Crazyleg build Pt 1

Epic costume requires epic preparation, as they say, and late last year I decided to embark on the most difficult thing I'd ever built: stilts.

I've always been fascinated by digitigrade legs. Their shape and form have sort of been a partial obsession for me from the day I saw my first anthromorph drawing.

Source: http://direblayde.deviantart.com/art/AnthroAnatomy-Digigrade-Legs-44937101

I'll admit, I am not much of an engineer and such stuff can have fairly dangerous outcomes when attempted by people who don't really know what they're doing. So following a build put online by another maker, I've decided to follow the design as close as I could for safety's sake.

As a result, the whole thing ended up fairly expensive but I think I'll be satisfied with the build once it's done (I hope) as I'm making it as part of a Shadowrun character costume that I've had in mind for quite some time now.

After months of waiting, gathering materials and doing research (special thanks to the fursuiting community for tackling many of the major issues involved in figuring out such legs) I set to work.

The stuff I ended up needing:
Heaps of aluminium flats, steel tubes, a large quantity of bolts, two sintra boards (6mm), nylon webbing and tri-guides/glides, aircraft cable, turncables and a big handful of washers.

Finding the components wasn't easy, considering the local market for small metal purchases is terrible. That and having metric system bolts vs American standard system bolts wasn't a walk in the park either. Some bits I had to order online from specialty metal stores, alongside the majority of bolts and nuts I'm using due to not being able to source for strong bolts locally.

Like these tubes! Always remember to check for WALL THICKNESS when buying tubes. The size can be right but if the tube wall is too thick, yer f*kd!

Most of the bolts I found were class 8.8 at their strongest, or more commonly Grade 2 which was good enough for standard applications but we needed something strong enough to be stood on by a grown human being.

Class 8.8 = Grade 5 bolts (strong but not strong enough!)

I was not willing to risk it at all and went ahead to get Grade 8 bolts from nutty.com.

I also got my aluminium C-channels and metal tubes from onlinemetals.com

My buckles and nylon webbing from bestbuynet.com/

Now on to the show:
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While I was waiting for my metals and bolts to arrive, we decided to get working on the sintra first.

My dad was over for the weekend and he had agreed to help out a bit so he brought his jigsaw along with him.

Cutting them with the jigsaw was like plowing a hot knife through butter, and we had chopped up the whole lot in no time. We then drilled holes in the appropriate spots so they can be mounted onto the aluminium frame later down. From there I proceeded to sand down the sides to get rid of all the rough edges. Rough spots are easily sanded down due to the nature of sintra, so they were pretty easy to handle overall.

Kinda looks like a toilet seat, that.

Next was forming them up with my trusty Skil heatgun.

The sintra pieces are meant to go around your thighs and lower legs to provide support, and thus need to be molded to your own legs. Getting them molded is simple business, just had to heat up the inner parts of the sintra and press them down on the appropriate areas to get the shape, holding them down for a couple of minutes to let them set.

Here's a finished piece.

I decided to sand it in a little more just to get the bits that re-roughened up when I bent them. Overall I'm quite happy with how they turned out; and hopefully I can mount them and get to painting soon!

Dat hilt

It's been a few months since I actually finished up putting on the decals and painting the sword. Here's more or less what it looks like now. 

Not that great I know, but since it's had a VERY long time to dry after the whole paint and polish process, I think it's ready for a second coat. The blade came out very nice though it's not pictured. It had a really good metallic sheen to it, with a bit of a mirrored effect. Not as great as what you get from shiny chrome automotive paint but it had staying power.

I still feel the middle part of the hilt is a little bare though, but having a square design like that its rather hard to factor in any organic designs. The tape is still holding on fairly well but it took a bit of damage at the con and is peeling a bit at the top. I'm contemplating changing it to a faux leather wrap but am doubting the strength of it's hold. But that would be a modification for another time I guess.

I'm not quite done geeking out at the paint job ^^

Hand-me-down claymore

I very recently traded in a gaming mousepad for a wooden claymore made by one of my maker buddies. Long story short, he didn't want me to pay for it and I didn't want to get it for free, so it's a fair trade in a sense.

It was decked out in these red gems (which I didn't feel suited the costume it was going to go with) so I set off to completely repaint the thing and give it a few minor modifications.

I'm generally quite terrible at thinking of detailing designs, but after trying out a whole load of things I ended up with this one.

Having just gotten a heat gun recently, stripping off the gems and glue was a breeze. Sadly I used a bit of a too high heat setting and the paint bubbled a bit. In the end I decided to sand off the blade's paint and use thinner to strip off the rest.

 Using 3D fabric paint is the worst. You have to have an insanely steady hand for it. After maybe 5-6 attempts to draw it on properly, I finally got down something decent. (though I'm still not entirely satisfied with it) and left it to dry overnight.

After scraping off a little bit of access paint, which was easily done with a boxcutter blade, I decided to do a paint test. Not really the best considering I didn't have the right shade of paint to get that gold lustre, it looked somewhat decent despite the slight lumpiness.

LSP approves!