Hexagonal rubber-banded armour plate by PerspexAvenger

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

As part of an outfit I'm working on for a festival, I've been looking at the various printable plate/chainmail offerings floating around Thingiverse and other places for a while.
Unfortunately, nothing quite fit what I needed - some of the print-in-place stuff takes aeons to print and is difficult to connect separate sheets together of afterwards, or relies on precision levels I couldn't always be confident of through my printer.
As such, when I've been designing this, it's been aimed for a reasonably solid print with minimal cleanup afterwards, and each panel is connected to others via loom bands (or something with a similar size) as they're cheaper than orthotic bands generally.
Whilst the central pin is large enough to take connections from 6 plates surrounding it, if it gets fiddly or you've connections that keep springing off, the push-lock plate should snap into the back of the hex and securely clamp things down.
However, that said, I've done lots of static assemblies of this with no problems but haven't tested in an actual worn outfit. Panels of various sizes have happily survived hanging and flexing, but this may be updated if tweaks are required.
I'd recommend printing out 7 plates and arranging them as a hex and generally beating up on them a bit to confirm your print state and bands are compatible.
Edit: I've added a 5-side version in case anyone wants to do geometries where the natural flow of the plates doesn't support it as they flex.
Please note that these are untested live, and are in a "weak" configuration as far as the movement of the rubber bands go, so your success will depend very much on the quality of your rubber bands.
Also, they're quite fiddly...
Edit: Added half-plate so you can neaten up edges and more easily prevent edge panels being caught on things.
Edit: Added a pentagonal locker for those plates by request, and a composite 2x2x2 hex-plate for if you need... I dunno, a solid surface or something.