A textured variation of my BB Bearing nunchucks: https://www.crealitycloud.com/model-detail/bb-bearing-nunchucks?source=22

Same internals, just fancier!

Assembly instructions:

Paints really well using thinned acrylic layers. I'm no expert at miniature painting, but a combination of 1 part gloss medium, 1 part acrylic paint, a few drops of flow aid, and add a little water until it's thin enough to flow, but still thick enough to bead up is what worked well for me.

Paint it with primer. Vallejo surface primer is what I see often rec'd, and it worked well enough.

Give it a dry brushing grisaille/slap chop base for exaggerated contrast. A lot of great Youtube videos on “Slap Chop miniature painting" like Ninjon's. Basically run your drybrush in only one direction with a dark color, then run it in the other direction with a light color to create a light and shadow effect.

Then go over that in several coats with your thinned “contrast paint" “Speed Paint.” Each layer adds more and more depth, and it's very forgiving because it dries much lighter than it goes on. A small detail liner brush (I think mine are actually for makeup) worked well to fill in recesses, such as engraved text. Also--and hear me out--a large tipped medical needle, like the exact same thing a doctor pokes into your arm, works really well to apply thinned paint to recesses as well. Saw that on Youtube (I swear).

Again, I'm no expert, but it's a surprisingly low barrier to entry as long as you follow the techniques in the videos.

Prime → Drybrush grisaille/Slap Chop → layers of contrast paint.

This model has a flat area that's ideal for engraving text. (I know some slicers have inbuilt features for exactly this. But I'm no help there as I've never tried it outside of CAD.)

I originally made an earlier version of this project as a Christmas present for my brother last year.

The deal is, he's got this tattoo he's super self conscious of. One of those deals where he got it as a dumb kid, and now he's a grown up family man.

He was like 18, just graduated. In fact, we were all down in Florida visiting him specifically to attend his high school graduation. And me and him were cruising along the beach in his ‘96 Saturn, said he had this super important appointment to get to. So we pull up to a tattoo parlor, but like an hour ahead of his appointment because he was so excited for it--which was strange because it turned out he didn’t even know what tattoo he was gonna get, only that he was going to get one. Pretty sure he had himself convinced that just the addition of tattoo in general would act on the principles of runic magic and magical girl transform him into a real menace, a real street tough type.

Didn't have a design picked out, but he did have a phrase he really really wanted: Live by the sword, DIE by the sword.

Problem was, kid forgot he was a pasty white ginger from the suburbs with a bit of pudge. Like, that's already his final form.

But I'm nothing if not helpful. So I offered to draw him something on the back of a coupon we found under the seat. Would make it, like, super sentimental and stuff, too, having big brother draw it. Took like 15 minutes of jamming out to Avenged Sevenfold or Moby for me to sketch a quick--what was essentially--clipart tattoo an hour before his appointment. Ended up being a pair of dueling swords with the blades each reading as a line from the deadly quote.

He goes in there and gets it done. Thankfully the tattoo guy (tactfully, I'm sure he dealt with that a lot) cleaned up my dumb drawing as best he could. Even still, my brother emerged with a massive cleaver inked all the way up his ribs where the blade read his deadly message--which is symbolic and stuff.

Now he's a family man, and quite embarrassed of his magical ginger tattoo. Out of pure nostalgic sentimentality, I made these nunchucks specifically to showcase his phrase:

BB Bearing Nunchucks with Textured Staff

0.12mm layer, 3 walls, 15% infill