First, a quick introduction for myself... My name's Andy and I've been in the prop and collecting world for well over 9 years now. I'm a member over at the Replica Prop Forum like Adam and have been building replica lightsabers, sci-fi armor and worked on several costuming projects in the past.
This project is actually my first attempt at Halo related items. I've always had an itch to start building my own Mjolnir armor, but I never got the project off the ground until my brother and his friends shoved Halo 3 into my face with their X-Box 360... which was like 3 weeks ago. Since then, I went straight to work on making this armor realized.
Before the accuracy purists nit-pick, I would just like to mention that this project was started earlier this month and it's been about 3 weeks of work. I had to cut back on certain detailing to try and make this armor possible by Halloween. Unfortunately, due to school and work, I won't be able to finish this armor on time for this Wednesday.
As for construction details... I spent about 2 weeks working out sizing and prototyping the overall shape and dimensions of the armor using reference photos of other fan made armor and resized images of the video game stills. The measurements I used for my armor are scaled to my own dimensions by eye. I prototyped using regular corrugated cardboard and then transposed them onto tracing paper to create stencils for my molds. My intent is to vacuum form the armor from .060 and .080 high impact polystyrene plastic.
I decided to build my vac molds from mat boarding (inspired by Chris Bryan's armor on the Bungie and other Mjolnir Armor sites) and fill it with expanding foam. The pieces were cut using a box cutter and a T-square and glued together using hot glue. I plan on filling it up with X-30 expanding foam TAP Plastics to fill in the hollow void. I used expanding foam in the past and it worked terrific on test pulls I did for past projects so I know it should work great for the bucks I'm making. I also plan on making Hydrocal casts of my molds after the first couple of pulls are taken from this mat board set. That way I can have good, durable bucks to use later on down the road for future sets of armor.
Here are a few photos of the chest mold I created so far. I still plan on detailing the piece a little more before finalizing it and filling it up with expanding foam. I will have more photos of the other pieces later on into the week. Hopefully I can put together a tutorial for you guys later in November as to how you can build armor this way too. Hope you guys enjoy!
-Andy
This project is actually my first attempt at Halo related items. I've always had an itch to start building my own Mjolnir armor, but I never got the project off the ground until my brother and his friends shoved Halo 3 into my face with their X-Box 360... which was like 3 weeks ago. Since then, I went straight to work on making this armor realized.
Before the accuracy purists nit-pick, I would just like to mention that this project was started earlier this month and it's been about 3 weeks of work. I had to cut back on certain detailing to try and make this armor possible by Halloween. Unfortunately, due to school and work, I won't be able to finish this armor on time for this Wednesday.
As for construction details... I spent about 2 weeks working out sizing and prototyping the overall shape and dimensions of the armor using reference photos of other fan made armor and resized images of the video game stills. The measurements I used for my armor are scaled to my own dimensions by eye. I prototyped using regular corrugated cardboard and then transposed them onto tracing paper to create stencils for my molds. My intent is to vacuum form the armor from .060 and .080 high impact polystyrene plastic.
I decided to build my vac molds from mat boarding (inspired by Chris Bryan's armor on the Bungie and other Mjolnir Armor sites) and fill it with expanding foam. The pieces were cut using a box cutter and a T-square and glued together using hot glue. I plan on filling it up with X-30 expanding foam TAP Plastics to fill in the hollow void. I used expanding foam in the past and it worked terrific on test pulls I did for past projects so I know it should work great for the bucks I'm making. I also plan on making Hydrocal casts of my molds after the first couple of pulls are taken from this mat board set. That way I can have good, durable bucks to use later on down the road for future sets of armor.
Here are a few photos of the chest mold I created so far. I still plan on detailing the piece a little more before finalizing it and filling it up with expanding foam. I will have more photos of the other pieces later on into the week. Hopefully I can put together a tutorial for you guys later in November as to how you can build armor this way too. Hope you guys enjoy!



-Andy