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Barad Dur XBox

 We're all fans of Tolkien here, of course. A little while ago, The Kid, who has been watching the LotR movies again, wondered if I could print a case for his XBox model X, already tower-like, which looked like Barad Dur. I figured there was only one way to really find out, and as it happens, the answer is yes.

There are several models of Tolkien-flavored architecture out there, so I started by looking at those. After considering and rejecting Orthanc instead, I came back to Sauron's dark tower. Doing the whole thing wouldn't work; to fit the XBox, I'd have to scale it up to the size of a large table, and we just don't have the room. However, just cutting it down to the top of the tower would work just fine. Kaiji's design on Printables already had the top section of the tower broken out, so that's what I went with. If you find yourself doing this, scaling up the tower part by a factor of 7.66 gets it big enough (the XBox is 6 by 6 by 12 inches), though you'll need to edit the sized up model to cut out some corners higher up. And, of course, that had to be chopped up into a total of eleven pieces so I could print them out at that scale on my Ender 3.

I went with an 0.8mm nozzle instead of my usual 0.4, but it took between 12 and 22 hours per part to print out. Assembled (with a lot of hot glue and cyanoacrylate) and affixed to a wooden base for stability, the whole thing came out to 39 inches tall.

Knowing it would be up against a wall, I sliced off the back of the model to save time and material. The front (or at least the first foot of the front) had to be removable because it needed to allow access to the DVD drive. For that, I drilled two small, shallow holes in the front piece for button magnets and drilled two steel screws in the back for them to stick to.

 

From there, I had to make a decision about painting. Barad Dur means dark fortress. Since I used black filament, I could have stopped right there. But there were a few more detailed descriptions, describing the structure as a "mountain of iron," and the top of the structure as an iron crown. So I hauled out the Modern Masters iron paint; paint with actual iron powder in it, giving the piece a realistic (because it's real) dark gray iron finish. And to underline that it's actually iron, I splattered it with their reagent which turns the iron to rust.

The eye is an other part of the Kaiji design, scaled up and printed with transparent resin. I cut some colored light filters to suitable shapes and stuck them on the back, then stuck a coil of LED lights on to that, finally hot-gluing the whole thing to the crown.

Then it was a simple matter of installation. The Xbox fit very neatly in the back, the front cover is cut away enough to reveal the power light, and the LED string for the eye plugs into a spare USB port in the back of the Xbox. Lots of pieces, but came together pretty well.

















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