Making a mannequin

Last weekend I headed over to my trusty sidekick's place and started on the process of making a model of myself out of duct tape.  Here are some process photos for you.  I don't have nearly as many as I'd hoped to take, but I'm not quite done with the mannequin yet, so there are more to come.  As we finish up, and make another of Curtis, I'll add more for you all.

I had to use a bandanna to hold my beard out of the way, otherwise it would have gotten all caught in the duct tape.  That's the weird thing around my neck.

Beginning the chest:

Front done, back begun, and one arm started:

Right arm complete:

Both arms done.  I can't move much at all now:

My girlfriend says I look like I'm ready to hit the gay nightclubs with this on.  Another friend thought I look like a white Kimbo Slice.  Such is life.

Detail shot of my back - note the cross hatch pattern to make it form-fitting:

 Cutting the shell off - Curtis caught my undershirt.  Awkward:

 After we cut the body suit up the back and on the wrists (just enough so I can get my hand through), we threw it on the back of a chair and patched the back up.  This was not a simple process, so be careful and take your time if you're doing your own.  Then we covered the top (the neck) with cloth and taped it closed, and filled it with expanding foam insulation.  Since the insulation isn't that cheap, and you need a ton of it (especially if you're a big dude like me), we decided to take up some of the space with a bunch of leftover 2 liter soda bottles.  This ended up being a mistake, because they don't form into the right shape like the foam does, and you can't really get the foam under them.  I'm going to have to do some repair work with the form because of that, but that's fine.  We had two bottles of the "large gaps" type foam, and it filled most of the body along with five bottles.  We still need to fill both arms and a portion around the neck and waist.  Before the foam set, we put the form on a wooden dowel with screws sticking out of it, in order to give it something to stand on.  I only have one picture of the foaming process, but as I said, more are certainly to come.

 That's me and Mike (Curtis's brother) pouring in the foam.  He was a great help through the process, so thanks Mike!

More coming soon!

Hey no one!  How haven't you been?

The funny thing about blogging is that you're basically not talking to anyone, and then you're suddenly talking to everyone.  I'm still in the "not talking to anyone" stage, so no surprise that it's awful quiet around here.  Prove me wrong.  Leave me a comment.

It's been a while since Halloween, and I haven't touched any tools since then.  I needed a break from robot costumes, and it's been nice to have a little more free time.  That said, I'm starting to get the itch to work again.

Since my last foray into building, I've been researching techniques and methods for making more refined and detailed builds.  It's lead me to www.therpf.com, where I've been reading up on casting molds in silicone and resin, as well as vacuum forming and sculpting.  All of them are really related, it's tough to do a professional-level design without some amount of all of them.  If you look to your right, you'll see a blog called Volpin Props in my following links - that blog, and Harrison's precision and attention to detail, has been instrumental in my own excitement to produce higher quality items.

I'm not entirely sure what direction I'll be headed from here.  I know KILLroy will have a 2.0, but beyond that, the sky is really the limit.  I don't have any particular movie or show that I'd like to start doing replicas for, I've been enjoying the freedom that comes with designing for myself, but as my experience with these new techniques grows, I'm sure I'll try to do a little replication here and there.

As a start, I've been picking up materials to make a 1:1 mannequin copy of myself, to be more able to do active work on costumes while I'm not wearing them.  I found a pretty good tutorial on how to create your own here, and decided that I'd give it a shot.

I haven't had time to work on it beyond shopping, but now that I'm actually doing some brainstorming, I'll be sure to check back in once things start to progress again.  I'm urging Curtis to start making a mannequin for himself, as well, since it's going to be beneficial for us both.

The next step for us is probably to clean up the basement, since it's basically still destroyed from our last minute stress work on our robots, but once we get some sort of organization in place, we're off to the races.  Stay tuned!


PS - I've also been writing for a Magic: the Gathering site called ChannelFireball.com.  I wrote a magic-oriented description of project day for them, which you can find here.  Give it a look!

Success!

It was down to the wire, but I finished the suit! And with less than a day to go before the competition, it was kind of hairy there for a while. Here is the finished product, in picture and video form!

My friend Tim is in the second pic to give you a sense of scale.  He's a little on the vertically challenged side, but I stand about 8"6' at the tip of my shoulders.

As you can see from the video and pictures, I've put a little more effort into the suit since you last saw it. I managed to wire it all up, including two more cathodes on the upper legs, which were made out of some spare foam board I had laying around.  I also put all the lights into the rest of the suit, and finished up the chestplate with a few of the highlighter tubes.  They looked pretty cool in my last round of pictures, so I just threw a bunch more on.  After that I went through and added electrical tape to detail a few areas, and was basically there!

Saturday, Curtis and his brother Mike, and his parents all headed to Turning Stone Casino for their annual costume competition.  There were four categories for costumes (Open, Scariest, Funniest, Team) and Curtis and I chose to enter different categories to avoid knocking each other out.  I entered Scariest (it is a giant attack robot suit, and people were certainly intimidated, if not scared).  I ended up taking second place, losing to a guy in a Ghost Rider outfit, complete with bike - but it was close.  Even at second place, I won $500!  I'll add more pictures of the competition once I get them from Curt's dad, sometime this week.

It's been a really amazing journey, and I'm very glad I made this suit.  We're already thinking about how to improve our costumes for next year, and after a few weeks off to rest, we'll be back at it.  Stay tuned for more, and thanks for reading!

Oh SNAP

We're SO CLOSE!!!

This weekend, I've been busy.  Completed both arms, including a rebuild of the right arm.  It's much more solid now, and I actually prefer this design over the old one, which was kind of weird.  The more I looked at it - especially after doing the left arm - the less I liked it.  Either way, it's been redone.  I also changed where they attach to the body.  The vertical pipes from the bike rack were the perfect size to fit a piece of half-inch PVC into.  I have no clue why I never noticed that before.  This let me remove the other arm attachments and use that space for the part that will house the battery pack.  Speaking of which, I'm in the process of wiring that up now.  I'm waiting for the last of the lights to come in on Monday (hopefully) and then I can wire it all up.  I've attached the jet pack to the torso, and figured out how to wire that up as well.  Really, we're basically waiting on the lights, and then I'll be wiring and wrapping it up.  Whatever time is left after that is minor details and tinkering, making it look pretty.  The pics below were taken prior to a bit of the work, but after most of it.  The shoulders have been worked on, the back has been worked on, etc. - but you get an idea of what's going on here.  I took this without the legs, but they're coming along as well.  I'm pretty happy with the spot I'm in, with just under a week to go.

Next time you see it, you should be looking at the final product!

A light at the end of the tunnel

We're getting down to the wire here.  I'm scared that I won't have time to do all the work I want to, but there's really no time to even think about that.  The costume competition is on the 23rd, which means I have only one weekend left before showtime.  I've spent the last three days working constantly, since Jen was on a weekender to NYC, and I had basically no distractions.  Each hour saw a bunch of work complete, but it just seems never-ending.  The good news is, I have one arm basically finished and the other well on the way, along with a real chunk of the torso.  The bad news is, I need to get all my lighting and electronics done this week, and finish up a million little things that stack up quickly.  Here are some photos of what I've been working on.

This first picture is a view of the "jetpack" that will be behind me.  These diamond cuts were totally tedious to make, and then fill with a chickenwire-type material from some dollar store garbage can.  It looks really nice, and will pop when I light the inside of the case.  I also added a strip of electrical tape at the joint between the two barrel sections, which was such a small detail, but totally changed the look of the piece for the better.  It's the little things.

The feet have been re-done, again.  I can't help it, I always end up hating how they look.  That's changed now, since I love the look of the casing on these bad boys.  So industrial, so awesome.  The angle looks a little strange since you can see the shoes inside still, but you can't really from the front.  The material is just this foamboard I picked up, cut into pieces basically freehand.  The nice thing is that I actually thought ahead and figured I'd need to actually be able to tie the shoes and need access to do it, so I put the pieces together like this:

The sections nestle together, and are plenty sturdy, but give me the ability to actually wear the damned things.  Works out well.

You've already seen the bottom half of this arm, and I didn't do anything special to it.  I may still put some lights into it, but I haven't made any final decisions on that front.  I like it being less light-up and more mechanical, so I may just leave it.  However, more lights = awesome, so who knows.  I think at this point, time will dictate.  In this pic, you see the connection between the upper and lower arm, which has been added to.  Where you'd see the ends of the bottles, I covered it with conduit to mask the material.  I added more conduit as connectors at the joint.  The green stuff is clear tubing filled with water and sealed off.  The green comes from highlighter ink mixed into the water.  It's a trick I've seen used in every college dorm ever to make blacklight-responsive vodka bottles.  I like this application much more.  Along the upper arm, I've removed the tape that masked the part that will be lit, although you can't really see it in that pic.  The next two show it better.  I've also added a strip of conduit to each side for detail.  I think the arms are looking really amazing, and I'm excited to see it come together.

Here's the second arm, which is finally created.  As you can see, I've decided to end it in a gun, rather than a claw.  Curtis is modeling for us.  The gun is made from some vacuum cleaner parts that we had kicking around.  I used two for the barrels, which will eventually be lit up from inside.  The handle is from a broken toy from Toys-R-Us, it used to be a sword.  I extended the LEDs from the inside of the sword, and they're now located at the top of the barrels, they look like a laser scope.  I still have a bit of work to do on the scope, but it's going to be killer.  The white part in the second picture is another piece of the handle that lights up and spins.  Kinda lame, kinda cool.  I'll take it.

I've gone from zero to almost done with the left arm over the weekend, so I'm stoked - but every tick of the clock means less time till Halloween.  This week I'm going to finish the arms and get started on assembling the torso pieces together.  Hopefully when I finally get all the lights and batteries together, the thing will start to look like a Mech.

It's hard to take pics of everything at once at this point, since it's like 8 and a half feet tall, and in pieces, but as we get closer to H-day, I'll try to take some to show the costume in all its glory.

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.

Chest Plate, etc.

I took a couple pictures of the upper body on Friday, after I had a little time to work on it. Since other than a couple limited pics of hypothetical parts, I haven't shared any of the top half, I figure it's about time. Pardon the ghetto stance on one of them, Curtis thought it was funny.

As you can see, the top half is coming along as well.  I took the yellow pieces off the ends of the vertical part, and I'll be finishing them to look like missiles.  The back will feature a pretty large jet engine (well, it will look like one, anyway) that will light up pretty heavily, and look awesome.  I haven't decided if I want to attach wings yet, but it's an idea we're toying with.

I also figured out a very important piece of the puzzle - how to attach things to the frame.  If I use the dremel tool to cut about a quarter of the circumference out of some 3/4" PVC (imagine the profile of it resembles a C), it snaps onto the bike rack frame like a clamp.  If you look at the chest plate, you'll notice two screws where I've used this method to clamp it to the frame.  Since Friday, I've started making the mech's arms, using the same concept.  I used a T-connector to act as the initial attaching point, with the arms coming off the horizontal part of the frame at a 45* angle, and down around my shoulders.  They look pretty good so far, but I'm not 100% sure on the best way to make them movable, but secure.  I used a joint like the knee joints on the Mechs I linked to before for the shoulder joint, but I don't want to use it for the elbow too, since it makes the arms a little too flexible to easily control.  I'll keep thinking on it, I'm sure I'll figure something out.  That's the major stuff I did this week, next time I build I plan to continue figuring out the arms and possibly make the jet pack.

After that, we're left figuring out the upper legs, the lower torso, and building out the structure to be more robust.  As great as PVC is for framing, it's not very polished or intimidating on its own.  Then the finishing touches - I can't wait to light this thing up.  10 weeks till Halloween!

Mech robot costume stilts - 1st attempt

Today was a victory! We managed to get some video of the finished stilts in action, with a description of what I did to make them work. The audio is so-so since it's on Curt's iPohone, but the video shows you pretty well what the finished product will look like. I have a few pictures of the stilts right before I attached the shoes and took my first walk, I'll edit those into the post a little later. For now, take a look at this!