I can't believe we got it all finished!!! Here's more of the build. Been 'working' from home, ha, so basically just been back and forth from mom and dad's and here working on this costume non-stop...
I knew the armor was going to be the most challenging part of the project and I was right. To make the armor, me and Luke decided to go with Worbla, which is a thermoplastic very similar to Wonderflex. Neither one of us had never used Worbla before so it was definitely a learning experience. There are a few things I might have done differently if I did it over again, but overall, I was happy with the results. For most of the armor, we used two pieces of Worbla with a piece of craft foam in between. We found this template online, enlarged it on a copy machine and used it as a basis for the chest armor.
Once we had everything fitted to my body, we made the two shoulder pauldrons and cut the two “tear drop” shapes out of the front. To fill in these two tear drop shapes, you could either use putty or do what we did, which was use bondo (aka auto filler).
The decision to use bondo (aka body filler) on top of the Worbla was due to a couple of things – I wanted the armor to be really smooth to the point where it looked like plastic and I didn’t want any imperfections in the shape. Perhaps a ton of gesso primer could have done that, but I didn’t want to take the risk so we decided to do it the hard way and bondo’d everything! We used Evercoat Rage Premium auto filler, which I thought was fairly easy to use although this was our first time using bondo so I could be wrong. :P
The entire 1-2 day process of bondo, sanding, bondo, sanding during a heat wave was pretty tiring and it took a while to get used to the materials. We had to bondo each piece maybe 5-6 times to fill in all those nasty little air bubbles and getting those “tear drop” shapes on the front chest piece was challenging, but I was really happy with the results.
After a few layers of wood glue as primer, it was finally time to paint! Since I was already using car repair materials, I appropriately ended up using auto body paint for the armor. Considering the 1-2 days it took to bondo and prime everything, painting was the fun and “easy” part. I highly recommend using Frog Tape for any of your masking needs – it is way more reliable than the blue tape, especially if you are painting your house!
Masked, painted grey, masked again, painted black.
Trying on the armor!
Once all the armor was assembled using sticky back velcro, I just had to take care of a few smaller pieces like the belt. I knew hooking up LED lights for Vader’s belt boxes was a going to be interesting since conceptually I thought I could do it, but in reality I wasn’t sure. I had never soldered anything or made a real circuit, but my dad is kind of a physics nerd, so I got him in on the project I was pretty excited to see if he/we could do it. We did some some online research, and doing some pen/paper calculations, we were ready to build the first circuit. And... It worked! At that point, we soldered everything together in the two Worbla boxes and taped all the wires down with electrical tape. Since I was running out of time, I had to purchase an unfinished chest box from a 501st guy here in Miami so unfortunately that part didn't light up. :(
Finally it was time to actually start trying everything on…
Well, that covers everything for the most part! Definitely let me know what you think of the materials or if you have recommendations. Would love to hear your thoughts!
I'll put up some pics tonight from the party/show. And I really hope the A/C is working there, this thing is damn hot!!! I'm gonna loose some weight tonight, fo shizzle.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!
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