A peek behind the curtain: Today, I want to share some of what goes on behind the scenes when we prepare a new product like the Andor Style Imperial Rank badges, which we are just about to launch

(Image for reference):

Of course, as always, the first step is research gathering, design & prototyping, which we will cover in another post. Still, there are alot of things extra we undertake to bring you all the best possible props no matter how small during our development & anywhere that is hidden to the user we can potentially take the excellent work made by the original prop teams and consider what we can add under the hood so to speak so that the item is as near identical to what we see on screen but perhaps has some hidden optimization for you the end user and for our manufacturing team.

We ask some key questions of ourselves:

- Is it Accurate?

- How repeatable is it?

- Is the Process Labour Efficient?

One thing I have always loved bringing to the costume & cosplay community is the mindset of an engineer, and one thing that can help with those three topics above is Jig making!

For these badges particularly the 6x2 badge there are 12 lenses, and each lense requires cutting on both sides before it can be bonded to the base plate, meaning thats 24 cut operations, which by hand with a stanley cutter alone would be incredibly time consuming but also we designed in 1.5mm of protrusion so it could locate into the base plate, meaning every single badge is repeatible & perfectly aligned, it also means we could build stock for all the variants and store the lenses to be added after and we can leaverage the power or batch production as somone making badge bases for 6 hours is more efficient than making them one by one.

Our Jig is 3D printed and running as we speak on our H2D to prototype before our kit of stock parts arrives.

Is this side of prop making enjoyable to you? We have a few others in mind. Comment below which you'd like to see next?

- Research Gathering & Image Ingesting

- Reverse Engineering For Accuracy with SolidWorks

- Costing.