connect my
custom LED bulb to the end of my Time Baton. Now wrap some tape for the for the sake of
blocking the light. Basically if there's anything, I don't want anything to leak out… light to leak
you know because light leaks right because it's a fluid. Um, I don't want any light to leak out in
areas that I don't want to illuminate and glow. So let me just do that around the bottom. I can
slip the glow rods over the LEDs and put the cage over the glow rods.
Yeah there we go, okay. Yeah all
right, all right. Okay what I need to do is actually… How well does this one work? Well that one
works really well. Okay so I'll use that one. A few drops of super glue at the
corners will hold the glow rods in place. And the cage will glue right to the cage base
over the glow rods. I did my best to keep the four strips of the LEDs facing the openings of the cage,
but it glows so well that it's really kind of hard to tell if I got it exactly right or not. The last
thing I'm going to do is add the tiniest amount of bright silver dry brushing. Just a touch to show
off panel lines. And to catch the tops of the rings. All the materials I used in this video I
ordered online I put a list in the description. Okay I understand that this isn't the single most
exciting MCU device ever. It really isn't it's. It's a baton. But um I like time travel
stories and I like time travel devices. And I think that this thing is really kind of neat
and I love the fact that in the show it's been kind of reduced to a kit that a security card wears.
Right? The Minuteman a little more than security guards but you know, it's a joke.
Also I'm really
happy because this is the first time I think that I've made a 3D printed prop completely from
scratch. This is the first time where I actually went in and made the models by hand in order to
do the 3D printing. I don't think I've done that before, certainly not on the channel. But I don't
think I've done that before specifically at all. And um, all right it was a lot of fun I really
enjoyed it. Uh now that I've got a hold of it and I can actually see it in three dimensions, um
I could totally make this out of foam. Absolutely. It's just rings of foam around the foam around
the flashlight with the PVC pipe there's more foam around here and something else I could
put in to to make it glow or just make a 3D printed part to make the glow so it's right.
You know totally doable, but um I had fun 3D printing one.
Is there a drawback
to it? Yeah they're kind of fragile. Unlike a foam prop if this happens to get
dropped the end's probably going to shatter. But you know, trade-offs. So I still have one and
I'm really happy with it. Now if you want to make a Time Baton for yourself, well you can. I'm going
to share my STL files and OBJ files. What I'm going to do is I'm going to load them up on my Patreon.
So if you're a member of my Patreon site you can download those for free. And if you're not and you
don't want to be that's okay, I'm also going to take the same files and put them on my Etsy store.
I'm going to maintain that my patterns that you use for cutting up foam are going to remain free,
but this particular time, I'm gonna… particular time… I'm gonna do a bit of an experiment and put these
up in a different place and see if that works out. And I appreciate it if you get a hold of those
because honestly that's supporting my channel. And I really do appreciate all the
support that I do get from the channel. So if you do want to make one of your own whether
you make it out of foam or you 3D print one or you find some other interesting way to do it
please share a picture with me I would love to see how you make a Time Baton or any of the TVA
gear.
Because I know there's going to be lots of different ways you can make a time manipulation
device from the TVA, but this is how Odin Makes. I had one other piece that I had designed
this is the first time I've actually pulled it off and got, the got to… Let's not
say pulled it off. So like a lot of flashlights this one also has a strobe mode, you know
a lot of flashlights just kind of blink? But this one's you hold the button and it's
like crazy fast. I don't… is that? Does that meet health and safety standards? This seems like
it's way too fast of a strobe. Hold still variant. I want to thank David Theobald III, Mickierat, and all of my Patreon supporters. My Patreon support is the number
one thing that makes this show possible. If you liked the video, don't forget to
subscribe.
Have an idea for something for me to make? Please leave a comment below. And if you make
any of these projects, you can send me a picture..
