Full Cardboard arms- complete with attached Spaulders and lames

So, in my attempts to archive, i seem to have missed a post! so here goes:

Now that i have my arms (in cardboard) and shoulder cop (in steel) complete, its time to design the lames that will connect them together.

This was made ten times easier by diving head first, once again, into the armour archive.

 

 Until now, i didn't even realize, but this pattern was by Sinric too! All i needed was the basic pattern of the lame, but nevertheless! For a smoother look, i wanted the lames to get progressivly larger as they got closer to the shoulder cop. To complete this look, i traced the lame shown above onto cardboard and i used it as the bottom of the three lames. I then laid the cardboard pattern over top of a piece of parchment and traced a progressivly wider lame using the same basic shape of the first one. I repeated this process for the top lame.

Side View

I think it has a much smoother look to it. 

The traditional Spaulder has a very boxy look, but Dooms armour is always very rounded.

Back view

Front view

Please notice, the inner elbow is very much exposed. This is something i will handle when it comes time for assembly. My current solution is a piece of firm fabric riveted into place spanning from the top of the vambrace to the bottom or the rerebrace. I plan to sew horizontal lines to give it a "ribbed" look and also offer a little more movement. But well see, these things have a tendency to devolve very quickly.

Until next time Doomed True Believers! Excelsior!

Arms- From Pattern to Steel

Not a whole lot of excitement here. No hammers, drills or shears. Only the patterns i printed off the armour archive, some parchment paper, black sharpies and painters tape (it doesn't rip the pattern when i remove it).

The full arms pattern was posted by Sinric and can be seen here.

The Fingered gauntlet pattern was posted by Thor Z, and can be seen here.

Now i have to do this for the legs, neck and Shoes.

This is more of a photo collage than it was a blog post, but pictures always speak louder than words.

Arming my arms- 3 (this is getting redundant)

Now its time to adjust the Rerebrace, or upper arm, so that it fits comfortably.

Shown above is a closeup of the current rerebrace top and bottom. If you remember from my earlier post, this was a temporary fix. All of the patterns i came across for full arms did not have a cover for the exposed side of the bicep. I used the pattern for the rerebrace and added a similar curve to the Vambrace bottom so that it will function similarly. Now the only issue is sizing!

Its just too large! That's what she said What? oh nothing.

 

Ahem, Moving along then. Shown above is my final pattern for the upper and lower rerebrace. Last time when i adjusted the overlapping material, i just cut off the excess. In this case, it was not that easy. Since the pattern my pattern was makeshift, i had to "recreate" the pattern in real life, instead of how things work in my mind. I untied the rerebrace from my cardboard arm and wrapped a large piece of parchment around it. I then traced around the edges of the correctly fitted cardboard mock up. The end result was one large piece of parchment. The used the width of the original pattern to decide where to separate the two pieces.

The end result is a nice clean fitted rerebrace! Now its time to get to work!

WHITNEY ROPER!

I know that i am getting a little ahead of myself by posting this (as i am extremely backlogged), But i just had to share this news!


I got my (semi)New Whitney Roper #5 Jr in the mail today!


Isn't she Beautiful! Ching Ching Sparkle Sparkle


The photo above shows a small piece of scrap 16 Gauge mild steel that i used to try it out on. It was so easy, it was like using a paper punch! for anyone who is not familiar with The Whitney roper #5 Jr, check out this link on the Armour Archive please ignore the Snarkey remark by "odd" in the beginning of the post.

Arming my Arms- 2 (sequels CAN be better than the originals)

Now that i have my cardboard arm up and running, its time to make all of the necessary adjustments to the patterns. The first, and easiest tweak was to scale back the length of the Vambrace, or forearm. Since Dooms Gauntlets have their own very large Vambraces, the ones connected to the full arm will not need to be very long at all.


The adjustment was very simple. First what i did was cut a few inches of length from the top and bottom halves of the vambrace, shown above.

Then, i put the demi-vambrace on my arm to see how it fit. This pattern is intended to be worn with a pair of gauntlets with very short wrist guards. Because of that the bottom hole was large enough to squeeze your fist through, but as it flared up towards the elbow it gets much larger in width. For what i need it for, this was much too wide as this will need to fit under another larger vambrace. So with the newly shortened demi vambrace on my forearm, i taped down the excess width until it fit comfortably. As i took it off i made sure that my fist would fit through the bottom hole. In black marker to traced where the cardboard overlapped itself. I then removed the tape and cut the excess material until the top and bottom fit without any overlapping. The Photo below shows where the overlapping occurs.


The end result was much more comfortable and practical. The next adjustment that needed to be made was to the Rerebrace, or upper arm. But ill save that for another post!

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!