Arming my arms

A few weeks back, I traced the pattern for my arms which consists of a Vambrace, a couter (elbow cop) and Rerebrace connected together with a few Lames. I used Sinric's pattern from the Armour Archive. Although, I will have to make a few pattern adjustments for this to look like Dooms armour.

The first (and easiest) adjustment i made was to remove the "wing" from the couter. Doom instead has something called a Rondel. A rondel is a circular piece of metal used for protection, as part of a harness of plate armour, or attached to a helmet, breastplate, couter or on a gauntlet. I have circled his Rondels in the picture below:


The Photo below shows the pattern cut out of cardboard. The top right piece is the couter. Normally the top portion of the pattern would have a large wing or "fan" attached to it, but i removed that and just matched it to the other side. I will make a pattern for the Rondel and attach that later on.


My next major adjustment was to add another piece of metal to cover up my bicep. The pattern only has a rerebrace to cover up the back of my upper arm. All of the patterns i looked at never seemed to have anything covering this area so i hope that it is not a functionality issue. I just hate having such a large area exposed. The piece on the left in the photo below is my mock up. I will have to play around with it a little to make sure it fits comfortably.


Below is a photo of my first draft complete arm. Another thing i noticed as i put it on, was that the Vambrace was too long considering how large the Gauntlets are going to be. That will be the next adjustment i have to make. I have already marked off where i will need to cut it in black marker.




Not bad for a first draft and its great to see that it actually articulates! Thank you Sinric!


The Upper arm doesn't look too bad, but more on that later...

Unprogrssive progress

So I have been making a lot of progress lately, but unfortunately i have been using up all the free time i have to make the costume and not work on the blog. Kind of defeats the purpose of progress blog if i never update it huh? Who thought working 70 hours, building a suit of armor AND writing about it would be this hard? I will be posting "old Progress reports" for a little while to catch up! And to kick that off, here's the first one!

This feels like a trip down memory lane writing like this. So about a month back, after completing the dishing on the shoulder cop. I started making sure that the lames i designed were going to fit and look good. The Lames are the smaller strips of metal designed to articulate joints and pivot points. *Spoiler Alert* The lame i designed was more cosmetic than functional and thus Failed at being useful.


Not only did it not line up, but it also made the shoulder look too round. I didn't count on the metal curving as much as it did when i dished the cop (as i had never done it before).


When i taped the two pieces together and tried it out of my shoulder, the Lame started to cut into my bicep as i lifted up my arm. The lame was obviously not designed with the shape of the arm in mind.


But, before i tossed the whole thing i tried to salvage it. I started to flair the top adjoining edge of the Lame to fit more snugly into the cop. I lined up the Lame on the dishing stump and used the smaller edge of my smallest tear drop mallet to raise its edges.




But in the end, its was just too poorly designed. Oh well you live and you learn! At least i was able to reuse the metal for the fingers of the gauntlets! But more on that later!