N7 Armor Build

After seeing some stellar work by people like EvilFX and Volpin at DragonCon this year, my boyfriend and I decided that we were going to make sets of ME2 N7 Armor for ourselves, for Halloween. We figured, two months, we could do it.

Well, after weeks of doing nothing but sitting in the basement with a heat gun, a couple of glue guns, countless tubes of E6000 and at least one package of glue gun sticks, we finally had something that was at least wearable at halloween:



I know they're nerf guns, but we didn't have a chance to even start work on the Omni Tools we wanted to make. We have a NYE costume convention to attend this year so our goal is to have the suits fully completed for that event.

Things left to do to our suits include:

- Apply an ingenious topcoat which Talesin came up with to replicate the carbon fiber appearance.
- Paint the lycra under suits with the 'weave' pattern.
- Make Omni Tools out of the 4'x4' of neon orange plexiglass we have in the basement. (Might make a build thread for this one since I don't think one exists? Maybe if there's interest?)
- Reinforce shin guards.

The shin guards aren't made out of EVA; we decided that the foam was just too thick and the yoga mats were too flimsy. I managed to place an order for Wonderflex and have it delivered one week before Halloween, so the shins you see in the photo above were actually completed the day of the party.

I kept a complete journal of the build process, viewable via the link in my sig.

Can you tell me more about how you plan to do the carbon fiber on the foam? I love working with EVA and I am very interested in this.

Cheers!

it's not going to be proper carbon fibre, we originally purchase a roll of pseudo fibre that was listed as vinyl, but turned out to be foil so it doesn't stick very well and will not stretch. So we found a rubber mat (for the bottom of drawers and shelves) with a fairly large rectangular weave from Walmart. Going to basically drape it on the parts (maybe hit it with some spray adhesive so it would temporarily stick to the shapes) and spray a gloss clear through it, thus giving a grid patterns of gloss/matte.

Looking good. Can't wait to see the finished product!

Well, we've finally got the weave printed on the under suits. If I were to make the under suits again (which is not out of the question) I think I would print the pattern on the fabric first, then sew the panels together. Still need to put the 'carbon' patterning on the armor.

Über epic!

That is awesomely awesome. Gotta get me a glue-gun!