A plastic hell

Remember how I back in 6th April started working on Masamune's leg armors? Well, I've been slowly working on them over the last few month and now I figured I'll put all the rest of the progress in a single long follow-up post. Here goes!

Way back on 5th April I continued the leg armor work by drawing a pattern for the knee cap part of the armor. I had to make a few versions before I came up with one that seemed right. The early ones had a dent at the middle but I scrapped that idea on the final version.

The final pattern version

 With the pattern at hand I took the polystyrene and cut out two pieces...

... and then came the heat gun treatment to shape the plastic.

After having shaped the knee parts of the armor I took one of the leg pieces and tried the fit against it. I had to go reshape the knee parts a few times to get them to fit as well as possible and without leaving "empty space" where the bent parts of both pieces met.

Testing the fit

Over 5th April and the two following days I was struggling with trying to find some method to glue the pieces together. I tried several different adhesives that we had available at mom's place on scrap pieces but nothing seemed to work and the despair-&-frustration meter was rising fast.

I tried hot glue, construction adhesive (?), pvc glue, epoxy resin and allround glue... and nothing worked. Fuck. :)

I kind of left it at this point for some days in frustration to try and come up with what to try now. On 23rd April I was feeling like going through hell again trying once more. I thought that if I gave the surface a rough treatment with some sand paper maybe it would maybe make a difference at how well the glues would stick. But of course before trying any glues on the actual armor parts. I had to draw some marks where the glue would sit and thus also where to sand.

Edges marked...

... and sanded.

On the same day my stepdad had been cool and bought some kind of glue that claimed it would stick to polystyrene.

Equipped with a glue that gave me hope I decided to tackle the damn plastic again, but this time trying the glue on the actual armor parts and not just scrap pieces as before. So with a helping hand from stepdad we glued the knee caps to the armor pieces at the marked lines and secured them to dry over the night.

You better be stuck together when I return... *glare*

About 24 hours later on the next day (24th April) I returned to check if the glue had done what it claimed it could and low and behold, the pieces didn't separate even after I tried to bend and put some pressure on them!

I could have been happy at this point.. but colored by the reminder of earlier gluing failures and some justified iffyness I decided to be extra-super-duper safe and reinforce the part that attaches the knee cap to the leg armor with some rivets. So on 26th April I marked where to drill the armors.

Holes marked with a pencil. There's 4 holes.

After drilling.

Actually my stepdad did this next part for me, namely inserting the rivets with a hand riveting tool.

Hand riveting tool

First we tried a rivet on scrap pieces just to check that it worked, which it did. Then we put rivets on the actual armor.

Front with rivets (surface paint cracked a bit)

Backside

I quickly realized the backside of the rivets would probably get really uncomfortable because they stick out and well, having them pressing against my legs all day in cosplay can't be a very pleasant experience. Stepdad then showed it was possible to cut off parts of the backside of the rivets if you were careful not to hit that thing in the center. He went ahead and trimmed the rivet backsides before I even knew of it some hours later while I was in my former room (this was while I still lived at mom's place) doing something else; he did it without me knowing. xD

A "trimmed" rivet backside

A few days later, on 29th April, I noticed that the paint didn't stick that well to the polystyrene. It was possible to peel it off with your nails or something semi-sharp.

Oh crap...

Again I thought that if I sanded the surface the paint would stick on better. I used some sanding paper with a very high number, super fine grit.

Preparations - sanding papers, armors and a chunk of finnfoam to wrap sanding paper around

Front leg armors front sanded

Back leg armors front sanded

I left them in this sorry state for some time because I moved away from mom's place into my own apartment and thus couldn't work on my Masamune cosplay as often as before. But on 12th May I returned to work a few hours!

Because of the earlier sanding there was dust of the spray spread over the armor surfaces and so, to clean it, I had to use white spirit.

I just used some tissue paper, put some white spirit on it and wiped the surfaces clean of dust. After that I let them dry for around 2 hours outside and then returned to recoat the fronts of all the armor pieces.

Newly sprayed coat of paint on top front sides

I left them to dry over the night because I had to leave for my apartment. It took me until 8th June before I got another chance to work on these again and when I returned mom had told me some things that sounded weird and bad. "The color is flaking everywhere." I had heard and I wasn't sure what she meant until I got there and saw the armor pieces. The fronts which I had treated and recoated earlier were as fine as ever but the backsides -which I had left completely untreated after sanding the surfaces- had pooed black flakes basically everywhere and even the slightest touch let lose a dark cloud of them!

Maximum flaking. Fuck. :)

I tried softly rubbing my finger against the flaking surface and...

... almost all of the (sanded) spray coat fell right off!

And on all the untreated back sides to boot!

Nothing to do but to let lose a few curse words mentally and give the back the same white spirit and recoat treatment I had given the front sides quite long ago.

On 24th June I decided to try them on and crossed my fingers but somehow I had a feeling it wouldn't go well. Guess if I was right? :DD
Before starting I cut out lengths of white cotton ribbon and sat down on the floor and started tying the armors on one of my legs. I started with the backside armor and at first everything seemed alright but when I started with the front armor I noticed things started screwing up. First of the armors wouldn't stay where intended and they would constantly turn to either the right or left and, secondly, the lower ties would slide down if I moved and sometimes if I didn't -.- and thus the armor would "pop out". I guess it slides down because the surface is kinda... plasticy/slippery (there's no grip) and because feet get narrower closer to the ankle. Frustrating to say the least.

Testing. Notice backside armor has "popped out" from the lower tie..

I also noticed that the backside armor had flaked some paint off in strips at the high tension bending point, the middle.

The front armor didn't flake though. I'm pretty annoyed because this means I likely have to come up with something else for the armor and I'm running short on time. I can probably still use the front piece but I would have to replace the backside armors with something with a rougher/uneven/non-slippery surface so that they won't slide around and shit. I guess I will try mutilating a roll mat...

Samurai armor

Yesterday I started making Masamune's samurai style upper arm armor. Of course before starting I looked at a lot of my Masamune references and two of them were these:

Okay, inconsistent references anyone? I looked at most of my references and the color of Masamune's lacing changed from white to brown and I think I saw blue somewhere and in the anime there is none at all. Also the amount of lacing rows and armor plates seemed inconsistent too the more different pictures I looked at... oh come on!

There's just three rows of armor plates on this figure..

So instead of trying to figure out the "real way" Masamune's upper arm armor was supposed to be I decided to take some artistic liberties and just do some free designing inspired by actual samurai armor. Yeah, you could say I thought "to hell with 100% character accuracy" and saved myself more headache from ever-changing references by doing my own take on the armor. Oh, but before that I googled "samurai armor" and got inspired. I payed attention to the different ways the lacing was done.

Samurai armor
(photo found on Google)

When I felt I had an idea on what I was soon to be working on I decided to let it roll!
First thing I did was to make a mini size armor out of paper and draw a lot of dots on it; the dots would be the holes for the lacing.

Paper armor test pattern

I didn't count or plan how many holes I needed in advance. I just marked the holes while I went on and added or changed the spacing if I noticed something didn't look right. When I felt I had something that might work I cut out the paper pattern, cut it in half, took a sewing needle and thread and started to improvice "lacing it" to check if I had enough holes.

My "lacing" test with a sewing needle and thread

I decided three armor plates were enough and four rows of lacing. By the way, my mini paper armor had just two rows, I cut it in half.
   When I thought about it I figured I wouldn't want the threads to start at the showing side of the armor so I made extra holes on the top plate so that the lace would start/end on the inside instead.

Now it's better ~

After experimenting with the mini paper armor test for a while I felt confident enough to start making the real deal. I used polystyrene sheets for the armor and measured and cut out two pieces. I also marked on the inside some faint pencil lines where each plate would start and end.

Cut out armor pieces

With the pieces cut out I went outside to shape them with a heat gun. I wanted a nice bend in the middle, but not a very sharp one. The heat forming succeeded very well.

Shaped armor pieces ~

The reason why I decided to shape the armor while it was still a single piece, instead of cutting it into the three plates and heat forming them individually, was to make sure all three soon-to-be plates would have the same curve to them and fit on top of each other, with a slight overlap, when assembled later.

Next thing I did was that I cut the big piece into three parts along the marked cutting lines on the inside. After cutting the big piece I now had three separate plates and, well, I drew a lot of dots on them. I used my former mini paper armor as a reference for the hole placement.

My three armor plates filled with hole markings..

... and now to make them into, well, holes.

Hello drill ~

I took a scrap piece of polystyrene and drilled two holes in it just to check if it worked. It worked like a charm, no cracks or problems whatsoever and easy to drill through! Yay!

Drill test

I took the scrap piece with me and went inside to find some suitable ribbon or cord for lacing. I didn't find any cords so I set for ribbon instead. I took what we had at home and the best I could find was this 5 mm white glossy ribbon. I tried threading it through the holes to check if the hole was big enough for the ribbon to run through freely but still not too big and well..

.. it was pretty much perfect!

Okay, so I was ready to drill holes. But before I did that I wanted to sand the edges a bit because they were a bit rough from the cutting. Sanding worked pretty okay on polystyrene.

After smoothing the edges a bit

And now.. well.. time to drill! Of course I did the drilling (and sanding) outside.

First armor piece drilled

A lot of drilling and frozen fingers later I had armor plates full of holes. No joke.

So many.. holes...!

That was all the progress I did yesterday. Today when I woke up I went to continue with the armors and well, next up was to paint them. I used the same black semi gloss spray paint as before.. I've used up more than half the bottle already, oops. I gave the showing side a coating first and let them dry for some time on my makeshift working table outside in the "car garage".

Newly sprayed with the first coating

Some time later I returned to paint the inside of the armors after the outside had dried.

Inside sprayed with paint

When the inside was dry I turned all the plate pieces over and noticed that while the showing side had been drying the spray paint had slowly flowed from the sides towards the middle bend. Also some of the paint had gathered at the very sides and left these small build-ups.

Gravity, I hate you sometimes.

This demonstrates the "flowing paint problem" (lighter parts, not full coverage)
and the "spray paint build-up".

Oh well, a second coating easily fixed the first problem.. but the spray paint build-up was still visible underneath because well.. there is more paint there, duh. Oh well, I didn't feel like trying to sand it down or anything and it doesn't bother me so much anyway so whatever.
While the second paint coating was drying I decided to move my makeshift table, with the armors, out in the sunshine so that the paint would dry quicker. It seemed like a great idea... until a random strong gust of wind appeared and blew all my armor pieces into the snow. My face was like:

Yeeeeeah...

Luckily most pieces had already dried enough not to have the snow get stuck everywhere but well, one of the plates got these "snow was here" bubble prints on the surface and it bothered me.. so I sprayed over them.

Oh well, after all plates were dry I took them inside and begun lacing them together with the ribbon. I burned the ends of the ribbon each time I cut it so that it wouldn't unravel. Oh, and about the lacing, I didn't use any "historically accurate" or whatever way to lace it, I just improvised and used some real samurai armor pictures as inspiration/guiding.

Burning ribbon ends

Two rows of lacing done

The lacing process was pretty tedious and took me a few hours. I was very careful with making sure that the ribbon didn't twist itself at any point during the lacing; I wanted it to lay neat and straight. Every time there was any error I undid parts of the lacing until everything was right and the ends I just tied together in the back.

This is what my armor looked like when done:

Finished Masamune samurai armor pieces ~

I must say I'm really happy with how these turned out! I know they are not exact replicas of the ones Masamune wears (and you know that too if you read what I wrote at the beginning of the post) but I like them like this, 20% cooler ~