Iron Man Mark VII Resin+Clothglass W.I.P. (Pic Heavy)

[Nako]

Hi everyone!
I'm Fernando from Argentina, I've been lurking the forums for more than a year now, i've first visited 405th and became very interested in their costumes. Then someone linked to this forum and my adventure began. I got amazed since the beginning and started searching and researching everything i could, went from left to right and looked at every corner of the forum, I found threads from all kinds, all nations and all tastes, read them and learned everything i could, I was inspired by some of the best artist I've seen, skillful and precise, delicate and patient above all. All that said, i'll start my thread.

Iron Man Mark VII

I chosen the Mark VII because when I started this project it was near the first avengers premiere, and I also liked it a lot, but the time passed, i got out of the project and delayed it more and more untill i dropped it completely, some months later a very good friend of mine made me a proposal. Wo could get some money with the costume, as a tourist attraction, We would finish it together, as a team, and then work together at least 1 season. It was pretty cool for me, I got to work in something I like, and make some money in the process. So the building began.

It's sensible to clarify that we are on a budget, a tight budget x(, so we have to find cheaper alternatives for anything we could.
First of all I needed the raw materials and tools. I started with repairing my old and battled Epson C45, that lacks some of it parts but still works (kinda, you need to watch it close so it does't destroy the paper), got pepakura viewer, and... paper. Oh wait no, I didn't, because just so happens that I live in what seems like the middle of the desert (metaforically), because I searched my entire town and found nothing. One library sent me to another, and another, and it never ended. I was directed to some major paper factories outside of the town just to get the paper. Or I could buy it online, but that means paying the delivery, and waiting up to 2 weeks (yep, that's what it takes here to deliver a package), and the handling and transportations costs me more than the paper itself. And that's just the beggining, because finding about anything here was the same trouble. Finally after days of searching I found a store that had one stored from archaic ages, and luckily the price was fair. So, I started with the printing.

The printing part was no major problem except for the fact that I needed to take care of every single paper separately because the printer would get stuck a lot.
At first I used a cutter, but the blades got blunt just too quick, after 5 / 6 pages actually, and the only use left was cutting the inner lines. I started to search for a X-acto knife everywhere, but I couldn't find any, there were just crappy knockoffs that wont even cut warm butter. So I decided to make one, I bought some blades from art stores and libraryes, found and old and dry marker in a drawer, and got a tweezer from the bathroom (an old and discarded one).

First i grabbed the blade with the tweezer and taped it with paper tape (very tight and lots of tape). then I emptied the marker and removed the tip. Then inserted the tweezer with the blade inside, very strongly (please be careful here or you could end up harmed) until the tweezer was no longer visible, and taped that to the marker. And voilá, X-acto knife ready for action.

Note: The knife is now with an old blade that has been sharpened with a grinding stone.
Ok, then I started the cutting process. I used small transparent plastic bags to separate each piece of the armor, and wrote in it wich piece was inside with a permanent marker (not the one I used to make the knife though ). After a while I went to the dentist, and he sent me to buy some stuff from a dentist specialized store, and there I found cutting heaven. In the counter there were surgical blades, I bought the ones that looked like the best suited for paper, I selected mainly two:

The left one is perfect for flaps, and the right one is perfect for cutting, over 15 pages and it wont blunt at all, and after that you can just cut the top of the knife (always carefully) and the blade thats left will cut like a new one. Also don't try to sharpen it with sanding paper or grinding stone for cutting, or you will just mess the blade. Here's some working on the paper.

Now that I had the paper cut and ready I started the gluing process, as you can imagine, you can't glue out of air, so I needed a hot glue gun. I bought a very cheap one at first (chinese of course), it worked for a while but one day it short-circuited and melted from the inside, also it blown off my house's electricity and had to change a fuse, so you've been warned. I bought a new and more expensive one, and it works like a charm even today.

One of the first thing I've make was the scaling helmet...

Note: Sorry for the bad quality of the pictures.
It was too large, so I scaled it down a bit to fit my head, and ended up with a perfect fit. Then I made the real one.

The final pep helm was a complete success, so there we go with some of the rest of the pieces.


To be continued...

 

[ShaunDark80]

Nice clean work - You should be proud.

 

[Nako]

Nice clean work - You should be proud.

Thanks Shaun, I'll keep posting and updating today, I'm in a very short deadline so it won't be as detailed and screen accurate as I shall desire, but it will be pretty cool (hope so) .

 

[RyGuyAnime]

You sir are a master craftsman

 

[Nako]

After the gluing process has been done, there comes the resin part, and as everyone knows resin and acetate are carcinogenic, so first things first, SAFETY. I can't stress this more, always wear safety equipment when working with hazardous materials. So even though I'm in a tight budged, I've spent the extra cash for the sake of safety, and it wasn't that much actually.

We bought the resin and clothglass. Here, they sell resin with 2 aditives, accelerator and catalyst. You have to add the accelerator first, mix it up until you get an homogeneous colour, then add the catalyst and do the same. The resin becomes sticky after several minutes (3 to 5) so you have to work fast, then we clean everything up with acetate. The accelerator comes in a 5ml bottle and the catalyst in a 20ml one. Because we don't wotk with such big surfaces and have to pay attention to detail, I've split the resin in 20 and worked with that, That means i needed to use 0.25ml of accelerator and 1ml of catalyst, so i bought an 1ml syringe and a pipette. To clean everything up I cut an old towel in rectangles and piles em up, so we could grab and discard them as needed. And now let me introduce the material, my friend and myself ready for work

We resined the first pieces and left them to dry, we needed the pieces to hang in the air without touching anything or it would stick, so we hanged some ropes to an old shelves, and added a few hooks made from some metal wire I had around for we could move the pieces easily. My scissors broke halfway the project and I fixed it with some epoxi resin I found hanging around in my house, can't believe it still works after the many years that it was opened, and badly sealed.
View attachment 322247
It worked like a charm, and we left the pieces hanging there for 2 days, checking on them from time to time. We are in Mar Del Plata, and now it is autumn, but in the morning the temperature reachs 0ºC and it rains very often, also we're a coast city, so the humidity levels ranges between 80% and 90% everyday. Needless to say they didn't dried-up at all. The time keeps passing, we needed a solution and we needed it fast. So we started thinking, and after getting some good ideas from my father and mixing it up with some mines and my friend's, we ended up with a new project, the drying barrel.
Some time ago my father bought a boat (he loves fishing) but after a while he couldn't use it because of work and ended up selling it. He used some kind of plastic barrels to store the fish when at sea. It is big, plastic, thick and has the top open, we needed a way to make it warm, sealed (so the air doesn't humidify) and humidity-free. To warm it up i tought using some high wattage lamps, I bought 2 100w lamps from a hardware store. My father told me there was 2 lamp holderes at home and so i just bought some wires. It just so happens that we hadn't any, so I had to make them. After cutting some metal sheets and bending it with a cilindrical shape, using a discarded cardboard cilinder that used to hold tape, the lamp holder was ready, I also used some cardboard to make little boxes around the lamp holders so they don't fall to their sides. Now we had the barrel with proper heating inside, we needed something to hold the pieces mid-air so they dry. After thinking for a while, we came with the idea of a piece of wood, drilled holes all around so we could get the metal wire inside and make it a V shape so it holds the weight. After some drilling and testing, it was great, and holded almost 20 times the weight we needed. Ok, now we needed to dehumidify, seal it, make the air flow (so it doesn't concentrate all the heat at the top and the bottom remains cold). I used an old computer power supply to power 2 80mm fans, also from an old computer, and placed them inside. To seal the top of the barrel, I used a suit cover that's waterproff, and made an elastic rope from and old tire. We tested it that night with a termometer inside. The next morning we opened it up and the termometer was 25ºC, much better than the 5º-10ºC of that morning, but still it needed more heat. After passing by my father recommended me to place an old mattress around it so it holds the heat. It was excellent, we put the matress around and some cardboard boxes over the top so it holds the heat coming from the suit cover. We tested it that night and the termometer went off scale, over 50ºC inside at all times. To dehumidify the air, we put 1kg of salt at the bottom of the barrel, It is airtight so the air inside dryes, the salt absorbs the water, and keeps it dry. It works, it costs nothing (2 lamps, 1 kg of salt, 5m of wire only, around u$s8) and it dryes up to 10 pieces in less than 8 hours.

And that's the end of this post, because I only have 25 attachments per post xD, hope you like it and find it useful, feel free to ask me any question, I will be glad to answer as soon as possible. See ya all =D.

 

[ShaunDark80]

With this level of creativity, I'm expecting full flight capability from this build

 

[Nako]

Hello, I'm back, we've been working pretty hard last week and we made some progress on the suit. First we had all the pieces pep'd and hot glued from the inside, but they lacked the supports. It was complicated, we had to harden the paper with some cardboard and popsicle sticks from the inside, but after all the pieces held in shape. Before we resined the hands and phalanges, we made some stands from cardboard and wire, so they won't glue to the table.

Now that every piece had it's shape we were ready to resin, and so we did. After the first layer, thin in some pieces and tick in others, everything holded together strongly, but still it won't hold the shape if we cut the supports.

The resin we used reacted very fast, and we had little time to work, but we wasted very little. This made us commit some mistakes, there were spots with lots of resin, that had accumulated in spherical shape, and some spots without resin at all. We used an indelible marker to spot the imperfections before we added the second layer, you can see the marker in the last photo on top of this paragraph. Here we ran into a problem, the back and chest collapsed on it's own weight inside the barrel, and the supports broke. Each piece solidified wide open and without any shape, we had to glue the supports together again, break the resin and repair the cracks, after that we did the second layer of resin.

And here we are now, everything has 2 layeres of resin and they're without the supports, we're gonna add the resin and fiberglass cloth inside the pieces today and tomorrow, and hope it dryes so we can start bondoing this week (here there is no Bondo anywhere, just crappy knockoffs that we have to deal with, so wish me luck ).
OK, see ya all in my next update =D and happy crafting.

 

[kev18284]

I like the way you made the supports. Great work so far!! Wish I had spent more time adding supports. I will be finishing up fiberglass stage by end of this month


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[Nako]

Thanks kev, yeah we actually took a lot of time doing the supports (more than expected actually) but the results are awesome, so it was worth the time. I bought the bondo today (not bondo actually, but kinda the same). Wish you good luck on your suit, and maybe I'll make some tutorials on the things I made for this suit, but whenever I have some time, now im very busy. Regards =D.