"Help!" for: Electronics

[23Magnum]

This thread will contain general first hand knowledge of electronics involved in the props and costumes you're working on.

People who don't know: Post questions.

People who know: Answer those questions.

Please be as clear and detailed as possible with your questions and/or answers. Repeated questions or variations of certain questions may be consolidated over time into an FAQ section in the post following this one.

Always ask and answer questions as if you were asking/answering your mother or grandmother. In other words, politely.

Rudeness and/or impatience will be met with an infraction. You don't want too many of those.

These threads are meant to reduce and hopefully eliminated the need for the numerous 'I need help threads' that seem to generate endlessly in this section of the forum.

They are not a be all, end all to all questions that could ever be asked though. Some questions will be project specific and you may need to ask those IN the project's thread itself. However, some may not see your questions there so you may post a link to said project thread in the appropriate "Help!" thread when you need the attention of a few extra eyes.

[23Magnum]

FAQ Section:

[23Magnum]

Tutorials that involve this thread's subject matter and are approved by the site staff will be linked in this post. Please review them as they may already contain the answers you seek.

Tutorial Section:

[ShadyTrojan]

I want to Illuminate a transparent sword with LED's from the inside. Sanding and frosting will obscure lights and wires.

Will resin eat through LED wiring and/or bulbs?

IF NO: How can I go about laying the wire and lights Inside the mold and poor resin around it?

IF YES: What about a strip of EL wire?

[thatdecade]

Resin won't eat the wires themselves, but it may eat the jackets depending on what they are made of. Shouldn't be an issue, have a look at my energy sword LED blade guide: http://www.westaby.net/2010/04/led-rail-blade-assembly/

If you are worried, do a small test run before making any big plans. I would think that solid poured blades would be heavy and put a lot of stress on the handle.

[GiellaCustoms]

resin can get very very hot because it is a pure chemical reaction. I would put the wire in some type of pvc tube of something, they have clear stuff at lowes. As for the EL wire it is known to go bad or be easily breakable. just use the frosted edge of the LED to get the effect. I have done this method with car AMP racks in the past and it looked amazing

[ventrue]

resin can get very very hot because it is a pure chemical reaction. I would put the wire in some type of pvc tube of something, they have clear stuff at lowes. As for the EL wire it is known to go bad or be easily breakable. just use the frosted edge of the LED to get the effect. I have done this method with car AMP racks in the past and it looked amazing

The bigger problem will probably be that resin is pretty aggressive towards other plastics and may eat certain types of isolation away regardless of temperature.

What I would do is get uncoated, unpainted copper wire and put that into the resin without anything around it. Isolation shouldn't be a problem, as long as the wires don't touch each other (unless you use conductive reinforcement fibers like carbon, of course).

[iSergi]

Anyone have a tutorial for an energy sword? or can somebody just tell me the materials I need to make one?

Thanks

[thatdecade]

Depends on what skills you have, what materials are you good at working with? Always good to stick to your strengths.

My sword blades are a material called PETG and were cast on a vacuuformer by Sean Bradley. Vacuuforming the blades really is the best method because the blades are strong enough to be swung (flat plexi blades are not). The handle was also sculpted by Sean and cast in... (I'm guessing) smooth cast 300 urethane. Sean did a lot of planning to make sure everything fit together.

[S73L105]

What about installing a fan in the Mk6 iron man suit (as in helmet and/or cuirass)?