I'm waay overdue for an update on this thread.
For starters, painting has happened. Here's one of the shoulders:
That's not much of a view, but it doesn't matter much because all you're looking at is the shiny silver basecoat. Just like you can see here on the pelvis:
And these other parts:
The back of the lower legs were fitted with plywood flats to allow them to bolt onto the stilts:
These were fiberglassed into place with the shin plates clamped on to ensure that everything would align properly once the glass had cured:
I also went ahead and cobbled together the vent details for the chest:
They came out okay:
Somewhere along the way I also installed a series of rings to hold the hoses on the upper chest:
I also installed the vent louvers in the back:
They came out okay, but my chocolate lab "Tiki" (aka "Moop the Spastic Dog Noodle") was not impressed:
I also made a quick and dirty version of the heraldry shield for the left shoulder:
This simple piece of foam was sanded to about the right contour, skinned over with Bondo, then sanded furiously:
A few coats of primer and it was good to go:
Once it was glossy and waxed, I prepped it for molding:
The mold was a simple, one-piece, fiberglass job:
Which separated from the original prototype cleanly:
Thanks to a copious layer of mold release:
Then I polished up the mold, coated it with more release agent, and laid up a copy of the shield:
It too came out of the mold easily:
Then it was just a matter of trimming and painting. Here it is nearly done and ready to mount:
I also sculpted out a quick and dirty belt buckle detail with the help of a 3D printed skull:
Along the way, my friend Sierra helped me out by tuning up the last bits of the sculpt for the right hand:
Then I made one of the ugliest rushed molds I've ever made:
The first cast came out okay:
Then it was time to get started on converting the right hand sculpt into a left hand sculpt:
Again, Sierra took the lead on that:
Then I molded it too:
But I was getting into crunch mode for the Maker Faire, so photography became less important.
While all of this was going on, I put my new assistant Madison to work making magnetic purity seals:
The wax seals are just resin casts with holes drilled into the backside to fit rare earth magnets before painting and adding the fabric text strips:
We may have gotten carried away:
Not pictured: the first round of fifteen purity seals tucked away in a bag somewhere.
The real nightmare though, was the lettering. You may remember that I had a huge pile of laser-cut styrene letters that I'd painted gold. Now it was time to start gluing them in place. The first step was to arrange them in their assigned spaces:
Each row was then covered with painter's tape so the backing could be peeled off:
Then, one by one, the outline of each letter was scored into the part below, the paint was scratched off so the glue could adhere directly to the part, the letter was bent slightly by hand to conform to the curve of the part it was glued to, and then, finally, it was glued in place. It was kind of a pain:
Moop the Spastic Dog Noodle was not impressed.
Not at all:
The little letters were truly a pain:
But given that there were three or four of us doing the work, it could've been worse:
It was Sierra who had the dubious honor of installing the very last letter:
With all of the lettering in place, I could finally get a start on the weathering. For this project, it was just a simple matter of a quick blackwash to bring out the details and dumb down the chrome paint to look more like old, well-polished steel, while tarnishing the gold to an appropriately old look as well:
Then Madison picked out a few details on the hands with flat black:
Here's a snapshot of the chest with the shoulders bolted on and the helmet wedged in place:
While I still had a few more pieces to make before doing the final rigging to make it wearable, I did manage to get this guy tied together enough to at least work as a statue for the Bay Area Maker Faire last month. He looked about like so:
Mortal for scale:
I know the polearm is wrong. Right now I still need to make proper upper arms, the correct force halberd, and the wrist-mounted storm bolter.
That last one I'm almost done with:
Stay tuned...