A few years ago, right after the debut of the first Guardians of the Galaxy film, I banged together a simple 3D model for Star Lord’s earpiece in Sketchup, before I started figuring out 3d Studio Max. It did the job well enough, and beat having to wear a stuffy, hot helmet all the time at conventions. I posted it up as a product on our Shapeways page at the time, and in the three years since listing it has done pretty well. I made a post to go with the model, explaining the basics of assembly and providing a list of parts.
Following the release of Guardians of the Galaxy 2, I had an upswing in people looking to get one of these, so I recently sat down and spent a bit of time redesigning the model to be friendlier to assemble. The earlier model left very little ‘wiggle room’ when it came to interior space, and some of the outer part tolerances were pretty thin. I remodeled the interior cavity of the earpiece to be easier to print, fixed some terrible geometry that was caused by trying to work in Sketchup, and re-did the hatch design to fit on the back a bit more simply.
The end result is a “V2” earpiece that comes together nicer than the old model, but still uses all the same electronic components in the same fashion. Because people kept asking for it, I put a quick mold together and started producing some copies in cold cast aluminum. This makes earpieces that can be polished with steel wool and sandpaper to get a realistic-looking brushed aluminum finish that is really satisfying.
Now, my concessions: I know that the actual earpiece might not be this bright silver. Better images of the part from the second movie has suggested it’s a darker metallic pewter with silver highlights. Thankfully, these things take paint easily, so if you really wanted to be a perfectionist (or just to weather it with some black washes) you could absolutely do so.
