TWO WHOLE WEEKS??????????? :eek
I know, I know.. I just didn't want to admit that to myself.
It's not like I didn't do nothing for the movie, it's just that everything I did was a failure..
But you asked, Ville, so hear me complain a little. :lol
In the next few days I'll go to a friend who is a fashion designer, and she'll help me tailor the police costume - chest, shoulders, wrist part... So, I decided time has come to tackle the Sinisalo armor chest protectors..
As some of you know (and I probably learned that from you), BR costume designers took a motocross protective armor, and probably did vacuumform pulls over plastic parts. Then painted them black and attached them to the police protective vests. Here's the pics:
I couldn't find the original armor on Ebay, and if I did it would probably be expensive, so I had to figure out how to make those plastic parts myself. I figured the easiest way would be to model it out of clay, but I delayed it for as long as I could since I don't like working with clay..
The day finally came and I made two bottom shapes:
In the middle you can see the simple tools I made for denting holes. Then I coated them with a thin layer of AIR DRYING silicone that stinks of ammonia and it is disgusting to work with. Since I live where I live that was the only silicone I could find a year ago when I decided to make molds for something. It's incredibly hard to find a two-component silicone here.
So after a few layers and three days later I had a cool negative and things looked promising:
Then I
sprayed the molds with mold release, mixed some polyester, tinted it black, and spread it in the molds.
The next day I excitedly came to my workshop to find that the polyester stuck to the silicone and when I tried to separate it I just broke everything !?!
Then I rested for a day or two because I was angry.
I searched all over the city and managed to find some small shop that sells two-component silicone for a reasonable price. But the guy had to order it from a neighbour country and I'm still waiting for it to arrive at this point. It would be much easier to be able to buy Smooth-on products locally. I know I could order them by mail but that wouldn't be cheap.
Anyway, I decided this was a good moment to try the ancient technique of vacuumforming which I wanted to try for a long time. So I built myself a small box (around A4 format):
At the right is a hole for the vacuum cleaner.. I wasn't sure if the vacuum cleaner would be strong enough but that was the first thing to try, right?
I also made the frame that sandwiches a thin sheet of PVC plastic and I heated it in the oven at 200-250 degrees for 30 seconds or so.
Then, as it's usually done, I quickly press it to the box and over a form I made:
And, of course, I couldn't get a proper pull since materials I work with are crap > since I can't buy proper materials > since I live where I live. The vacuum cleaner seems to be strong enough, though.. But the plastic I have is obviously not the type that can form over all details. The problem is I don't know where to buy the correct type of plastic so I'll have to search for it all over and waste a couple of days as usual.
And so two weeks went by and I did mostly nothing, apart from partly finishing the helmet:
...which actually is still missing the bubble goggles I ordered, but it's been over a month and they still haven't arrived, so I opened a case at E-bay and I'm waiting... for something to happen..
So there it is.. Nothing much.
:unsure