A little rough

[ModernMeltdown]

Hey Guys, first post and first build. Me and my partner are working on a foam spartan mark 4 build. I finished the helmet tonight and wanted to introduce myself to the community. I still have a long way to go, sanding, filler, plasti-dip and paint. So at the moment the helmet is still a diamond in the rough.

 

[Minishdude1]

Honestly for your first build you cant expect much, but after all is done I believe it'll look good. Take pride in your work bro! Cant wait to see pics

 

[ModernMeltdown]

Started the bottom of the chest piece tonight. Decided to clean up the helmet a bit we are going to do some filling with bondo.

 

[ModernMeltdown]

Front of the chest piece is done, working my way around.

 

[FlyinPhil]

Gonna have to advise you against using bondo on a foam based prop! Foam is very flexible. ...Bondo is super brittle. Any slight twist to the prop, and the bondo will crack and crumble, as well as it is very, very hard to sand something that has a flexible base. I tried this on an eva and craft foam magnum that I made, and ended up scrapping the whole thing.

For foam, you want to bevel your edges and continuously use new blades (I use a blade for 6-8 cuts and then toss it away), this way you will be able to make clean joints without any gaps.

Good luck with your build!

 

[ModernMeltdown]

Hi Phil,
Thanks for the advice, would the plastidip coating fill some of the gaps? Also here is my work on the back tonight.

 

[Sped10909]

I'm new as well man and looking good so far man! As a filler I've heard to use stuff called Quickseal (might be spelled Kuickseal). Heard its great for foam just fill it and scrape the excess off before it dries because it can't be sanded. I hope this info helps!

 

[Spartan Warrior]

For clean edges I recommend using a hot knife, because it is using heat to make the cut you will almost never have to replace the blade.

 

[x30ffx]

What knife are you using?

Although I personally have not worked with EVA, I have worked a lot with other types of foam in architectural models. I would use a box cutter with a straight, metal edge As you cut, the blade should be perpendicular to the ground, and should run smoothly along the straight edge. I would cut very lightly, and allow many passes before separating.

Nevertheless, nice start! As much as I am starting myself, we will both learn lots very quickly

 

[ModernMeltdown]

Thanks for all the help and advice i'm keeping my knife sharp,and I'm using a new foam papkura model which has made the whole process faster.

 

[FlyinPhil]

Hey! So plasti dip won't full those gaps, but I have read about people using some form of silicone caulking to fill gaps. That being said, I haven't used anything for gaps before and I would look more at your cutting and gluing technique first!

I would strongly recommend finding the user, Drack, on the forums here, and check out his foam tutorials on YouTube. The man does fantastic work with foam, and does a very good job of explaining how he manipulates it. I learned a number of my techniques from checking out his videos and projects on this site.

Now back to your work! The shapes of your pieces look good, but it almost appears that you aren't adding any bevel (or angle) to your cuts for parts that need to be glued together at an angle. Here is a picture of one of my foam pieces, all cut out and ready for glueing. As you can see the bevels are very clean, and I probably used one razor blade to cut this piece, and then threw it out. All of my cuts are done in one or two passes, as I find any more than that, and you are just unnecessarily dulling your blade. This is what your pieces should look like for any parts that must form an angle once glued together.



And lastly is a pic of the base foam of my forearms, which, as you can see, has been beveled and glued together to form nice clean seams.



It just takes a little practice, but great work so far! I'm looking forward on seeing how your armor turns out!

 

[ModernMeltdown]

You are right, I wasn't adding enough of those cuts into the foam for the helmet, I have however done that for the chest piece, worked out a lot cleaner then the helmet, thanks for the tutorial I will give it a look. I may even do another helmet when the rest of the body is done, not sure yet, depends how enthusiastic I feel.

 

[FlyinPhil]

Nice work on the chest! Already seeing lots of improvement.

 

[Afrousjojo]

looks good for a start, keep it up

 

[Chainer Cygnus]

Looks pretty good, how hard is the foam to work with? I thought about doing some pieces in foam but I don't know still, I like the look of the fiberglass armor.

 

[ModernMeltdown]

Foam is so easy to work with, it has some great benefits. For example if you glue a piece in the wrong spot or cut a piece wrong, warm the glue up, take the piece out replace or re-glue it's a very forgiving material. Where you can get into trouble is with the papkura files, you have to modify them for foam, this means using your instincts to remove unnecessary pieces. But in the files section on the forums there are already files modified for foam and their great to use. I'm going to do another helmet using them.With the right paint you can still get that great metalic look, but I have only seen videos. With foam you also get to skip the fiber glass and bondo, which look amazing but you need a workshop to do it safely and properly. Foam is also lighter then fiberglass, but I believe it will probably be more susceptible to ware and tear. Hope my limited knowledge helps

- - - Updated - - -

Time for an update before I start the cod piece, I have found a better file, one specifically for foam. The chest used one of the foam files and I think I will re-do the helmet using one of those files.

 

[Chainer Cygnus]

Foam is so easy to work with, it has some great benefits. For example if you glue a piece in the wrong spot or cut a piece wrong, warm the glue up, take the piece out replace or re-glue it's a very forgiving material. Where you can get into trouble is with the papkura files, you have to modify them for foam, this means using your instincts to remove unnecessary pieces. But in the files section on the forums there are already files modified for foam and their great to use. I'm going to do another helmet using them.With the right paint you can still get that great metalic look, but I have only seen videos. With foam you also get to skip the fiber glass and bondo, which look amazing but you need a workshop to do it safely and properly. Foam is also lighter then fiberglass, but I believe it will probably be more susceptible to ware and tear. Hope my limited knowledge helps

Thanks for the informative response. I saw a comment somewhere that someone was considering using foam due to their build (tall and lanky) because it will allow them more flexibility to ensure the overall look of the armor. Would you consider that a solid line of reasoning in your experience? I ask because as I said, I have none at all, and am also tall and lanky and worry that an all fiberglass suit will look stretched out on me with extra area being shown in the torso/arms/neck/legs.

 

[FlyinPhil]

Thanks for the informative response. I saw a comment somewhere that someone was considering using foam due to their build (tall and lanky) because it will allow them more flexibility to ensure the overall look of the armor. Would you consider that a solid line of reasoning in your experience? I ask because as I said, I have none at all, and am also tall and lanky and worry that an all fiberglass suit will look stretched out on me with extra area being shown in the torso/arms/neck/legs.

That was me with the tall and lanky post haha. I have built all of my suit, aside from the helmet, from foam and from scratch (just looking at pictures, no plans or templates), and I am more than happy with the fit and look of my suit. If you were to use pep files for the foam, you would have the same issue with parts looking somewhat out of proportion, but foam is very easy to modify, so you could theoretically add or remove sections of foam to fit your needs.

 

[Chainer Cygnus]

That was me with the tall and lanky post haha. I have built all of my suit, aside from the helmet, from foam and from scratch (just looking at pictures, no plans or templates), and I am more than happy with the fit and look of my suit. If you were to use pep files for the foam, you would have the same issue with parts looking somewhat out of proportion, but foam is very easy to modify, so you could theoretically add or remove sections of foam to fit your needs.

Thanks Phil! I couldn't remember where I saw the post. I guess as I get into my build I may be asking a lot of these kinds of questions (i.e. how do you add to it/modify it to look like it fits with the overall theme). I guess I could go the long route and just work out and try to put on muscle mass or weight but that seems extreme. Sometimes it's tall being the bean pole.

 

[ModernMeltdown]

Thanks for the informative response. I saw a comment somewhere that someone was considering using foam due to their build (tall and lanky) because it will allow them more flexibility to ensure the overall look of the armor. Would you consider that a solid line of reasoning in your experience? I ask because as I said, I have none at all, and am also tall and lanky and worry that an all fiberglass suit will look stretched out on me with extra area being shown in the torso/arms/neck/legs.

I would agree with that idea, I picked foam mostly because I don't have the equipment nor the workshop in order to do the build safely and well. Also as I have just started out,foam is an easy to use material. I also liked the idea of being able to easily modify the pieces. So I started with a complex papkura file that was way to complicated for me, that's why my helmet looks wonky I found these files here and I would highly recommend them for a beginner like myself ( http://www.405th.com/file-archive.php?do=download&downloadid=433 ). But if you don't have a military mans body, this is your best bet. You can tighten, modify as needed. Years ago I tried taking a crack at using fiber glass, it was a disaster to be honest. The problem is that if you screw up with that stuff your screwed and you have to start over. When using resin, everything has to be very exact. Another great advantage with foam is that it's a lot cheaper then resin and bondo. Btw I am by no means saying that resin suits are crap, the complete opposite, I just don't have the skill or workshop for a resin build.