Making Pidge’s Bayard
After getting hooked on Voltron, I wanted to make myself a bayard, and found this excellent light up model on Thingiverse, which I printed out and assembled, then painted. Afterward I also made Keith’s bayard, and while both looked pretty good, I wasn’t quite satisfied with the results so I decided to redesign the bayards from scratch myself. For Pidge’s bayard, the end result looks fairly similar but with some changes to how design is laid out. While I was at it I also printed the blade in a translucent green rather than the clear that I used the first time, so the blade is always green, rather than only when lit up.

My main issue with the Thingiverse model is that it is comprised of only three pieces, two halves for the main body, and a piece for the blade, This works well for printing, but means that each part prints in one solid color and has to be painted afterwards. This might be fine for someone that can paint semi competently (not me). Instead I separated every color section into it’s own component, printed them all in their corresponding colors, then assembled them together. This way I avoided the paint job, plus I didn’t need to worry about chipping the paint, which is a nice bonus to the durability of the colors

I am a great fan of things that light up or move. Luckily lighting things up is a relatively simple task. The electronics are quite simple, and are housed completely within the body of the bayard. I used a standard 5V green LED strip powered by a rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery. The battery has a voltage of about 3.7V, so the LED strip doesn’t actually get the full 5V, but there isn’t a noticeable difference of brightness, so it works quite well. The battery gets recharged through a port, originally designed into the side, for a USB cable. It works quite nicely, but the blade overhangs a bit over it in its first location so it’s a bit tight to plug the cable in. I moved the port to the back of the handle for later models, but I’m working to update the model to USB C, to allow for a smaller profile plug overall.