Master Chief Costume

General Composites Discussions Showcase
#1

Although I own these forums I personally haven’t worked on any composites projects in a while.

However a girl I know was making a bespoke costume for Halloween and luckily for me she needed FG help and had no experience. And lucky for you guys I took a couple of pictures! :smiley:

She wanted to be Master Chief for Halloween, which is a popular videogame character. For those who aren’t familiar here’s a picture

For shapes she chose a method called Pepakura, which basically means folded paper. Basically, someone creates a shape in a CAD software, and the computer translates it into flat patterns which are then folded and glued into a final shape.

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Here’s the chest piece

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and here is she wearing the helmet and holding the folded and glued pieces.

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#2

From there the process was fairly straightforward, initial layer of polyester to give the paper some water resistance and additional strength, and then a couple of layers of fiberglass.

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Some of the parts had very sharp folds so before laying down the fiberglass I filled in the corners with polyester resin with flour filler. I used flour because we had it in the kitchen and it was free.

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After this the process is to sand the paper off, fill in gaps with Bondo and do some final detailing and paint.

Unfortunately she severely underestimated the time it would take to get this done so we only semi finished the chest piece but it was good enough for Halloween. She’s going to finish the rest for Halloween 2014. Here’s a picture of her in the chest piece.

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Most importantly THANK YOU ROTORAGE.
He donated all the fiberglass and resin needed for this project. If he posts everyone should give him a Thanks +1 since he really did a lot to make this happen.

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#3

Wow - that’s a lot of folding and gluing!
Do you have an idea of how long that part took?

I’m also just wondering if there was a particular reason the paper was sanded away? Why not just leave it and put glass on both sides? Or do you think that sanding away the paper is a quicker method?

Any photos of the helmet and complete suit??

#4

I love this!

#5

The folding took her 150-200 hours. She recruited a lot of her friends and family to help.

The suit isn’t finished, she underestimated the time it would take to go through the whole process and only completed the chest piece by the time Halloween rolled around. She’s going to finish it for next year though.

Lastly the paper outside looks ok, but in person the texture and surface finish is just ok. Looking at what other did online it seems the best finished is sanding away the paper to smooth out the surface finish.

#6

Here’s a shot of just the helmet in paper form, it all looks bad @$$ in person.

#7

that paper folding is crazy. I go crazy with the simplest things. much respect for the person that has that much patience!

#8

hehehe this is really cool :stuck_out_tongue:

#9

Totally Totally cooL!