Harry Potter Wands - Custom set of mix & match pieces - Feedback Wanted

[curious aardvark]

Thus began a project that took at least 3 years off our lives.



Behind the Scenes:


The planning for this party was insane! It took over 4 months of inventing, designing, purchasing, assembling, experimenting, and decorating.




My amazing pastry chef sister designed and made the dessert. You should definitely check out her culinary creations on her YouTube channel, Brittnee Kay Bakes




My incredibly talented and creative boyfriend made countless custom illustrations for the potions book, potions ingredient bottles, wand core displays, and other decorations. He researched and found hundreds of bottles for all the potion ingredients. He created all the potable potions recipes from scratch, plus wrote the potions text book. Somehow he also found time to create all the necessary items for the House Cup tournament which was a last minute addition.




I spent most of my time designing, engineering, prototyping, re-engineering, manufacturing, and assembling the magic cauldron stands. I had to dive deep into the world of pop-up craft in order to figure out how to make a paper owl spread out of an invitation to deliver a letter. I spent weeks inventing a modular wand system, then even more weeks designing and 3D printing all the many wand parts.

Out of all that, the expanding owl is probably the toughest thing to pull off.

The rest I could do, but yeah, that would take some research :-)

But, yep still bloody impressed :-)

As far as the dowels go, you could simply have printed them with the wood filaments.
That would give you better consistency.
I tend to slightly flatten one side of a long thin cylinder for ease of printing lying down. Makes it stronger, quicker to print and for 99% of applications the flattened side just makes no difference
It would also have given you a way to simply align the parts of the wands.

The magnetic switch for the self stirring cauldrons is also pretty neat.

And the deserts - damn that's cool !