I made this minimalist Death Star* for my husband, who decided he wants to hang it on his whiteboard at work – which obviously means it needs a hanger. Good thing I have a laser, right? Oh, but since I do have a laser, why make a plain hanger when you could put the Imperial Seal on it – no! better yet, why not make the entire thing a Star Destroyer, can you just make it look kind of like this?
1/8" Woodpeckers bb ply. I used boxes.py to generate an L-bracket in the size I wanted, then brought the SVG into Illustrator and kept the finger joints untouched while I turned it into a spaceship.
The L-bracket design was too wobbly, especially with the weight of the layers on top and the Death Star below, so I added a second short leg to brace against the front of the whiteboard. Then I decided that the single base layer didn’t look proportional with all of the layering on top, plus realized that if I added another base layer on top of the one with the joins I could gain a little more design room. There are six layers, and to keep things sorted and easy to assemble I scored each one with details plus the center line and the outline of the next layer. I left off the top vertical bit in the name of flat design, already having a ton of layers, and not being sure how I wanted to do it…but I have since figured it out and may have to build one just to see how it looks.
This was such a fun little project that I mostly don’t even mind that I am pretty sure the top edge of his whiteboard is above eye level for most people, meaning that I should have built out the bottom of the Star Destroyer instead of the top. Next iteration, I guess.
*Minimalist Death Star is super super cool but be prepared for it to be sort of fiddly to glue together.
