Time for the quarterbadges. Here’s a nice big picture I took last year of the Sultana’s quarterbadge.
Initially, I thought I would model this in Fusion 360’s T-Spline modeling area. However, that proved to be beyond my abilities with the software, and ultimately, not necessary at the scale at which I’m working. The quarterbadge form pushes my 3D printer to its limits. In the end, the best approach was not to try to model the quarterbadge form perfectly, but to arrive at a shape that would create the best badge based on the limited ways the 3D printer would produce each layer.
I started simply by creating a single layer object to establish the general outline of the shape. From there, I gradually built up each form of the badge. The picture below shows the evolution of the design.
The following pictures show my final 3D design and the corresponding 3D printed part. The mechanical pencil is included for scale.
When I designed the bulkheads for the model, I intentionally made sure that there would be empty space inside the hull at the location of the quarterbadges. In fact, if you go back to my post of 20 March, you can see on the last picture that I painted that area white before planking over it. All of that was for the purpose of having the interior visible through the quarterbadge windows.
I carefully broke through the planking and exposed the cavity. My design wasn’t perfect, and some bulkhead wood also had to be filed back a bit. The cavity was given an extra coat of white paint. (The walls of the Sultana’s cabin are painted white.)
The quarterbadge pieces were painted yellow and white, and cellophane was glued to the windows as glazing. Then the quarterbadges were glued into place.
