Holy crap!  I can't believe it's been three weeks since I updated!

I had a week off, there were some things going on that weekend and I needed a break.  However, I've gotten one arm completely worked out, and I'm beginning to see the thing take shape.

The first week, I finally bit the bullet and re-made the foot that was crappy.  Our friend Tim came by while we were working and took some pictures, I'll put them up when I have access to Facebook.  I didn't realize how frigging heavy these things are.  You really can't imagine how much work it is to walk in them until you try it.  It's pretty rough.  I think for the next version or whatever, I'm going to put some real consideration into making more things out of foam and coating them with some sort of sealant for permanence, rather than trying to make them out of sturdy stuff.  It's a lot of weight, and I can already tell that I'm going to be spending a lot of time standing in one place rather than trying to lug myself around all over.  Beyond that, it's pretty tough to walk on any surfaces that aren't flat or level.  I managed to walk in some grass to see if I even could, and I didn't fall, but I did have a couple close calls.  It is scary, I'll tell you.

Anyway, once I figured out how to make the arms look a bit thicker, I worked on making them light up.  I'm not wired up yet, but I did test run the arm with lights in it and it looks pretty cool.  We'll get there eventually, and I'll have to get some battery packs to power the lights.  They are pretty expensive, so I've been hesitating on spending a bunch of money on them.  I've got enough to get the arms lit, but I'd like to do a few other places, too.  Maybe Curtis will have some leftovers... yeah right.  The kid's costume lights up like a frigging Christmas tree.

So, here's the arm after painting layer 1:

You can see that the paint has a pretty nice color, it's the Krylon hammered metal textured paint.  It looks pretty awesome on the forearm, and although the upper arm looks a little lame right now, it's going to have a lot more detailed work on it later on.  The claw isn't perfect yet, it needs at least one more coat, but it still works and the new color makes it look intense.  If you look close at the upper arm in the first picture, you can see the tape line running down it, masking where the lights will be.  There's two bars, one on the inside and one on the outside of the arm.

The process for figuring out how to get the shell attached to the arm was actually a pain in the butt.  I ended up using hot glue on the wrist section (an Ice Tea bottle), which has since come undone.  I'll either try to fix the glue, or pick up some epoxy, although I didn't have much success with that last time I tried it.  The next section was easier, since the soda bottles are basically locked on via the mouth.  The thick section that covers my hand grip is a modified small garbage can, which was a tough one.  I ended up gluing a small piece of 1/2" PVC to the arm cut to the correct length, and gluing a 2 liter bottle cap to the shell.  These fit together quite nicely, and gave a sturdy attachment point for the shell.  I'm thinking this is worth remembering, since it worked out.  The final portion before the elbow is another soda bottle, and then of course three more go up the bicep.  I'll be using some conduit to connect the upper and lower arms to make it look better, along with detailing work on the upper arm.  I'm very optimistic on the look of this once it's done.

I still haven't figured out what to end the other arm with.  It's getting on toward the point of no return, so hopefully i come up with something soon.  More to come, stay tuned.

Much work done this weekend, although by the end of it I felt like I hadn't really accomplished much at all.  Still, I had at least two breakthroughs that felt like "Eureka!" much in the same way as when I first clamped PVC onto the bike frame.  Before I get to that, here's the pic I promised a while ago of the feet complete minus the shoes:

They look pretty good, if I do say so myself, even if they are completely different shapes and sizes.  I don't really care anymore, especially considering how frigging difficult they were to make in the first place.  I'm sure you can tell which one I made first and which one had all the mistakes from that one worked out...

Here are a slew of pictures from my work this weekend.  First, I've finally figured out how to make the arms thicker than a half-inch piece of PVC.  The solution - 2liter soda bottles.  Turns out the mouth of the bottles is exactly the same width as the PVC.  Eureka number 1.

I'm still tinkering with how exactly to blend the thickened segments into the joints without it looking forced, but that will come with more time.  The good news is that since the bottles are clear, I can light them up from inside, and exclude portions from painting to make it glow through.  It should look pretty cool.  Unfortunately, that's a ways off at this point, because that kind of detail work is simply unrealistic to me right now until I get the structure of the whole thing laid out.

Next up is the arm that includes a claw.  As promised, here are a couple pics of how I made the claw work.

In the first picture, you can see the PVC connector chain I needed to use to get the thing to fit.  It was guess work at Home Depot, since I didn't have the claw with me, but I knew how well my hand fit into it, so I figured the opening was about 4".  Turns out I was almost exactly right, and after I used the dremel tool to round out the spot in the cuff that was flat (making the hole a circle, rather than an oval), the 4" PVC connector fit perfectly.  It was a 4":2" connection, a 2":1", and a 1":1/2", by the way.  Once I got that figured out, I ran some 16 gauge wire through a hole I drilled in the trigger of the claw down through the PVC, and out a hole near the handle.  You can see this in the second pic.  I attached the back end of the wire to a strap hinge , which was set up like a trigger.  The tension on the hinge bent it, but that's fine, it doesn't really matter. This kinda worked by itself, but the problem was, it didn't reset itself since there wasn't enough tension on the wire.  I had to take it all apart and attach an extra spring inside the claw trigger to make it go back to open when I released the trigger on the handle.  Now it works awesome, and I can open and close the claw from a foot outside the cuff.  Here's one more pic of the arm attached to the chestpiece, to give you some idea of how long it is:

It doesn't really look like that anymore, because of two things.  First, I realized I need more support for the front of the arm if I don't want my wrist to break or my arm to fall off by the end of a night wearing this thing.  It's heavy on the end, and that weight only gets harder to carry with time.  The best way to do this is to attach the arm to my own near the elbow.  This is a great plan, except for one thing: The hinge at the elbow doesn't provide a good range of motion for my own elbow, and makes using the arm awkward.  The solution Curtis came up with was to find a way to let the arm swivel as well as bend.  He found an attachment for a vacuum cleaner that let this happen, but I was looking for something more elegant.  I went back to the Depot looking for a ball-in-socket joint of any type, but found inspiration elsewhere.  Enter Eureka number 2.

Yep.  It's a caster for furniture or whatever.  The top swivels just like it should, and after screwing into the wheel, the elbow flexes and bends just like it should.  This one got a "You're a genius" out of Curtis.  It was the breakthrough of the day, until he found some sick speakers to attach to his own costume.  Still, I'm pretty proud of this one.  It's going to make my life much simpler, and on top of that, it makes the elbows way thinner, so I don't have to worry about those clunky joints.

The last thing I worked on was the "jet pack" for the back of the costume.  I knew I wanted something shaped basically like a big keg, since rocket engines aren't much more than that.  I also figured I wanted it to have some sort of conical shaped thing inside, I'm pretty sure that's what they have, too.  The result of this concept is pictured below.  It's a couple of dollar store buckets connected together, along with some wire mesh garbage cans cut up and inverted into each other.  It doesn't sound like much, but it looks pretty solid, and will look even better when it isn't just duct taped together.  No, the duct tape won't be staying on the bottom or sides once I'm done.

Like I said, I'm pretty happy with this week's progress, so hopefully I can continue with that trend this next week.  I plan to order some lights, which should come in this week, and that will give me the opportunity to at least start thinking about the finished product.  It's hard to put final touches on anything till you get the wiring figured out for any lights you want to add, so I need to get them started asap.

Today wasn't a huge day time wise, I only had about two hours this afternoon to work.  It was pretty productive though, I managed to get the arm assembly attached to the Matchbox claw and get it working.  Here's a pic of the arm attached and strapped onto my real arm:

Tomorrow I'm going to try and figure out how to make 1/2" PVC look like anything but what it really is.  It should be a neat trick, since I've got no clue what I want to do yet.  I'll try to take some pictures of the trigger assembly for the claw extension and the way that I connected it to the PVC.

The upper body is starting to come together in the same way I felt the legs were, so I'm getting more and more excited.  Stay tuned.