Weekend of Failure!

So I have to begin this by admitting that I failed horribly this past weekend. My plan at the outset was to buckle down and finish up a costume that I was planning to wear THIS weekend at RealmsCon down in Corpus Christi. I spent all morning running around trying to find last minute little things for my costume that I’d need to build it. (Like metallic copper spraypaint.) Came up short on most of those things and had to admit defeat on the search. 

So I grabbed a couple bottles of locally brewed (Austin) beers, a burger from a local burger joint, and sat down to start working on the electronics side of the project.

Texan Burger from Billy Bob’s Burgers, complete with tater tots (that would soon be joined by Sriracha), and a Dr Pepper (also from Texas, amusingly enough). Pretty tasty, in my opinion the #2 burger place in the Killeen area (#1 being Black Meg’s #43), but to be honest it’s a pretty close shot. I think Meg’s edges it out just due to price. Billy Bob’s, however, is completely shameless about the “healthiness” of their food, so that’s a plus for them. It’s all about flavor and giving the customer what they want, which tends to be a delicious burger and damn the consequences.

After feeding my cat Lilith some of the bacon, and polishing this bad boy off, I set up this little work area for all the soldering I was going to have to do. The plan was pretty simple. I was going to solder short wires (about 5 inches) to the leads of the vacuum tubes I purchased so that I could hook them all up to a breadboard to accomplish two goals: 1) Make sure the math and design I worked out is sound and a 9V battery will indeed power all the vacuum tubes I’m trying to light up. And 2) see how long it takes for the ungodly amount of current 5 vacuum tubes takes to drain a 9V battery down below the 6V needed to power the heating element of most of these tubes.

The first beer, with all my soldering equipment in the background. The Yogi by Rogness Brewing Company. The bottle says “Spiced Amber.” I’m a fan of Amber beers, spicing them sounds like an interesting experiment, so it seemed like a logical choice. It weighs in at 5.2% ABV and 39 IBU (which is kind of right where I like my IBU’s it seems). Their website calls it a “Spiced Chai Beer” and that’s pretty accurate. Combine Chai with Beer and this is what you get. If you think it’s a weird combination, you’re right. It smells awesome. It tastes pretty good cold too. It’s definitely an interesting taste, has a lot going on with it. But unfortunately as it warms up, the black pepper flavor starts to overpower everything else and it loses its appeal (unless you like black pepper, then you might just love it more).

So, to give you guys an example of the effect I’m going for, if you’ve never seen a vacuum tube in action, vacuum tubes have heating elements to make the flow of electrons easier across their internal gobbledegook. I’m not going to get all techy on you because right about now half of you would just go all “eyes glazed over” and I’d lose you. So fear not! It’s all about dealies and stuffs here. So anyway, you put 6V across the pins that power the heater dealies and boom, nice subtle glow:

It’s not very impressive in the daylight, but when it’s darker, it’ll look awesome. Or people won’t get it and be all like, “Meh.” Tubes are cool people, tubes are cool. The hipsters are right with this one (for once). However, little did I know, it’s pretty much impossible to solder onto these leads. The solder will just glob up at the end of the resin wire and none of it will actually stick to the post.

Le sadface! Solder on the wire, but none on the tube. I think it’s because they don’t heat up enough because the heater soaks up a LOT of heat, and they’re probably made of some kind of metal that doesn’t like solder. Either way, I was trying to avoid having to get the little mounting brackets they make for them which have normal electronic leads, but alas, fortune was not in my favor. So I had to admit defeat and order the parts. They’re due here early next week… not in time to finish the build before RealmsCon. Alas!

So, since I couldn’t finish the electronic work and do my test, I decided to start working on the grunt work of my armor/tech piece. So let me try to lay out what I’m going for here. What I’m trying to do is make what would be the pauldrons (complete with “protection” for my upper arm), couters, and vambraces of plate mail armor for one arm. Built into the shoulder piece (pauldron) is going to be the electrical circuit I’m working on, mounted into this:

What in the hell is that? You might ask? Well, I picked it for it’s unique shape, and the tubes are going to stick out of it around the large edge. I also picked it because it will be difficult for someone else to get their hands on a found piece like this, because it’s the plastic case a gas mask canister comes in. The plan is to figure out how to anchor it to the armor itself on the shoulder piece after painting it with metallic copper spraypaint. From this thing will be two copper pipes that run down the arm to the elbow, connecting behind the bit of armor that protects the elbow (couter), to hide the hinging mechanism. My plan is to use two different size copper pipes/tubes so that they can collapse into one another and telescope and become a faux piston. After the hinging mechanism, it’s going to continue down to the piece “protecting” the forearm (vambrace), and have a way of mounting down into the armor using some fittings. 

This is the medium of choice. It’s called “EVA Foam” and if you want you can look up all the nerdy scienceness here. Basically it’s awesome to use as a base for making armor for costumes. It’s really cheap (a 6 pack of 2×2 foot squares runs about $20 at Walmart – they sell it as protective flooring for your home gym), and easily moldable. Basically you heat it up, bend it into the position/shape you want it to be in, and when it cools it stays that way. Mess up and get the shape wrong? Heat it up again and it will flatten a bit and you can shape it again, as many times as you need to to get the shape you want. From there you can seal it and paint it and leave the textured side exposed (there’s a lot of people that do this for contrast on Mass Effect and Halo armor), or you can basically upholster it with another material. 

First up is shaping! There’s kind of two methods of doing this. You can either make a mold and mimic vacuum forming. Heat material in oven, stretched/sandwhiched in a form if possible, or by itself for a few minutes before pushing it down over a mold or placing into a mold. Or you can use a really powerful hairdryer, AKA a Heat Gun.

This thing gets Hot As Shit* (* – Approximate Temperature). It’s got a low and a high setting. And you just heat the foam up and bend it. So I took some quick measurements of my arm and cut the foam.

As you can see, you get a lot of mileage out of a single 2×2 foot square. It’s easy to cut too, just grab a box cutter and cut away. Anyway, a short while later, I took a heat gun to it and poof.

Vambrace formed. It needs some finishing now (the diamond plate pattern is on the underside, this is what the back looks like). The next step is going to be to use a dremel and sand it down and finish the edges. Then upholster it and figure out how I’m going to glue/attach the straps to it. 

A wider piece to cover my upper arm. I worked on forming the piece to cover my shoulder, but I think I need to go back to the drawing board on this one. I’m going to take a look at some of the papercraft armor out there and see what I can take from it. Since this project no-longer has a deadline I can do more research and take more time with it. I also need to figure out how I’m going to work in the mounted circuitry, so we’ll see how that goes. And I will definitely keep you all updated.

So, the upholstry experiment. My plan was this. I bought some of this stuff:

It’s basically that tape you use for air conditioning ducts, but made of copper. Remember back at Dragon-Con when I talked to the Steampunk Big Daddy/Scuba guy? This is the stuff he put on his helmet. As you can see here, it picks up fingerprints really damn well. It’s also unfortunately thin. I cut off a chunk of foam to use as a test strip. I was going to wrap it in tape completely, punch some holes in it with a rotary punch, install a rivet and see how the copper stuff responds to such abuse. 

Unfortunately, this stuff is horribly thin. The marks on this test bit were made by my fingernail. Imagine if I ran into someone, or brushed the wrong way against a wall, or a chair? I need to figure out some way to put a more solid backing behind it. Hopefully that will make it more structurally sound.  The other option, which I think I might opt for, is to seal the foam with something like Mod Podge, and then paint it (otherwise the paint will seep/soak into the foam and it won’t look good). I’m leaning toward the second option. We’ll see how things go. 

So, with both parts of this particular project on hold and awaiting parts and paint (trust me, NO ONE had metallic spray paint this shiny of copper, I had to order it from Amazon), I decided to drown my sorrows in beer #2.

Sorry for the blurry, but you can still see that this is Rogness’ Bella Belgian-style Golden. You know me and Golden style beers. Two of my three favorite beers are Golden styles (Delirium Tremens and Weyerbacher’s Merry Monks). So this hit home. 7.5% ABV and 28 IBU. A good rendition of a golden and exactly what you expect from one. It was a good way to end the even.

So that’s where I sit, waiting on parts and planning. This coming weekend I’m still going down to Corpus Christi to RealmsCon and I plan to attend a BUNCH of Steampunk and Costuming panels. 8 of them jotted down based on the schedule. I’m also hitting up a couple of Video Game panels (A voice acting panel and a “How to Get into the Industry” panel, both will have elements of sound design stuff there). And a couple writing panels (these mostly focus on Comic writing, because I have a pet project mulling in the background if I can ever afford to pay someone to do the artwork). And also I will (totally not) be stalking Voltaire this weekend, I will be attending one of his shows, however. I also might sit in on his “Hour with Voltaire” panel. There will also probably be some time somewhere to drop by his booth and chitchat with him at some point in time. Probably. Sometime. We’ll see. Totally not stalking. Promise.

So! Until next time! 

(Administrative note: I’ve decided to set up a Twitter thing for this thing. You can find it here if you’re so inclined. I plan to post occasional sneak peeks at what I’m up to and random other things there. Feel free to drop me a line there. I look forward to hearing from you. Feel free to comment here too, that’ll be fun.

Also, I’m starting working on a setup for doing some Let’s Play videos. I’m probably going to do them live on Twitch.tv, and then post the videos after-the-fact to YouTube. Right now I’ve got a couple Shadowrun Returns videos up there testing out my setup. I’m going to experiment with it, but I’ll probably post stuff on Twitter/Facebook when I’m going to be playing live, if you want to watch or join in the fun. I’ll be doing more stuff with that in the future too. That’s another project in the works. Busy, busy me.)