Barbie, Home Depot sells a 'three ribbed' strip of weather stipping that is made to self adhere to the bottom of a door. The ribbed portions are flat on the sticky side so laying them out wouldn't be a problem. IIRC some of the torso protions of 'hydration tubing' are sections of three.
If the wetsuit glue doesnt take to the tubing you could hot glue the ends and/or sew from underneath to hold them in place. That way the threads wouldn't be visible.
Anyway basic used wetsuits can be had for cheaper than buying new foam. That's my way to skin this cat.
Like Dropshipbob mentioned, Headliner material can be found at Joanns fabrics in 1/4 I think. Not sure on the price. Dont know well it would absorb the latex-plasti dip coating. But if you are a clean seamstress this is an excellent method also. I just imagined the suit with a rubber texture.
Yeah I actually stopped at Lowes last night, the 3-ribbed ones were not the right size so I just stuck with innaccurate stuff for my mockup. I'm still shopping around to see how close I can get with weatherstripping, but I don't trust the adhesive alone. Now that I know the stuff is all neoprene I can get some wetsuit glue but I like the idea of hot gluing. It won't look too bad if I need to do the ends because it'll all be rubberized anyways afterwards.
I was originally going to go with Barge, does anyone know if wetsuit glue is much better for that sort of thing than contact cement? I couldn't pick up Barge last night so I used GOOP (ugh never again, I'm so sick of that stuff getting everywhere, and somehow, I don't know how, I can't get the damn taste of goop out of my mouth even today. And it destroys my nailpolish. I know, I'm a wussy girl LOL) and it seems to have held decently. Then again I haven't really done much with moving it...
I'm definitely going to be going the route of buying already put together suits, but going to take extra neoprene and attatch it that way. Noooo way am I going to sew up entire wetsuits, not with how rocky my relationship with my sewing machine is haha. The problem they were mentioning on that interview though was with the latex not drying properly, which I have thus far not really encountered on the mockup. I need to double check the furniture foam though, because that kept soaking in right away (something I'm concerned would happen with the neoprene) so I eventually just started coating the sucker and it took the longest to dry. Need to make sure it really did dry all the way through. But neoprene still isn't as porous as that stuff so I don't forsee it being that huge a problem, as long as I'm not wrong and the latex doesn't get absorbed easily into the material. (Took to the model magic like a duck to water, it's too bad neoprene doesn't have a surface like that.) The other problem they mentioned was sticking which I think I can just circumvent with fullers earth and talc.
The thing about the puffyness though...looking at the studio pics in that link, it looks like all they did was take pieces of neoprene and tack it down in waves to make pockets. It doesn't look like they used much foam at all. Which makes much more sense now because they way those things bend, it looks like there's nothing in it. (Which is kind of aggravating because aren't they supposed to be filled with water? :rolleyes ) A friend of mine just linked me to a great neoprene supplier so I'm gonna check it out and see if I can't find a wetsuit and then seperate neoprene that matches at least somewhat.
As for the thumper, the main problem I'm having is figuring out the mechanism of movement itself. I guess I'd just want it to be a 1-way movement, since 2 way would be much more difficult to construct, just have something pull the cylinder up and drop it. The cylinder shouldn't be hard to construct, nor the smaller cylinder inside it...my main issue is just getting the whole mechanism figured out from the inside.