Thorssoli's HALO 3 Marine(s)

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Say, you wouldn't happen to be THE Thor? You know, the norse god? Because I see some godlike awesomeness there! ;)

Nope, I'm Thorsson. I may be pretty good at some of this stuff, but Dad's really awesome.

I'm still making progress on the rest of the armor. Yesterday I enlisted a bit of help and cranked out hte last of the pep models for the torso and shoulders:
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Then we reinforced them with resin and threw them on the vacforming table:
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With some quick trimming, they looked pretty good:
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Having proven the concept to be sound, the vacforming bucks need to be smoothed out and I need to hurry up and crank out a bunch of sets of the armor.

Stay tuned...
 
Those pulls looks great Thorsolli! Are you using ABS or HIPS and how thick is the sheet? Did you have to use a generator to run the vac-form machine? I don't think a regular residential circuit can support the wattage the machine uses. I was thinking of using one of those garage propane or LP infra-red heaters to heat up the plastic for a vac-form machine to save energy, but don't know how safe it would be.
 
The question I have here is how in holy hell did your ancestors manage to do something so undeniably epic by Viking standards that it was decided they must be sons of Thor himself?? Your lineage impresses me, and your work seems to live up to the past's expectations.
 
The question I have here is how in holy hell did your ancestors manage to do something so undeniably epic by Viking standards that it was decided they must be sons of Thor himself??

Might have been precognition?
I mean - name one other Viking who could vacuform Marine armour! :-D
 
Then we reinforced them with resin and threw them on the vacforming table:
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How powerful is the vacuum that you had pulling the plastic?
The area between the shoulders seems quite large to be considered the normal vac forming webbing. It may just be an issue of space between the vacform pucks though.

Great work on the pep, pulls and former regardless of that small issue.

P.S. Laying down some 1/2 inch mesh wire netting on your table will help with getting proper and even suction, even beneath the pucks.
 
Those pulls looks great Thorsolli! Are you using ABS or HIPS and how thick is the sheet? Did you have to use a generator to run the vac-form machine? I don't think a regular residential circuit can support the wattage the machine uses. I was thinking of using one of those garage propane or LP infra-red heaters to heat up the plastic for a vac-form machine to save energy, but don't know how safe it would be.

I'm using .040" ABS in the pic above. I'll probably pick up some .080" ABS for the rest of the pulls once I'm satisfied with the bucks.

The service in the workship is only 30A, but the oven we built runs on 240V, so there's not quite as much current draw. My friend Matt has been instrumental in the design and construction of the oven itself, so he did the math when we decided to give up on running it on 110V (after tripping the breaker over a dozen times) and converted it to the higher voltage. I've seen descriptions of propane heating setups, but I'm not sure I'd like something like that in the workshop. In either case, consult someone who knows what they're doing before you burn your house down.

How powerful is the vacuum that you had pulling the plastic?
The area between the shoulders seems quite large to be considered the normal vac forming webbing. It may just be an issue of space between the vacform pucks though.

Great work on the pep, pulls and former regardless of that small issue.

P.S. Laying down some 1/2 inch mesh wire netting on your table will help with getting proper and even suction, even beneath the pucks.

I'm using a 6hp shop vac to do the pulls. So far I've managed to get plenty of detail using just the shop vac.

There is no area between the shoulders. I built the two shoulders as one form with the bottoms pointed toward each other and a block built in between. Once they're formed, I trim off the area between them. The only webbing was a bit in between the two tall forms I had on the table (which were trimmed off of the final pieces) the pulls came out great. In fact, on many of the parts you can tell where the tabs and seams were on the pepakura models.

I smoothed out and sanded the forms quite a bit today. I'll post more pictures once I've got a good pull from them.
 
I'm using .040" ABS in the pic above. I'll probably pick up some .080" ABS for the rest of the pulls once I'm satisfied with the bucks.

The service in the workship is only 30A, but the oven we built runs on 240V, so there's not quite as much current draw. My friend Matt has been instrumental in the design and construction of the oven itself, so he did the math when we decided to give up on running it on 110V (after tripping the breaker over a dozen times) and converted it to the higher voltage. I've seen descriptions of propane heating setups, but I'm not sure I'd like something like that in the workshop. In either case, consult someone who knows what they're doing before you burn your house down.

Good to know that you guys found another way to make it work. Those piston pumps aren't cheap and a 6.0 hp shop vac can do the job especially for a Halo 3 marine armor which doesn't have too many details. Don't worry about the propane heater idea, I would probably try the charcoal heating idea in my backyard if anything at all. Looking forward to seeing your marines come to life!
 
As promised, here's some pictures. Enjoy.

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It's late and I'm kinda strung out right now, so I didn't think of anything helpful to write about these.

Also, now that I'm getting close to perfecting the forming bucks, be on the lookout for a classified thread for some marine armor. If you have any questions, shoot me a PM.
 
do want that orange primer!

It looks like it is Rust-Oleum orange. A standard color from Lowes or Home Depot.
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Well, I went to the Maker's Fair yesterday sporting my ODST suit that I threw together this week, and there were sure a lot of people! I couldn't walk 20 feet without someone wanting to take a picture with me! But the coolest part was being able to meet Thorssoli himself, and see his incredible booth! (Which I must say was quite incredible indeed)
He did a great job putting it all together. Kudos to you!

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It was awesome
 
Wow, that's something I would actually have loved to see in person! It's a shame that all the good stuff always happens somewhere else :-D

Does anyone happen to have more pictures? :)
 
Wow, that's something I would actually have loved to see in person! It's a shame that all the good stuff always happens somewhere else :-D

Does anyone happen to have more pictures? :)

I'll post more pictures up tonight!
I'm sure Thorssoli will post his massive updates on this thread as well
 
Thanks for the kind words. It was great to meet you in person and I'm glad you liked my booth.

Here's the last part of the build process...

First up, I had to rough-cut all of the vacformed armor parts:
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Since I was dressing a whole squad, I enlisted some help in doing the knife and scissors work. Here's my friend Breana cutting out some shoulder parts:
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Here I am trying one of the chests out:
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I'd also roughed out a plan for making Magnum holsters to strap onto the armor:
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They didn't work out very well though, so I had to take that plan back to the drawing board.

Here's a shot of my friend Trevor fitting some of the straps:
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Since my sister Rose had agreed to wear one of these, the next thing was to have her test-fitted for shoulders:
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My sister Sheryl showed up later as we'd made more progress on the strapping system, so I had her try on a set of the armor too:
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The morning before the Maker Faire, these suits still needed some strapping and final detailing. Here's a shot of Rose and my nephew painting the rivet heads to match the rest of the armor:
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Meanwhile, my niece separated out all of the soft parts into kits by size:
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Sheryl and Rose did a lot of the final strap work too:
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The morning of the Maker Faire, all that was left to do was to get everyone dressed:
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In this pic, the combat knife is just one of the raw black resin casts and it's riveted right onto the chest plate. It wasn't until we were on location that I realized that there were no underarm straps holding the chest plate down, so we added those too. Sooner or later I'll go back and build the forming bucks to make the armor plates that run under the arms.

More pics of the finished rigs can be found in my blog: http://protagonist4hire.blogspot.com/2011/05/halo-marines-continued.html.

I'm still going through receipts to put together the parts list if you're looking for the soft parts. Stay tuned.
 
Looks like everything went brilliantly at the fair.
I wish I could have gone but I was stuck spending my weekend at a bay area hospital with my cousin who decided it was the perfect week to rip his arm off at work.
 
Looks like everything went brilliantly at the fair.
I wish I could have gone but I was stuck spending my weekend at a bay area hospital with my cousin who decided it was the perfect week to rip his arm off at work.

I'd have thought that no week is the perfect week to rip off an arm. I hope he's doing okay.

For those of you too lazy to click on the blog link, here's one of the oodles and gobs of pics:
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Enjoy.
 
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