The knee joint will work just like the elbow joint. The shin won't actually be attached in any rigid way to the thigh. There will be the small parts below the knee that slip into the thighs, but that will be all. That way the thin will be free to slide up and down if needed when the knee is bent.
Not so much. I've got molds for a pair of slightly-too-small thighs and a prototype for an undersized left hand and an undersized faceplate. I had the whole helmet, but the resin for the 3D printer doesn't have very good memory and it has warped significantly under its own weight.
Alas.
UPDATE:
Late last week I handed off the molds for all of the open parts and the larger parts to a guy I know who lays up fiberglass parts for a living. Last night he stopped by with a box:
The contents? A whole bunch of gelcoated, lightweight, surprisingly strong pieces of the armor:
I could've laid up the parts myself, but this guy does a much better job in much less time. Now all I've got to do is trim up the edges, do some quick sanding and touchup, and start shooting paint.
On that subject, I stopped by my local automotive paint supplier last night and had them mix me up some colors. The production suit was supposedly painted with a color called "Nissan Merlot Red." When I talked to the service writer at the local Nissan dealership, he was able to give me the paint code for it. It's "AX5" for those of you following along at home. There's also some discussion that it might have been a color called "Roma Red" or "Red Mica" which were a much lighter shade. The color chips for the Merlot Red showed a very dark, purplish tint. So in the interest of experimentation, I had them mix me up a half pint of each. I'll shoot them both and see which one I like better in various lighting.
The gold was a color called "Pacific Gold" from DuPont's Hot Hues line. Unfortunately, my paint guy says they don't make it anymore. But he did have the book of color chips to compare, so I did some flipping through their yellow-saturated gold metallics and compared them against the Pacific Gold chip. I think I found a pretty good match:
I'm priming things today, but tomorrow this thread should be much more colorful. Stay tuned...
