Falcon Folding Wings Costume for my 9yr old

indiefilmgeek

Sr Member
After finishing my daughter's Baby Groot costume, I only had two weeks to pull off a Falcon costume for my 9yr old son. The catch... he wanted wings that 'popped' out of the EXO-7 flight system back-pack. :eek

Here's how it turned out.
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And this is a look at the wings in motion!

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How I got there in two weeks...

First I started with the design on the wings. I design by trial and error, so I mocked up the wing design out of wood and paper first.
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This is the test of the hinging of the wings.


I then created the wooden frame pieces out of aluminum.
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I then took images of the Winter Soldier Falcon wings and modified them in Photoshop to fit the size/shape of these wings. By printing that out to scale, I had a template for the design of the parts.
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For the wing material, I picked a 2mm foamedPVC. This stuff is AMAZING. Lightweight and easy to cut, but works like styrene.

I laid the printed template down over the foamedPVC and figured out what panels would have which wing parts.
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That resulted in the following...
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And this is the same wing - closed (folded down)
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To hold the two wings I built a wooden box with two panels. Because the wings will overlap when folded, one wing will be 3" in front of the other.
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Here are the wings mounted in the box...
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I used the templates again to figure out where the paint colors should go and which colors to use.
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...and then started taping off areas to
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Once all the wing parts were painted it looked like this...
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For the straps, I bought a cheap hydration pack with a waist and chest strap.
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I then cut off the fancy back and just kept the straps and padding. I added LOTS of little pieces to it!
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And then plasti-dipped them and painted them with a spray metallic paint.
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Which looked like this when completed.
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There the EXO-7 is complete and on my work table.
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And here it is on my kiddo!
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A note on gluing foamedPVC... I hadn't tried gluing foamed PVC together before so I tried a few adhesives I had ready to hand. I went with super-glue which worked great, but Gorilla glue also worked well.

 
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Dude you knocked it out of the park as usual !
Also I gotta look into this foamed PVC seems like some good stuff
 
The saddest thing about that gif is that everyone in the back is not nearly as impressed as they should be. Amazing work!!! I love it!
 
That is SO sick! Haha, now the bar is set WAAAAY too high for all of his future halloween costumes!
Quick question- approximately how much did it weigh? I'm thinking about doing something similar but I'm already going to have a lot of armor on & don't want to be dying.
Great job!!
 
That is SO sick! Haha, now the bar is set WAAAAY too high for all of his future halloween costumes!
Quick question- approximately how much did it weigh? I'm thinking about doing something similar but I'm already going to have a lot of armor on & don't want to be dying.
Great job!!

The Foamed PVC was very light, but the hinged aluminum and the housing for the wings made it weigh more than what I wanted it to. He went to several events and even trick-or-treated in it for an hour, but if I had more time I would have focused on making it much lighter.

Some ideas for that could have included:
  • Using light wooden wing-frames rather than aluminum.
  • Cutting out large sections of the Foamed PVC and using metallic fabric stretched across it to both add the color and keep the weight down
  • Found much lighter material for the back-pack/hinge frame system. I used plywood... way too heavy.
Thanks,
Jon
 
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