How I built Companion Cube for my girlfriend

in #diy8 years ago (edited)

Hello guys!

It's my first entry on Steemit, so I want to say Hi to all of you.

I want to share with you a story about how I built a Companion Cube from the game 'Portal' for my girlfriend. We are both gamers, and when I asked her what she wanted for our anniversary gift, she said just 'do something by yourself'. So, it gave me this insane idea to build that cube as a box suitable to hide something in it.

Here's the original one:

The whole idea was crazy as hell, because I made it out of wood, and I didn't have any experience in woodworking before. I had a lot of fun doing it, didn't cut myself even once (I think it was beginner's luck ;) ) and it came out better than I expected. Take a look.

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I had to take a lot of measurements, and by 'a lot' I mean 'A LOT'. I didn't use any of tutorials found on the internet, I wanted to do it from scratch all by myself.

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Some more measurements. I had to maintain scale. Project took me about 4 or 5 pages of paper. These two squares were for top and bottom.

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I even bought that sawblade especially for this project.

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Part of them cut (these were for sides of the box).

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Time to grind these rough edges.

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After grinding.

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Trying to align bottom...

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...and top.

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Fitting together surprisingly good.

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Time to take care of corners.
It also took me some time to measure it properly, because every face of the corner has to had different dimensions.

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Corners faces cut...

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...and grinded and sorted.

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It's starting to actually look like Companion Cube.

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Taking measurements for cutting angles.

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Angles cut and grinded.

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Trying to fit them. They fit like they should, which is nice ;)

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Fitting bottom...

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...and the rest.

Aaaaand unfortunately, I don't have photos of the final phase - painting and putting it together. But I have some photos of the finished cube.

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A few photos earlier you could see the middle circle made of wood, but I decided to make them from the old CDs glued together.

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Here's the inside look of the finished Companion Cube, along with other gifts - Dark Souls themed mug, Bioshock: Ininite necklace and Star Wars fanfiction story I wrote. I know the handprint isn't perfect, but I can't draw or paint at all ;P

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And here the look of how big it is - me myself for scale.

If you read it till the end - thank you. I put a lot of effort in making this, and I am quite proud of the effect. I know it's not perfect, and I missed some of the details of the original Companion Cube, but - as I mentioned at the beginning - it was my first ever build like this.

Cheers ;)

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I imagine you could find paint that would eliminate the visible wood grain on the cube, but very cool build! Came out really nice :)

I painted it with spray paint. I probably could use another one, but I wanted it to be visible :)

wow. . . just. . . wow. . .

Thank you :)