Cursed Cruise Coins

This project began when our family booked a Disney Cruise. (Our first Disney Cruise ever.) Soon after I learned about "Fish Extenders" and "Pixie Dust."

Fish Extenders are bags you hang on the fish (or other animal) shapes outside your stateroom door. Fish Extender groups are organized gift exchanges using the fish extenders. (You sign up to a list and the leader of the group organizes who gives gifts to whom.)

Pixie Dusting is the same - but unorganized. (You put gifts in whatever bags you choose and you don't expect any gifts back.) I decided that I preferred Pixie Dusting to FE exchanges. But I needed to choose Pixie Dust gifts. The best Pixie Dust gifts are probably items that are fun for everyone but don't take up much luggage space.

I also planned on dressing in a costume for "Pirate Night" (another Disney Cruise Line tradition.) So I thought that a fun Pixie Dust idea would be making and gifting cursed medallions (like you see in Pirates of the Caribbean - The Curse of the Black Pearl) but customized to our cruise.

My plan is super simple: design both sides of a "cursed medallion" and 3d print the coins with Gold Silk PLA.

1. Computer
2. Internet reference images
3. Vector graphic editing program (Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator, or Affinity Designer)
4. 3D modeling program (Blender)
5. 3d slicer program (Cura or other)
6. 3d printer
7. Gold silk PLA filament
8. Acrylic paint & water
9. Paintbrush
10. Paper towel/rags

Let's begin by defining the basic requirements for a successful result:

1. The medallion needs to be the same size, general color, and thickness as the medallions in the movie,
2. it needs to have a skull on it,
3. and it needs a few flourishes and symbols in similar locations to the movie prop. (I don't know the meaning of the original symbols though so I'm going to choose my own.)

It doesn't matter what software is your preference as long as it allows you to design vector shapes. I have Affinity Designer 2 so I used that. The black shapes are going to be the thickest. The lighter grey areas are the thinnest. So the flourishes, text, and symbols will be raised on both sides and the edge of the "coin" is a thin ridge. You can import reference images and trace over the shapes to get a starting point.

Most of the symbols I chose can be reversed without losing meaning. But the DCL logo can't be mirrored. So the bottom 4 symbols are flipped on one side. This hopefully also increases strength. (The flourishes & dividing lines, the butterfly, beetle, lion, and fish will be solid all the way through the coin.)

I chose the symbols I did because butterflies, fish, lions, and beetles are the animals outside staterooms on the Disney Treasure (the ship we're going to board.) The lamp was chosen because Jasmine, Aladdin, Carpet, and the lamp are the subjects of the statue in the Grand Hall of the Disney Treasure. The "swishes" are the swishes behind the Mickey Mouse head in the DCL (Disney Cruise Line) logo (the unsimplified DCL logo turned out to be too intricate for 3d printing at this size.) Finally, the Mickey Mouse head seemed to fit at the top.

I designed the cartoony skull after JR, (Jolly Roger) the CG host of the "Pirate’s Rockin’ Parlay Party." I also modified the post ends between each flourish so they ended in "hidden Mickeys" instead of knobs. The word "Treasure" is from the design on the back and side of the ship and official press media. "Treasure Island-Ears" is the name the Facebook group for our particular group gave itself.

Once you have a design that you like, convert all text to curves and all lines to outlines. (So that everything you want printed is a closed shape.) Then export the design layer-by-layer to SVG format. My design had a "thinnest" layer, a "background" layer, a "ring and dashes" layer, and two different "designs" layers. We're using SVG because it's a format our design program can export and Blender can import.

Open the latest free version of Blender from Blender.org and make sure its units are set to metric (mm) because that's what your 3d printer and slicer use. Remove whatever starting objects (default cube, camera, and point light) are in your project and then import all your SVG files.

The resulting objects are "curve" types. You need to convert the objects to meshes. Once you have, one by one select your layers and enter Edit mode. Select all the faces and Extrude them to your desired thickness. I knew that I wanted my coin to be around 50mm in diameter and less than 4mm thick. I resized all the objects so the coin ended up 47.6mm in diameter. I knew that my 3d printer was going to be set to print .2mm layer heights, so I made the thinnest layer 1.2mm thick, the next layer 2.8mm thick, and the designs 3.6mm thick. (Each of the thinner layers are moved upward in the Z axis to rest at the midpoint.)

Choose one of your objects and, using the Boolean modifier, combine it with all the rest of the objects. Make sure that result is manifold (a closed object that if it where hollow would be water tight.) If you put your objects in the Outliner in a common collection, you can merge all your objects with a single Boolean modifier.

Finally, export your object as an STL file. (A format that Blender can export and slicers can import.) For my design, I made sure that the "selection only," "scene unit," and "apply modifiers" checkboxes were checked and scale was set to "1000."

All of these steps can be done more quickly and precisely if you know Blender's multitude of keyboard shortcuts. (You actually only need a few basic ones and the energy to Google the next one that you don't know yet.)

1. [G] tells Blender you want to move the active object(s)
2. [S] is for scaling the active object(s)
3. [R] is for rotating the active object(s)
4. [X], [Y], or [Z] restricts the transformation to a specific axis
5. ([Shift]+[X], [Shift]+[Y], or [Shift]+[Z] restricts the transformation to the 2 axes apart from the one specified)
6. When you're transforming (an) object(s), typing numbers will transform by that amount in the default unit
7. [A] selects all (in Object mode: this is all objects; in Edit mode it's all components in the selected object)
8. Switch between Interaction modes with [Tab] (for these objects, it'll likely switch you between Object and Edit modes)
9. In Edit mode, you can chose a selection mode: Vertex, Edge, or Face with [1], [2], or [3]
10. [E] extrudes components in Edit mode (above, we're extruding faces so we need to be in Face selection mode)

If you're used to modeling in Blender, I know this is a tiny list and is missing your favorites you use 500 times a day. I tried limiting the list to the ones that would be useful to the 3 operations we're executing for this particular project.

Next I opened Sovol Cura (a flavor of the Cura slicer for my particular printer) and opened the STL from Blender. I told Cura to fill the printed object with 100% infill and, because the design is intricate enough that there won't be significant bridging, I told it to print without any bed adhesion or support material.

Once I confirmed the print project worked (I tried it upside down to figure out which resulted in more legible text) I multiplied the coin in Cura and turned on "print objects one at a time" so I could print 12 coins at once without any stringing between them.

After the coins were printed, they looked too shiny and new. So I took water, blue acrylic paint, brown acrylic paint, and black acrylic paint and experimented with different mixes for the next step: dip the coins in the watered-down paint or brush the paint onto the coins and then dab them dry with the paper towel or rag. "Worry" the coins between your fingers if they look too dark. This should make the coins look more realistic. (Like they've collected dirt and tarnish over the years but have also worn shiny places through handling.)

Now I have cursed pirate medallions that I'm going to hand out during Pirate Night and slip into fish extenders and I just need to figure out the rest of my costume!

I made some more items that go with my costume. But all of my projects seem too simple for Instructables. (If I can fully explain them in a single sentence - will an Instructable be useful or interesting to *anyone?*)

I designed and printed a gold chain, belt buckles, a compass box, and modified a Treasure Planet key. Which of these should have Instructables?