Hey guys, remember this?
Many moons ago I had a bash at wax carving a Thor’s Hammer pendant.
It was big and clunky. My castings were terrible, but I achieved something in the end.
Well the other day I received this gorgeous silver pendant, free of charge, from a company
specialising in Viking jewellery and wow, just look at it. The detail is incredible.
Obviously in sending me something for free, these guys were hoping I’d promote them a little
and in this case I really don’t mind. Looking at their website, it becomes obvious that these guys
sell some amazing items. There’s some real talent gone into these and I wish them
nothing but good luck. I even managed to wangle a generous discount code for you guys
if you like anything you see, but more about that later.
My Thor’s Hammer was very basic and my wax carving hasn’t really improved,
but my CAD skills have come on a little. So I decided to have a go at designing another.
I wanted to work from authentic, historical dimensions and I found this very helpful website.
I borrowed a screenshot and placed this in the background of Fusion 360,
so I could get a reasonably accurate online.
It obviously wouldn’t be fair to copy the excellent piece that was sent to me,
and the historical pieces are obviously less decorative, so I wanted to do my own thing.
Fusion’s great for producing the basic structure, but for sculpting work, I turned to ZBrush.
It’s not free, but it’s amazingly good, though Blender is an excellent free alternative.
I genuinely had no idea what I was doing. I’ve deliberately edited out a lot of this footage
as I was frequently changing my mind and altering direction. I just knew I wanted something that
was a little bit Viking and a little bit me. I also knew that as I’d gone with authentic
dimensions, my piece would be much smaller than the one I’d been sent. But this also meant I
didn’t have to do as much detail work. It’s pointless getting older if you don’t get smarter.
Eventually I reached a point where I was happy with the design
and I added a sprue for convenience.
I printed this on my Phrozen Sonic 4K and instantly noticed how small it was.
Don’t get me wrong, I knew the dimensions, but somehow I was still surprised.
But the Sonic had done a great job. Again, I’m still testing this castable resin,
so one print was UV cured for roughly 10 minutes per side.
These look pretty good.
I was quite taken with these castings and decided to take a gamble. Rather than polish
them with my Foredom, I placed them both in my tumbler for an hour to see what would happen.
Well that paid off. I’m quite pleased with these.
The detail pops thanks to the darker recessed areas and the bronze looks warm in contrast.
It’s nice to think this is the actual size that was worn by the Vikings,
unlike my previous attempt. As is my normal approach now,
I’ll be making this STL file available to my Patrons as a thank you for their support.
Unfortunately though, I can’t give them access to this one…
It’s a monster compared to mine and the quality difference is obvious.
There’s some serious skill here that I’ll probably never be able to come close to,
but if you fancy something like this, you know where to go.
And I’ve managed to wangle a 20% discount for you guys. Check out the description for details.
So there we go guys, my second attempt at Thor’s Hammer.
I hope you enjoyed this one, take care and thanks for watching.