Blue Drake

So we wore our N7 armour to Wizard World and it had a great response!  A friend of ours grabbed a really great pic of us which another friend of ours photoshopped.  Thought I’d share it (because I love it!)

Ok, finally got the resin Walther PPKS and had some time to spend in the shop.  Here’s the gun as it was when I first received it:

As you can see, there was quite a bit of flashing on the cast, and the handgrips were attached when the piece was cast.  When I tried to fit it in to the kit I have, I discovered that the gun shouldn’t have had the grips.  I tried belt sanding, a jeweller’s saw but in the end the mouse sander and my trusty Dremel tool did the job nicely.  I also cut off the pour spot at the base of the grip.

Well, after quite a bit of sanding, cutting and Dremeling, I managed to get it somewhat recognizable.  Sorry for the blurry pic, trying to hold the bits together and take a pic at the same time was challenging!

Worked a bit on the Seburo CX today.  There are some air bubbles in the actual casting and some seams that needed to be taken care of.  The worst air bubbles are in the hand grip, right by the trigger, so I’ve had to fill them in and try to sand them down while keeping the lines intact.

Here is a close up-ish picture of one of the sections I was speaking about by the hand grip, in the top left section of the picture:

Another thing I’m not looking forward to is drilling out all the holes in the one piece.  The five big circles and the two smaller circles have to be drilled out.  The two smaller ones will be used by screws.

So, got a really nice Christmas present from my wonderful signifiant other, a Seburo gun kit.   Masamune Shirow uses these types of guns in his anime series Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed.  Here’s the beginning untouched kit that wraps around a Walther PPK/S gun:

The gun itself is illegal in Canada (The “S” stands for ‘short’ – the barrel length puts the PPK/S in the restricted weapons category) so we’ve managed to find a resin version of one.  It’s solid resin, no moving parts, perfect base to the Seburo.  I’ve seen photos of many completed kits and I think I am going to go with this paint job:

I will keep this blog updated!

Ok, so NYE has come and gone and we did wear our suits just for fun.  We added a bit of the ‘weave’ to the armour:

This was done by using the anti-slip matting you’d find at any WalMart (comes in a roll, can be used to line shelves.  We used to use it on the sailboat to stop supplies from sliding when the boat was heeled over).  Using the matting, mask off the areas you’d like to have the carbon fibre appearance and spray with a clear gloss.

Another change we made was that we painted the shin guards all black.  The grey was just a bit too light and it stood out too much.

I have decided that the thigh pieces on my suit are not tall enough, which means I will most likely be redoing them.  They look fine on a mannequin, but they don’t look right on me.  Updates to come on that.

Well for the last few days I’ve been painting with metallic black fabric paint and some stencils.  One suit is done and the second just needs the backside done.  In the future, I think I will paint the fabric first, then sew it.  I think the pattern would turn out a lot better.

First off, I would like to apologize for the gap in posts.  After the first week of October had gone by I realized that due to time constraints (and other events) we’d be pressed for time to get these suits done – well wearable – for halloween.  So basically it was nose to the grinder every day getting the armour done.

I’m happy to say we did get them wearable for the Silver Snail’s Halloween party that was on October 29th.  We got them to the wearable stage at approximately 4pm on that date.

During the build I had decided that a two piece body suit would not be appropriate; I was worried about the shirt slipping up during wear and the fact that you’d be able to see the bottom of the top in between the ab plate and the top of the leg plates.  Sooo… the weekend before Halloween we visited several halloween stores in search for spandex body suits.  No one had black ones that were reasonably priced.  Not one to be discouraged, we visited our local Fabricland, bought a plushie costume pattern (think Ewok), 5 yards of lycra, a couple zippers and a metric phuckton of webbing, velcro and elastic in various gauges.  (The webbing and elastic was for holding the armour together and on.)

Sunday October 23rd for me was a marathon sewing day.  I have never made a lycra bodysuit before and I needed to get these done and fast.  From the minute we finished breakfast till just after dinner, I cut, I stitched, I serged and I managed to get the two suits done, but not fitted.  I have to admit, the suits would not have been possible without my trusty serger.  Another thing that had bothered me with some of the other ME suits I’ve seen is that the body suits worn did not have the collar that is seen in the game.  Using some construction paper, I devised a pattern for the collar and fitted it to both of our suits.  The male version of Shepard has stitch lines along the collar.  These I did with the ancient no-name sewing machine (only has forward and backward, no zig-zag stitch!) by eye.

Please excuse the iPhone pics, as I said above we were very pressed for time.  I know some of you professional tailors and seamstresses will be cringing when you look at this picture, but please remember that, well, I suck with a sewing machine and these were very rushed.  I need to tear out the collars and re-make them anyways, they’re not good enough for my standards.

While I was completing the body suits, my extremely talented partner painted, painted and painted.  Painting the EVA foam was frustrating at best, really the only thing that sticks to it is the Plasti Dip.  We ended up using a cheap dollar store yoga mat for the glove accents which in hind sight probably wasn’t a great idea.  The matting was so cheap it acted more like a sponge than a mat and soaked up a considerable amount of paint.  Everything was painted with a base coat of Plasti Dip then the right side elements had to have a white stripe, then a red stripe painted on them.  We found that regular masking tape stuck to the Plasti Dip and actually would peel the Plasti Dip off regardless how careful you are removing it.  I found this out the hard way when I masked off my collar highlight area to paint it grey.   We repainted the damaged areas, however every time I look at pictures it’s as plain as the nose on my face to me, as you can see in the picture to the left.

The shins were another factor that we had to really brainstorm around.  I didn’t like the EVA foam for the job; it was too thick.  I also didn’t like the yoga matting; it was too flexible. I liked the shins from my Stormtrooper gear; styrene vac moulded.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a vac table so that was out of the question.  While sleeping on this conundrum two weeks prior to Halloween, I had an epiphany; Wonderflex.  I had heard of the material that was heat mouldable and cooled rigid.  I did a search and found that a supplier website had a warehouse in town.  Win.  I called on October 15th to find out if we could just come by and pick up a couple sheets; yes, pickups were possible, however they were flat out of Wonderflex.  It would have to be shipped up from the States.  They stated that the material would arrive by the 20th and I found it tight, but manageable.  We’d have the entire weekend to work with it.  I placed an order for the largest sheet they had (leftovers will make my grappling hook belt attachment) and waited. Turns out this company shipped via UPS and didn’t charge me for shipping.  The no-charge was good, but I had heard so many horror stories about UPS and their brokerage fees when shipping from the US to Canada.  The Wonderflex actually arrived on the 21st, to my surprise, with no brokerage fees.  The UPS fellow was more interested in the venting system for our furnace than anything else.  Go figure.

I had never worked with Wonderflex before.  It came rolled up like a piece of construction paper, one side smooth and the other side resembling the non-sticky side of duct tape.  I experimented with heating the material with a heat gun and quickly found out that it became sticky and fabric like when hot.  We were able to make the shins by moulding the Wonderflex over a form, which worked quite well.  The challenge was sticking the two halves of the calf piece together.  All the glues I tried didn’t work very well and hot glue just warped the form I’d worked hard to give the piece.  I ended up shielding the majority of the piece and using the heat gun to heat the leading edge of the shin piece.  Once it was hot (and therefore sticky) I applied pressure to the corresponding piece and the two became bonded.  They were then painted with a base coat of black primer for uniformity, then given a top coat of grey to match the spine and collar accents.  To finish them off, foamies were used for the front and back stripes as well as the calf scoop.  The knee plate was hot glued and webbing was applied to the top edge of the shin guard, with velcro to fasten it all together.

Overall I am happy with the way the suits turned out.  There is still some work left to do though, so look for more updates soon.  Here are a couple pictures from the costume debut at the Silver Snail Halloween party, or Snailoween as they called it :)

Been working quite a bit on the suits. I’ve been getting accustomed to working with the router attachment on the Dremel. I cut out the thigh pieces and used the router to carve out the segment where the rubber matting will be inserted:

In that image you can see that I’ve made the top part of the chest piece and stuck it on. Not sure if I’m exactly happy with that yet, but we’ll see once 48hrs has passed and the E6000 has had a chance to cure.

The suit is coming together though as seen here:

Made some *awesome* progress last night. I took the plunge and tackled forming the breastplate. Using the remodeled form, I trucked up to the kitchen with some EVA scraps and the piece I was planning on making the chest plate from.

I set the oven to broil which is 500F, but only the top burner. I waited a few minutes for the oven to heat then popped my scrap in. The thing started to smoke immediately, so I pulled it out for fear of it going up in flames. I readjusted the racks so they occupied the two lowest rungs and tried again. Same thing, it started smoking. Well, I knew it had to work, my heat gun wouldn’t be able to heat the whole surface evenly enough to be able to do the stretching and cornering that I was looking for with the breast plate. So not to be deterred, I tried again, this time using an oven mitt and just holding the piece under the burner, flipping it over when it started to smoke.

Bingo, that worked!

I dropped the piece on the form and experimented with stretching it and how much pressure I’d have to put down on the MDF press. It seemed to work. So, on to the actual piece.

Since the width of the tile was wider than my oven, I used a box cutter to remove the tabs on either side. This gave me the clearance I needed. I used the same technique to get the EVA hot then I placed it on the form, and used the press to keep the upper abdomen area flat. I knelt on the press and used my free hands to stretch and form the EVA over the form. It cooled rather quickly, so I picked up the heat gun and used that to keep the EVA warm until I had a shape I was satisfied with.

I am quite happy how it turned out! I took it downstairs, trimmed off the edges, drew on what I will need to burn in using the wood burning tool and compared the width of the chest straps to the back plate I’ve already formed. It was a perfect match. Here’s what the chest piece looks like now.

This seems like it’s finally coming together!

I know it’s been a few days since I’ve updated. Things have been moving along quite well. Thigh patterns were completed and cut out. I’ve been using the wood burning tool and I’ve etched in the lines; however now looking at the thigh pieces I’ve noticed a pattern flaw. The ‘butt cheek’ lines aren’t quite true to the 3d model; I will have to cut them down and see if I can salvage what I have. The thigh piece may not cover the 50% on me that it does on the game model. We shall see.

I have also sketched and completed shin patterns which will be cut out and molded soon.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, the carbon fiber decals have arrived and we picked up our 4′x4′ piece of neon orange plexiglass. Now all we have to do is make a pattern for the Omni Tool and figure out how to bend, shape and glue plexiglass. Not too much of a tall order, hm?

In parting, I’ll leave you with this picture. I’m actually quite pleased how it turned out!