Flyerfye's Foam Reach MK V Custom (as always, pic heavy)

Hey folks! Been a while! Flyerfye back once again to work on the Reach Mark V suit I've been planning to build for LITERALLY OVER THREE YEARS. And in all that time I managed to not even build a single solitary hand plate! But time and progress march on, and after being prompted to bring out my ODST suit to a con, I got so many questions and compliments that it rekindled my interest, and here we go, my custom Mark V Reach build!


Obligatory Vanity Picture: build plan may change at any time


I've actually never done any of the more complex foam builds up until now, so my first try was on the left gauntlet (which is a relatively small piece, and any minor mistakes on the top half can be covered up by a forearm attachment. Fortunately, it wasn't actually that bad, although my results are at this point more hot glue than foam. I ended up adjusting and cutting some of the parts AFTER I put the thing together, so there's a lot of junk I'm not really happy with. Oh well, they'll work for now, I'll upgrade them later!


gross hot glue everywhere, I've smoothed this down a bit since this pic was taken


Some weird twisting happened here, but it's not really noticable from most angles.


Behold my terrible falling apart gloves. I started doing some details in craft foam, probably will look better once it's primed and all the same color (I can only hope).

looking good. Always good to see new builds. Me and foam have never been BFFs so I still do papercraft. But yours should come out fine.

Thanks!

Got the other gauntlet cut out and assembled, it's amazing how much better you can get at something just doing it twice instead of once! A lot less glue everywhere.



Drew (and messed up) a few lines for detailing work on the left gauntlet, not sure what all I'm doing about that yet.



Well, this shows the improvement fairly clearly.

Unfortunately, that was the last of my foam, I'm trying out ordering an entire roll from a new supplier, expecting it to be here tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

Sorry for the double post, but it's a new day!

I have good news and bad news;

Good news first: I got my giant roll of foam!

It's pretty giant.


Bad news: It's, uh, not gonna work as well as I thought it was. It looks to be a different composition from the foam mats, it's a lot less dense, and significantly softer. This also makes it more prone to damage, and has a soft velvety feel. It even does that thing where you can run your hand across it in different directions and it gets a little lighter/darker depending on the direction, like a car seat. It also doesn't cut nearly as well, and is actually more prone to stretching out than wanting to be cut properly, even with an extremely sharp knife or hot knife. It also dents permanently at the slightest touch, and is completely unrecoverable if you mess anything up. I fear that even running a hot glue gun over it will melt the crap out of it.

This was seriously the cleanest cut I could get out of the stuff.


Compare to my "not even trying" cuts on the foam mats:


That being said it's REALLY SOFT AND SQUISHY. I may still find a use for it on parts of the undersuit and for padding. It also doesn't have the pattern on the backside, and you could potentially make much larger single parts out of it, as well.

Oh well, onward we go, except now once again I have nothing to do but cut out foam templates and wait for my next order to ship.

Pictured: EXCITEMENT


See you guys when my foam gets here!

That's really strange, the super squishy foam. I've never seen anything like that before. My only guess is that you could, like you said, try a hot knife on it. But the forearms look good, it's amazing how much you improved from the first to the second one.

Thanks! Hopefully I'll continue to get better at foam as I go through this suit (and then get sick of looking at my old work and redo it...)

Supposedly they're both technically EVA foam! I've seen the squishy version before actually, used in cushioning mats for camping, just didn't know it was actually squishy EVA.

Oh well, experiment complete!