First Attempt: Mk. V foam armor, WIP

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Sierra 720

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Hey all, it has been a very long while since I've posted anything in earnest! Six years, at the very least. Since my last major visitation here, I have indeed been fiddling around with pepakura for a lot more, with limited success, due to time constraints and Bondo. As such, I've lurked around here, and other places, watching and learning, and playing with metal armor-crafting as well, until I have deemed my skills worthwhile enough to return, and to attempt a new medium- EVA foam, and while on my winter semester at college, have begun the slow construction process. Without further ado, here we go!

Apologies for the clutter of textbooks and notebooks, it has been a very busy week so far leading up to a midterm.

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Here we have the tiles with all the parts from the front chest piece (by my estimates at least), using the Reach Torso V3 foam template by the illustrious L3X BLU3R1V3R.
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And here we have what I have cut out so far of the plates immediately around the neck and frontal chest. frankly, the odd Y-shaped piece is giving me trouble, but I'm thinking it's because of the general need for the collar of pepakura that normally secured it to the rest of the plates, so I will have to look into that when trimming everything into place.

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Finally, the massed paperized pep-files, which gave me more than a fair share of grief during the ride back home with these.

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Overall, despite my rather rusty skills with a x-acto knife, I find this to be a curious process so far, and look forward to my future progress in this.
 
Welcome back! Oh the plights that we students face. Kudos on getting back into it,especially during a crazy busy time.

Looking clean and crisp, looking forward to seeing more :)
 
Alright, a little more cutting and similar achieved today, but alas my temporary R&R ends tomorrow, so I will have to return to school, with limited tools. Until that point, though, I carry on with what I can.

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here's where I ended out last night, with some general concern about the angling to be done later.

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And after today's cutting. The main thing I'm thinking I'm going to have a problem with, before I get to gluing together this, would be getting the angles right. I'm contemplating taking a dremel sanding tool to it, or using a belt sander, on a high-grit paper. Would this work, or would it just chew up the foam? Also, would a high-temp hot glue gun be good enough to keep everything strongly secure?
 
Dremel should world if you don't feel up to using a knife to make the edges (and it gets it all smooth so two birds I guess).

Good question about the glue gun. There seems to be two main groups of advocates:

Low-temp: Totally effective in bonding everything, Risk of melting if you reheat/leave foam in hot area (this shouldn't really be an issue though unless you're gonig to put it on a furnace for hours on end...for some weird reason)

High-Temp: bonds more strongly, but risk of warping/bubbling the foam.

Would love to get other opinions on this aswell.
 
Hmmm, never tried to use my dremel to make angled cuts. If your going to take that method go verrrry slow cause you may over heat the foam do to friction and could warp the edges of the foam. I use a wood burner with an exacto attachment to make the angled cuts cause the hotknife goes through like......well a hotknife lol. The hotknifes are usually only $10-$20 if you want to save some time cutting the angles.
 
Well, construction continues, never fear. Wound up using high-temp glue, just because it is all the school store had, and since my hands are so adapted to the heat from a forge, I wasn't burned too badly. Managed to get part of the chest glued together and some of the shoulder strapping pieces, with pics coming soon. However, with the central control panel bit, the knives dulled a bit so the edge on the inside (which will be glued together) is a bit shredded, so we'll have to see how it handles itself. Finals are approaching for this winter semester, so not much time free for crafting!
 
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