A few years ago, I had the great pleasure of attending several showings of Philip Reeve and Brian Mitchell’s “The Ministry of Biscuits“, a darkly compelling tale of state-controlled nationalised industries gone mad (ok not really) starring Amy Sutton, Brian M, Murray Simon, and the late, great David Mounfield.  (You can read a writeup by the splendid Sarah McIntyre here.)

For a four-man show in a pub basement it boasted really very classy costumes (although I recall the welding helmet’s visor kept falling down and hitting poor David in the face), the finest element of all was the Minibic lapel badges the cast wore.  I coveted these something awful, and I didn’t expect to ever have one. But, now I have a 3d printer…

I found a decent-res version of the Minibic logo online. I cut the ministry’s motto, made a filled-in copy as a backing layer, converted them both to .svgs, imported them to Tinkercad, set the appropriate dimensions and stuck them together. Easy! As usual, the most time-consuming part was set adding supports so they’d print properly.

Painting them was a series of unnecessary self-inflicted agonies. I had the bright idea of using a gloss enamel black paint to get a shiny finish on the inside, so ordered a tiny Humbrol enamel tin like those I had first used for an Airfix model as a wee ‘un. A first coat did actually get the desired effect, but the absolute tedium of waiting 24 hours for a coat to dry and washing my brushes in white spirit reminded me why tiny me binned the Humbrols and gleefully switched to Games Workshop acrylic paints aged about nine.

Using an enamel paint for the silver highlights was also a total messy waste of time. At the suggestion of the same lovely chap who got me into 3d printing, I invested in a silver paint marker, which did the job much better, although being completely cack-handed I still managed to make it look a bit rubbish.

To attach the pin backs, I tried a hot glue gun, which lasted about six seconds, so I got out the epoxy glue, which is much much stronger. The pin is probably still a fair bit too fragile to be worn out (it’s also not the sort of thing you can wear in public without some really weird laboured explanations; and it’s not like I go outside or talk to people at the moment anyway), but it probably is good enough to take to the theatre. Perhaps to see the next Reeve & Mitchell show…

 

Now, the question is: am I pleased enough with this to go back and retroactively insert it into my pin collection…?