This post has been a long time coming....
This story starts back at the May expo last year. After an amazing two days in costume including one day of costuming for Gearbox, Liz (my wife for those of you who dont know) and I where driving home. We had spent out sunday in our Marine costumes
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Me on the left, Liz on the right
Me and liz.jpg [ 73.24 KiB | Viewed 3803 times ]
Me and liz.jpg [ 73.24 KiB | Viewed 3803 times ]
Now although these where good cosutmes for cheep scatch built cosutmes we never drew much attention, especially with Abe hanging around! On the drive home Liz turns to me and smiles saying "I want to get into armour, I want to join in properly" Now at this time we where only engaged and it braught two thoughts to my mind, Firstly IM GOING TO HAVE THE COOLIST WIFE IN THE WORLD!!! and secondly...how the hell am I going to do this...??
A few months went by and I had started looking for armour for the pair of us. Of course with any project like this the main thought is costs and how ever much I would love to place an order to Spat for over £1000 with a wedding in our furture it wasnt going to happen. Then in True UKCM style a gift appeard out of the blue, Glenn Allan Sent me a message, letting me know he was looking to get rid of a few things. A few discussions later and the promis of naming our first bourn after him in Augest last year we where the proud owners of two full sets of armour! There was only one problem, Although mine fit my burly manly (if not slightly portly) frame nicely, Lizs set was a little....well....she looked like a turtle....so much so I wont post the picture we took of her trying on the armour....
At this point I would love to say i went home, broke out some tools and went to work straight away BUT I kinda had to finish decorating our house.....oh yeah and get married!
Now a few more months down the line we hit January and with the release of A:CM comming up I decied its finally time to start work on Liz Armour. Now after having Liz try it on far too many times I found i needed to reduce the width (from hip to hip) and depth (bellybutton to back). Now the Depth was easy to fix. Using a hacksaw i trimmed off an Inch from each of the edges next to the buckels where the armour clam shells together. Now came the trickyist and scaryist part of this build. I looked into many ways of making the armour fit Liz from hip to hip, I went from bending the armour using a heat gun (which I was told was a very bad idea as its a fiberglass kit) to filling Liz with cakes to make her wider to fit the armour.....she was not fond of this Idea. It soon became aparent that I would have To split both the front back plates in half, take two inches of material out of each, and then stick them back together....this was not a fun idea...
And this happened....
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First cut....
split.jpg [ 131.19 KiB | Viewed 3803 times ]
split.jpg [ 131.19 KiB | Viewed 3803 times ]
As you can Imagin, at this point I'm panicing....as there is no going back! luckerly the gods of prop building and hot glue where on my side
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The chest stuck back together
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stuck front.jpg [ 74.39 KiB | Viewed 3803 times ]
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Stuck Back
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stuck back.jpg [ 102.87 KiB | Viewed 3803 times ]
With both the chest and back plate I used the two inches of materail I had cut off as a backing and hot glued it into place (to give you an idea of how much material that was on the small of Liz's back there is a letter L and R....this used to say LIFER...) This gave the armour a base structre to build off, but not only did this look like somthing that had been split by a Xeno....it also had no strength....so I got to play with fiberglass!!! sadly this did mean I ruined the paint job but at this point all I was worried about was putting it all back together!
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Fiberglassed chest plate fiber front.jpg [ 119.39 KiB | Viewed 3803 times ] |
... and Liz's armour looks better on her than it ever did on me 