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Star Wars Rebels is one of our favorite parts of the Star Wars universe and Kanan and Hera are some of our favorite Star Wars characters, so making a kalikori had been on our list for awhile. We were overjoyed to finally bring it to life at ECCC last year and that another kalikori of ours made it to SWCC. Here’s our build write-up from initial designs to final execution!

Our first step, as always, was to find as many reference photos as possible. Thankfully there are turnarounds which provided a lot of the details and views we needed but we also took some screenshots from the show itself to help with some things that weren’t clear.

We then modeled the entire kalikori in Fusion 360. (The files to print your own are also available in our shop!)

The next step was printing all of the parts. We initially printed everything on our Raise3D N2 using Matterhackers PLA, but decided we didn’t want to do as much post processing on the smaller pieces so reprinted them on our Anycubic Photon using Nova3D Resin.

You can see the difference between the FDM and SLA prints here. We then finished the pieces with our typical sand/prime/fill/rinse/repeat method until they were all ready to go.

Once all of the masters were done, it was time for molding the pieces. Each piece got a mold box made of foam board – our go to for mold boxes – and then was covered in TC-5024 from BJB Enterprises. All of the pieces were then cast in their TC-802 resin.

All of the pieces were primed and then received a base rattle can coat of a khaki color. Using various brushes and acrylic paints, we then painted all the detail parts. Since we knew we didn’t want to hand paint all of these details, we had modeled them as indentations in all of the pieces to make the final painting easier. Acrylic paint was brushed in and then wiped off the surface of the parts.

Final assembly was a combination of a wooden dowel down the center, armature wire down the hanging sides (so that it can be somewhat posed), and BJB Enterprises Armor Bond to glue everything together.

To commemorate the completion of the prop we setup a little photoshoot with our kalikori, Kanan mask, and Kanan saber hilt with a “stone” floor and wall made out of some EVA floor mats.

We got to bring the kalikori to ECCC and do an amazing shoot with our good friend Amber Brite Props. Hudson Michaels did some amazing photos of us.

Then we did a photo-op with the voice of Hera herself, Vanessa Marshall where we gifted the kalikori to her. It’s probably not obvious from the photo, but if we all look weird its because we were all crying over it right before we snapped the photo!


One of our kalikori even made its way to SWCC where it took a photo with Freddie Prinze Jr. and Vanessa Marshall and got both of their autographs. It now lives in a shelf of collectibles with its new owner. (She brought a brown Sharpie and it looks so good on the kalikori!) We are offering several of these completed kalikori in our shop, but true to luck, less than a month after we finished our long project, the official version made its debut at Galaxy’s Edge. Whenever we make props or costumes from animation, our goal is to always try to bring it into the real world, so because the Galaxy’s Edge version is identical to the cartoon, it has a bit of a’ cartoony’ feel to it, which is not a bad thing! But it definitely makes ours different from theirs, and we’re cool with that.

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