Thank you all for the kind words and encouragement.
It's taking me a bit longer than I'd hoped to build up steam now that I'm back. Progress has been pretty slow on this project. I've barely had a chance to wind down from my routine at sea, It's been a bit chilly outside, and I've had trouble getting motivated to do much more than read and drink as much hot coffee as I can get.
That said, there's really no excuse for all of the delay in getting this stuff knocked out. In fact, I noticed yesterday that my thigh prototypes have now taken me as many hours of work to complete as my helmet and chest prototypes combined. Right now, they look like so:
The biggest problem is that I've now spent enough time away from the shop and studying reference materials that I've noticed oodles and gobs of little details that needed to be fixed or added. Here's another shot of the thigh details as they look on one side:
On the other side I still need to add in the two little latches and then I need to score the seam lines near the knee. After that, I think I'll have reached the zit stage of this piece (that's where you just need to leave it alone because messing with it any more will only make it worse).
If I don't post pictures of these two thigh parts at least in primer within the next 24 hours, I need you guys to give me some grief about it. This has taken way too long already. If I don't have castings coming out of a mold by the middle of next week I have failed.
Part of taking way too long means my mind's already wandering all over other project ideas. One quick one I cranked out was a little statue of Cthulhu in the pose of Rodin's famous sculpture of "The Thinker"
Then I made a quick mold and started cranking out copies so I could sell them on
my ebay page.
Hopefully these guys will help offset the costs of some of the tools and materials I've dumped into the armor project.
Liq said:
I still want to get with you on a codpiece and maybe shins in the coming months if my wife will quit spending all my money. Your work is simply amazing to say the least.
I've got at least 3 complete space diaper sets and five calves cast up and setting on the shelf. I'm pretty sure I've sent you a price list, but I'll PM you the list all the same.
Queen said:
Was the sea a bit rough around Oregon (if you went in that direction)? My ship was rocking a bit...
We crossed the Pacific via a great circle route from Yokohama, Japan to Southern California. That route took us almost as far North as the Aleutians before we arced back down to the West Coast. There were a lot of low pressure systems rolling across the Pacific and all of them would've hammered right into Oregon, Washington, and Canuckistan. If I'm reading your profile right, you're on some little Navy ship, so it was probably miserable for you.
Coming up: I'm going to be finishing up the larger sized version of the torso armor, remolding the my-sized version of the torso armor, forming my undersuit parts in foam rubber, making a prototype for the inner thighs, and re-inventing my boot molds so I can make the soles and the uppers more reliably.
Stay tuned...