Just a completely normal Hayabusa build

[Coreforge]

And another update after 2.5 months!

Since I'm back in lockdown again, I've got a bit more time on my hands, and I've made some more progress on the chestpiece this week. I first started with the second thruster by cutting everything out and welding on the smaller pieces. As you can see, my welds are still really ugly, but since they have to be ground/filed down anyways, it's not too big of a deal.

After this, I can assemble the thruster and hold it together with tape for welding later. I can't bend very precisely, so not everything fits correctly (other reasons for that too), but it's easier to fix that after some seams are tacked together, as I can just pull the pieces into the correct place.

Like I said, I want to make some parts out of thicker steel. So far, I've done the upper plates on the back, and I'm glad it's only a few pieces that need 3mm steel. That stuff weights a lot and is kinda difficult to cut accuratly enough without a lot of filing afterwards. It looks a lot better though than thin steel with pieces welded to make it look thicker.

Assembled it also looks pretty nice.

And that's basically it for now. The back is mostly done, so the front is next. While it has a couple nice big pieces, it also has a lot of small pieces that'll need a lot of grinding/filing to make them look decent. I'll be trying out some 0.6mm wire though instead of the 0.8mm wire I've been using so far, so that'll hopefully help a bit with the amount of filing down welds.

 

[Coreforge]

I started a bit with the front today by dishing out some parts. I haven't really done any dishing before, so I'm just doing what I think works with the tools I have. I started off dishing out the most part with a square face cross peen hammer (I think that's what you call them, not sure) on top of a piece of pipe in my vice. This works pretty well for shaping the metal, but also results in a lot of small dents and some deeper dents in the surface.

The part on the left is after rough shaping, the left one already after planishing, which is the next step. I did that by using a 16mm piece of steel with the end rounded over as an anvil and hitting the workpiece as straight as reasonably possible with the face of the hammer, flattening out the dents. This works pretty well, but it changes the shape again because it stretches the metal a bit more. The result is well worth it though.

After cutting on the excess I left where the seem will be, it fits prette decently with only a few gaps that should be relatively easy to weld shut.

So yeah, this is basically where I'm now. I might build something like a blacksmiths guillotine for planishing, kinda as a hybrid between a pneumatic planishing hammer (which is too big and expensive for me) and planishing by hand, so that I still get the alignment of a pneumatic one, but I can easily store it away and make it out of materials I either have or can get cheaply.

 

[Lieutenant Jaku]

*evil laughter* i've found your thread. This looks amazing, how heavy is it so far?

 

[Coreforge]

The helmet is 2.5kg, I havent weighted the chest piece yet, but I'd guess around 4kg for that.

 

[Coreforge]

Haven't updated this thread in quite a while. Since I weld outside and it's been kinda cold I haven't done too much, but there's still some progress.
Most big parts are there except for the lower front, but a lot of the edges and details are missing.

One issue with this was the center of the front as it doesn't line up well. This isn't that surprising since I didn't form those curved pieces super accurate, but still kinda annoying.
I also switched to 0.6mm wire which gives me a smaller weld so I need to do less cleanup afterwards. The downsides of it are a lot more spatter that also sticks a lot (could just be wrong polarity, the welder sets it automatically and there isn't an easy way to change it manually) and it doesn't fill gaps well, but with some kind of backer it works decently.

In comparison to the 0.8mm wire it's a lot better.

 

[TecnicoNinja]

That is coming along very well

 

[Meritorious]

keep up the good work this is looking amazing

 

[Coreforge]

Woo, this hasn't been updated in quite a while. I haven't made a ton of progress on the chest piece (other than splitting it), but I've started and nearly finished the cod piece, only the boxes on the sides and some clean up is missing, and I've started building an english wheel.

I can now put on the chest piece again (the head opening is too small to just stick my head through), but I still have to find a good way to connect it again. Using screws works well as they hold it together nicely, but it's difficult to do by myself. Getting buckles in there in a way I can still reach them isn't easy either. I might try larger screws though, as M5 screws should be a lot easier to line up than M3 screws.

After then not working much on this for a few months ( I was doing other stuff, like working on the radeon driver on the raspberry pi), I then started on the cod piece. I made that like the rest of the pieces by using pepakura, transfering the templates to steel, cutting them out, bending them, welding them together and bending them again. The cod piece doesn't have many compound curved though, so it's easier to make than the chest piece or the helmet. I'll also keep it as two parts that just get connected with some screws or something else if I find something better.

And last but not least, I started building an english wheel to make compound curves easier, and maybe even use it as a bead roller, though it wouldn't be a very typical one.
I started out by modeling a design in blender. I decided to use 40x40x3mm square steel tubing as it's not too expensive and should be strong enough, as I'm not builiding a huge one.

For the top wheel or anvil, I'm using a fairly hard roller I found at a scrapyard. It's not as heavy as the anvils usually are, but it should still work. For the lower wheels or rollers, I'll be making those on my lathe out of some 50mm round stock. The steel I have for that can be hardened, but I'm not sure yet if I'll do that, since the temperatures it needs, especially for tempering, aren't that easy to get for a long time without a heat treating oven or kiln.
After the design was done, I started off building the holder for the upper roller. It basically consists of two bearings in bearing housings that are mounted to a piece of square tubing. To make those bearing holders, I needed some thicker piece of weldable round stock. I could just buy some, but most of it would just get drilled and bored out again, so I decided on a a bit unconventional way. I got some galvanized pipe in various sizes at the hardware store and put it in vinegar for a few days to remove the zinc. After that, I cut them to length, put them into each other and welded them together to get them to the right thickness.

After welding them, I cleaned them up on the lathe and turned the inner diameter to the proper one. This actually worked surprisingly well with HSS tools, as I didn't have any carbide tools at that point.

Once those are finished, they can be welded to the frame. It's important that the bearings still line up after welding, so I tacked them into place while I had the bearings in and a rod between them.

To mount the roller on the rod, I had to make some adapters that adapt the 12mm of the rod to the 20mm the roller has.

Once the top roller was done, I made the tube that the lower wheel gets mounted to. It basically consists of two pieces of tubing where one slides in the other one. For this, I needed some seamless 40x40mm tube and some 34x34mm tube. For the 34x34mm tube, I just cut up some 40x40mm tube and welded it together. For the seamless tube, I made a tool similar to the one fireball tool made, but I made it a bit simpler by just using a piece of sheet steel that was harder than the tube. It doesn't work too great, but good enough for what I need. For the other pieces where I needed some seamless tube, I just removed the seam with a chisel.
After these parts were done, I made the frame out of more square tube. I started of by cutting the pieces again. Cutting miters with an angle grinder isn't as precise as it would be with a bandsaw or chopsaw, but I don't have one of those, so angle grinder it is. To get it fairly straight, I lined up the pieces and clamped them down, leaving a small gap between the pieces so they can be adjusted and don't get moved too much when the weld cools down.

After I tacked them all together on one side, I turned the frame over and tacked them on the other side while clamping the pieces to another piece of tubing to keep them straight.

Once they were tacked on both sides, I put a few more small welds to keep the 90° angles and then fully welded the seams.
And that's about where I'm currently at. I still have to make the assembly for the lower wheel and I may have to reinforce the frame, but other than that, it's pretty much done.

 

[jegatherdomnai]

how much does the chest piece weigh?

 

[Coreforge]

I don't know exactly, but I guess around 4-5kg. It'll be different when it's finished though as there are still some parts missing, a lot still needs to be welded fully, and grinding takes off weight again. The helmet was about 3kg of sheet steel and a bit over 1kg of wire, but it came out to 2.5kg.

 

[jegatherdomnai]

I don't know exactly, but I guess around 4-5kg. It'll be different when it's finished though as there are still some parts missing, a lot still needs to be welded fully, and grinding takes off weight again. The helmet was about 3kg of sheet steel and a bit over 1kg of wire, but it came out to 2.5kg.

if you where to guess, how much will the whole suit weigh?

 

[Coreforge]

I don't really know, but I wouldn't surprised about 15kg or more.

 

[Wicked Demon 15]

This is amazing!!

 

[Coreforge]

Well, I pretty much finished the english wheel. I did have to reinforce the frame as it was too flexible before, which made it harder to apply enough pressure. Adding those reinforcements unfortunately distorted the frame quite a bit since the miters weren't too accurate (I'm just cutting the tubing with an angle grinder and I'm not very good at it), but I also didn't weld it in a good order. I actually had a tack weld rip just from another weld cooling down.

The angle might make it look a bit worse, but it's definitely visible.
That gap was straight before welding in the reinforcements, so that kinda shows how much it distorted it. It didn't twist though, and I was able to adjust the lower wheel to get it straight again. It already worked at this point only using the edge of the die, but that's obviously not how it's supposed to be used, so next was actually shaping the die.

To do that, I first put the die on a piece of 12mm round stock I had centered relatively well on my lathe and fixed the die in place with a set screw. This way, I could work on the whole length of the die at once, and the surface is pretty concentric with the hole. Once I had the surface flat and running true, I could actually start on getting the shape. To do that, I first made a stepped version of the shape by calculating the depth I had to cut at a few places with some trigonometry (yes, it's actually useful), and then turned the die down by those depths of cut. This got me this shape, which is already fairly close to the final shape.

At this point, I just needed to smooth those steps over to get the final shape, That was kinda an issue though, as while the steel isn't hardened yet, it's still not that soft, so it dulled files rather quick. So instead if filing it, I just turned up the speed on the lathe and sanded it down with an old sanding belt. The downside of that is that it gets quite hot in one place, since it's the same part of the belt rubbing against the part, instead of going along the whole belt like it would do on a belt sander, but it still worked, and after a while, I had a rather smooth die with a radius of 50mm.

So I currently only have this one die for my english wheel, but I'll be making more as I need them. I've also tested it and it works, so now I have to learn how to actually use it.

 

[Zoogami Snowfox]

I'm very excited to see how this turns out!
The Helmet and Chest Piece are looking really decent so far.
Are you planning to apply anything over the metal for more details / smooth surfaces?
Looking to work on some armour myself, but I may be using rivets instead of welding, so just a little curious about the build process.

Keep up the great work!

 

[Coreforge]

Most of the armor will probably be painted, so that should hopefully hide some unevenness. With the english wheel I can now also get a lot smoother surfaces than I could get with a hammer (since the anvil roller is polished it actually leaves a mirror finish, but weld spatter is gonna ruin that), so I hopefully have less that would need to be filled. I might also try coating some parts in brass, but I'm not sure yet. I don't think I'm gonna try and get a higher detail level, since I don't think it'll make that big of a difference, but it also depends on how much work it would be.

 

[Coreforge]

What, me forgetting to update my threads? Never!

So I finished the cod piece quite a while ago. Not really anything special about it, but I do like the way I'm holding the two parts together. I said I was probably just going to screw it together, and I somewhat did that, but they aren't just screwed together with bolts and some pieces of flat bar like I did it on the chest piece.

Instead, I took a piece of 12x1mm pipe and some 12mm round bar (I just didn't have any 10mm round bar), turned a shoulder on the round bar down to 10mm, and drilled out the pipe to 10mm (mostly just to clean out the weld seam, since it's not seamless pipe). That way, the pin can fit into the pipe, so it also works as an alignment pin. I then have a hole with an M5 thread cross drilled in the pin, so I can lock it together with an M5 screw (or I can just push an M4 screw into it, that way the screw doesn't fall out as long as there is some tension on the pin, but is easy to remove by taking off that tension). The advantage of using these pins over pieces of flat bar with threads in them is that I can align the parts first, and then find the holes and put the screws in, instead of having to align the parts while also having to hold screws and then have to screw them in, all while still holding the parts in the correct place. It just makes it easier to put on the armor by myself (and in general).

But back to the cod piece. I don't have many WIP pics, so here it is almost finished. The outside isn't ground yet in that picture, but other than that, there isn't much missing.

I have one pin in each of the boxes on the side, so that the front can detach. The screws just poke out the side (or they wouldn't poke out if they were shorter).

There isn't much progress on the chest piece, but I replaced the pieces of flat bar with some alignment pins as well. I'll probably have to adjust them again (grind off the welds on one side and reweld it) once I finish it up, as I'll probably be bending stuff around again, which will mean the threads don't align with the hole in the pipe/armor anymore.

Here you can see the pins a bit better. These are 2 of the 4 for the chest, but the ones one the cod piece are pretty much the same, just a bit longer.

I'll probably revise the placement of the split again, as the screws on the lower straps are pretty hard to reach. I could either just turn them around, so that the screw is on the front part, but that wouldn't change much. I'll probably weld that cut back together and cut them again further to the front where it's more comfortable to reach. That's something for when I actually have the rest of the chest pretty much finished.

Getting the pins all parallel was a bit tricky too, since if they aren't parallel, it'll be harder to put on/take off the chest. Since the pins are rather short though, I have more wiggle room to not have it perfect and still work, and the front is currently still pretty flexible, which also helps a lot. That's another reason why I'll have to rework some of the pins though once I finish the construction, as it will be a good bit less flexible.

I also did another fit test with what I have, and the chest is too big. My helmet pretty much constantly colliding is to be expected (hayabusa clips a lot ingame), but it's also severely limiting my arm movement, and I feel like it's too deep as well. It's not way too big, so I could either just keep it like this and just have limited movement, or I could try cutting out some parts to make it a bit smaller. I'm leaning more towards cutting out parts, but I'm not sure where the best places for that would be. I'd like to keep the back as it is for the most part, as it consists of decent amount of smaller parts, and it also doesn't really feel too big. The issue is more at the front, which is too wide. Cutting a strip out of that center bit wouldn't make it that much smaller but just removing material in the center (and some from the domed parts as well) is probably my best bet. To get the depth down, I can just cut a few cm out of the straps that run under the arms, which shouldn't be too difficult. It'll just change the angle at the shoulders a bit.

(my arm reach slightly below the domed parts. Further up it's even worse)

(and a view from the side to see how deep the chest piece is)