Poor poor Thorssoli. Any money he makes on these projects just goes to storage space for all those molds! :lol
This one's not a money making project. Maybe someone else will want one sooner or later, but for now it's just a thing to keep me busy in between paying gigs. The storage space is no joke. I'm thinking I'll have to purge a couple of shelves and get rid of a lot of things in order to find space for these babies. Right now, my shop's getting a bit cluttered:
Wow, the amount of work involved is staggering when you pose and think of it:eek...it's a good thing that you have lots of little hands helping you. Keep up the great work, it's going to be the bomb when finished!!
I try not to pause to think of the amount of hours in this thing. It'd end up making me upset. That said, it's been fun hanging out with a few friends when they get a chance to come by and lend a hand.
I'm going to be the mook that asks for specifics about the fiberglassing process you're doing to make these molds. What's the clay you're using to build the walls? Can you go into more detail about the materials you're using, and what you're casting the finished parts with?
Power armor like this was one of those projects I wanted to do and have been thinking about for the last year while I work on other things... I have to say, seeing half a dozen+ people work on this project is driving home how much labor's involved. Not sure I could tackle this if I wanted to, based on what I'm seeing.
The clay I'm using for the mold walls is a plastilene oil-based clay. Soft grade Chavant NSP works just fine. You can get it here:
http://amzn.to/2rK3xpg
I'm using orange tooling gelcoat and black regular gelcoat from whatever supplier offers the lowest price when I'm buying. That stuff seems pretty consistent. The laminating resin is polyester bond coat from TAP Plastics. The glass mat is 3/4 ounce mat, also from TAP. I use the same resin and mat for both the molds and the final parts. The molds get at least three layers of mat. Usually more like four. The parts are usually two layers with a third around the edges for reinforcement. At some point, I'll be editing together a few Youtube videos about this project that will describe the process in greater detail. In the meantime, you can check out more of the same sort of work in this other project I did where I explain molding (
LINK) and laying up parts (
LINK) in fiberglass.
Labor-wise, it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that I decided to pick up the pace here at the end. If I wasn't in a hurry, I'd happily do it all myself over the next few months.
On that front, it's time for an update.
It's been about a week since my last post. In that time, I finished the four-part mold for the back as well as a five-part mold for the chest. Here you can see both of them (and the heel mold) ready for gelcoat and fiberglass:
At the same time, Lewis put the finishing touches on the shins:
And the finger parts:
While he was working on those, I also made a 7-part mold for each of the shoulders:
The toe mold was finished with one section made of silicone so I could capture the more delicate ridge details on the front end:
The same thing was done for the lug details on the front of both shoulders:
On the subject of silicone, I went ahead and molded the helmet:
With all of the rushing, I neglected to get photos along the way. Still, the mold got done and the first cast came out okay:
I also went ahead and boxed up the finger pieces:
Each of those boxes will become a two-part rubber block mold when I get a chance to separate them. They're just some of I don't know how many small molds I've got scattered around the shop for this project right now:
But the bulk of my time this past week has been spent laying up fiberglass. Here I am making the very last section of the very last fiberglass mold for this project:
Sadly, I wasn't able to get the last five parts laid up in the molds in time to have this guy walking around at the Bay Area Maker Faire this past weekend. I came really close (there's already black gelcoat in those last five molds) but it'll be tomorrow or Wednesday by the time I've had a chance to get a bit of rest and finish up that last bit of glass work. Still, for the folks that were at the Maker Faire, I had plenty of other things to show off:
So, after deciding to postpone the rest of the T-60 project for a couple of days, loading up my whole display worth of props and two truckloads worth of costumes, and three days on my feet answering questions and telling people about prop making, I've decided I need a day off so I can see straight again:
For now, here's where the project stands:
It's worth noting that all of the orange parts will be grey in a couple of days. Then I just need to make a prototype for the tanks on the back, design the rigging for the finger articulation, and sculpt all of the rubber bits.
Piece of cake.