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.