Building it, one stage at a time.

Lay every part out in the arrangement the exploded view shows. Confirm you have all of them — a default build is 30 named meshes, and the ones people discover missing at stage 06 are the small interior pucks.

Then dry-fit the whole thing with tape. Every joint is interference by construction, so expect to open most of them. Sand the male face, never the female one: you can always take more off a spigot, but a bore you have opened too far is a shim job forever.

• Check the shell's inner sealing face for support scars. This is the surface the bead beds onto, and a ridge there means a rocking seal you will never chase out later.
• Look at the visor aperture edge for layer stepping — it is the most visible edge on the finished piece and the hardest to fix after paint.
• Snap the thin parts now rather than at stage 07. The el_wire runs and the crest antenna are the fragile ones.

SLS PA12 arrives matt and slightly porous — bead-blast it, then filler-prime for anything above a satin finish. FDM parts want the layer lines sanded hard; the shell's 2.6 mm wall gives you plenty of material to do it with, which is one of the reasons the wall is that thick.

Work up through 220, 400 and 800 grit. The armour seam grooves and the panel crowns are the design's signature — a sanding block that bridges them will flatten the read, so cut those with the grain of the groove and finish them by hand.

Shell first, fully finished, before anything is bonded to it. Almost everything in the later stages either covers paintable surface or blocks access to it.

A Shader Lab spec code is a colour and finish reference, not a printing instruction. It swaps a material and never geometry, and only shell_polymer, bronze and cartridge_alloy accept one. Order PM1-HEXPLATE-85 and no hex plates appear in your STL — you get a colour and a sheen.

• Shell — #dcd6c9 at roughness 0.58. Read that as satin.
• Galea bronze — #9c7c46 at roughness 0.34. Semi-gloss.
• Canister alloy — #8b9298 at roughness 0.33.

Roughness is a PBR parameter, not a gloss unit. Match it on a spray-out card under the light the piece will actually be seen in — a screen will lie to you about both value and sheen.

This goes in early for one reason: you can still reach the aperture from inside the shell. Once the oronasal cup is in at stage 06, you cannot.

Cut the lens from 2.2 mm polycarbonate to the rounded-hexagon aperture — half-extents 56.5 × 29.2 mm, flat top and bottom, pointed at the temples. Trace it from the printed shell rather than from the mesh; your shell is the part that has to be matched, and it has your paint on it now.

That aperture edge curves in three dimensions, so a flat cut will not seat. Heat-form it over the shell itself or over a buck taken from it. Go slow and even — polycarbonate that is overheated locally will haze, and a hazed visor is a new piece of sheet.

Gasket into the aperture first, lens into the gasket second, both worked from behind. If you are using 4.8 mm cord instead of the printed gasket, cut it long, seat it around the full perimeter, and butt the ends at the bottom centreline where the join reads least.

Seven parts, built outward from the shell in the reverse of the direction air would travel. Working this way means each part registers against one already fixed, and the grille — the only piece with a visible outer face — lands last and can be clocked to sit square.

• canister_collar — onto the chin. This one sets the axis for all six that follow, so take your time squaring it.
• pzt_blower_stack
• uvc_reactor_housing — lathed at 8 segments. Those flats are design, not faceting artefacts; do not sand them round.
• pzt_capsid_ring
• filter_cartridge
• pzt_coalescer
• intake_grille — the cap, and the visible one.

Epoxy rather than CA here. The stack is the piece most likely to be knocked, it cantilevers off the chin, and a cyanoacrylate joint at that lever arm is a repair waiting to happen.

Also fit uv_status_band now if your set includes it. It is a status indicator, not a window — there is nothing behind it to see, by design.

Cup before bead, always. The oronasal_cup is the thinnest structural part in the set at a 1.8 mm wall, and it needs to be positioned against the shell's inner surface while you still have clear access to both.

Then the seal bead — an 8.4 mm section tube following the 548 mm rim path. This part exists to be soft. If you printed it rigid, treat the print as a pattern: pull a silicone mould from it and cast the real one, or face it with closed-cell foam. A rigid bead against a face is the difference between a piece you wear for an evening and one you take off after ten minutes.

The pzt_seal_sensor pucks go in last, seated into the bead at their modelled positions. They are sculpt — solid ceramic-look parts with no cavity, no electrode and no wire route.

Only if your tier includes it. The armour layer is generated in place on the shell surface — it does not move in the exploded view because it never separates from the shell in the design. If your slicer handed you the plates as loose objects, they must go back to their modelled positions, which is why re-importing the full set into your slicer and using it as a placement reference beats eyeballing it.

• Scale hood — around 160 plates at roughly 11 × 11 mm. Work in rows from the rim upward, alternate rows offset half a column, each plate overlapping the one below like roof tiles. This is the long stage and it is worth its own evening.
• Solar horns — from the temples, curving up and back. Epoxy: they are the longest lever arm on the piece.
• PV array — seven panels per horn on the outboard face. Cosmetic sculpt, no cells.
• Crest keel and antenna — the crown centreline. The antenna is millimetre-scale detail; if it did not survive the print, the keel reads fine without it.
• EL wire — thread the seam channels last, after everything they route around is fixed. Runs break automatically wherever they would cross an aperture, so follow the channels rather than trying to make one continuous loop.

The anchors are modelled as 26 × 12 mm loops swept at 2.7 mm, leaving a clear slot of roughly 20 × 6.6 mm. Bond them with epoxy — these carry the entire weight of the piece and they are the joint most likely to fail in use.

Thread a four-point harness: two lower straps around the back of the head below the occiput, two upper straps meeting in an over-crown strap. Skip the crown strap and the whole assembly rotates down your face as the chin stack pulls forward — which it will, because that is where the mass is.

Set the lower straps first with the piece held level, then take up the uppers until it stops rotating. Do not tighten to compress the bead; the seal is decorative and hauling on the straps to close it just puts pressure on your cheekbones.

Cut closed-cell foam to the 548 mm rim path and face the bead with it. Two to four millimetres is enough. Bare printed nylon against skin goes from fine to intolerable in about fifteen minutes, and it is the single most common reason a finished build sits on a shelf instead of getting worn.

Pay particular attention to the bridge of the nose and the point of the chin — the two places where the reconstructed surface is least reliable and where all the pressure concentrates. A second layer at those two spots costs nothing and buys hours.

EL wire in the seam channels, or ordinary visible LEDs behind the status strip and the indicator band. Both read beautifully at night from the side, which is what the channel routing was drawn for.

There is no wire route, no cavity and no driver bay anywhere in the geometry — the horns, cells, PV panels, LED rings and PZT elements are all solid sculpt. Any cavity you need, you cut yourself, and you cut it before paint if you can plan that far ahead.

• Run a fingertip around the entire visor aperture and the rim. Any edge sharp enough to notice is sharp enough to cut — break it.
• Hang the piece by the harness and let it settle. Anything that shifts is a joint that has not cured or has not seated.
• Check that no adhesive has wicked onto the visor. It will have. Now is the moment.
• Photograph it before you wear it. Assembly marks show up fast, and the first hour is the best the finish will ever look.

Then send a photo to build@aureliusdynamic.com — builds get featured with credit and permission, and the problems you hit on the way are what improve this page for the next person.