Thanks for the kind words. It was great to meet you in person and I'm glad you liked my booth.
Here's the last part of the build process...
First up, I had to rough-cut all of the vacformed armor parts:
Since I was dressing a whole squad, I enlisted some help in doing the knife and scissors work. Here's my friend Breana cutting out some shoulder parts:
Here I am trying one of the chests out:
I'd also roughed out a plan for making Magnum holsters to strap onto the armor:
They didn't work out very well though, so I had to take that plan back to the drawing board.
Here's a shot of my friend Trevor fitting some of the straps:
Since my sister Rose had agreed to wear one of these, the next thing was to have her test-fitted for shoulders:
My sister Sheryl showed up later as we'd made more progress on the strapping system, so I had her try on a set of the armor too:
The morning before the Maker Faire, these suits still needed some strapping and final detailing. Here's a shot of Rose and my nephew painting the rivet heads to match the rest of the armor:
Meanwhile, my niece separated out all of the soft parts into kits by size:
Sheryl and Rose did a lot of the final strap work too:
The morning of the Maker Faire, all that was left to do was to get everyone dressed:
In this pic, the combat knife is just one of the raw black resin casts and it's riveted right onto the chest plate. It wasn't until we were on location that I realized that there were no underarm straps holding the chest plate down, so we added those too. Sooner or later I'll go back and build the forming bucks to make the armor plates that run under the arms.
More pics of the finished rigs can be found in my blog:
http://protagonist4hire.blogspot.com/2011/05/halo-marines-continued.html.
I'm still going through receipts to put together the parts list if you're looking for the soft parts. Stay tuned.
