I’ve got two sword blades fully cut out, sanded, primed, and ready for paint. Sorry, don’t have a picture of those, I’ll post a few with my next update.
Redid the design for the bracers a couple times, finally settled on something I was happy with. Nothing fancy, but certainly good enough for what we’re doing.
Played around with my feeds and speeds prior to cutting this out and I’m really happy with the results I got. After doing some reading and watching some videos, I realized I was running my router way too fast. I suspected I was, cause I was cutting a LOT of dust and very little in the way of “chips”. Looked in the manual for the router and realized the setting I was using was around 25,000 rpm. According to the (surprisingly few) people who are cutting EVA with CNC machines, around 10,000 is where I should be.
I also cranked up my feed rate. I had been running around 18mm/s. On a whim, I just went ahead and doubled that. Immediate difference! All of the sudden I was getting “chips” and hardly any dust at all, and the edges were SO MUCH cleaner. On top of that, the machine didn’t show any signs of strain at all, so sometime in the next day or so, I’m going to experiment with increasing DOC. I’d love to be able to cut the 5mm foam in a single pass!
Bracers painted and laced with elastic. Once I get a chance to fit them on the actors, I’ll trim the ends of the elastic and tie them off.
Like I said, nothing fancy. Went with a simple straightforward design. Fits me snugly, so they should fit the actors comfortably.
Got elastic attached to the pauldrens. I have elastic bands to hold them on the arms, and an elastic cord with a small loop on the end that slips around a 3D printed grommet on the armor to keep them from sliding down. The grommets are mainly to attach the back straps, but it was a nice convenient attachment point for the pauldrens as well.
I wasn’t sure how well the foam would work as a belt, but they turned out pretty well. The buckle is 3D printed, and I plan to do some work on the design and reprint them. The design is functional and works well, but with a little effort, I think I can make them look nicer as well.
I finally settled on a design for the greaves. I poked around on Etsy for a while, but didn’t find anything I liked. So I bit the bullet and designed my own. I used a technique that I learned from Kamuii - I wrapped my leg in plastic wrap, then covered that with strips of duct tape. Did some drawing with a sharpie, then cut it all off my leg. I laid the cut pieces flat and took measurements to draw it out in Illustrator. From there, I printed the designs out on paper, traced them onto some poster board so I could tape them up and make adjustments. After a couple iterations, I had something I was happy with. Hopefully get those cut out and put together next week.