KnowOne's Designs

WE HAVE MOVED!!!

2013-12-02T20:03:00.000-07:00

The new home of all of our work is at www.KnowOnesDesigns.com

I'm leaving this page as an archive and for anyone who might have it book marked, but I will no longer be updating it. Come and see the new site, its pretty sweet!

Video Time!

2013-10-22T14:12:00.002-07:00

Hey, so I am kinda bad when it comes keeping this updated. My plan to fix this is using the magic of videos! So here is my first video, about building Adventure Time props.

Crick (Raksa) figure from Hinges

2013-04-23T13:10:00.003-07:00

We love Meredith McClaren! Not only is she a great friend, but also an amazing artist and wonderful PhxCC booth buddy(AA28 for 2013). Last year we asked Meredith do a Wasp design that would be the base for Jackies costume. This year we wanted to do something more focused on Meredith's work, so we decided on making a figure from her comic Hinges. She has ton of interesting characters to chose from, but Crick (raksa) really caught my eye.
From a design standpoint, I liked the idea of taking an essentially 2D character and representing him in a 3D space. Meredith had done such a great job of portraying that concept in the comic that I felt it would be a great first piece to do.

Lucky for us, Meredith had drawn him from several angles, so we had quite a bit to base our templates on

After Jackie came up with the templates I decided to use 1/4 inch plywood for the master copy. Raksa reminds me of those wooden dinosaurs that you built as a kid, plus the the grain of the wood and the way it chips would add an extra level of detail to the finished piece.

I used some fancy washers that I found at Ace hardware for his shoulder joints. I backfilled them with resin to add surface area for gluing. Jackie also used these to keep everything in proportion. Remember that when you use off the shelf parts in a build you need to scale everything else to that part.

To save on time, I decided to cast Crick in a simple open back box mold, which meant he would be assembled out of seven pieces. You might notice that after I traced all of the pieces on the board I drilled a ton of holes in it. Those are to make cutting it out easier. I tried to put a hole where ever there would be a tight turn with my coping saw. It helped save some time and avoid broken saw blades.

Always label your "don't cut" areas! It will save you from hours self inflicted frustration.

Cutting, sanding, filing and shaping. This took an entire sunday afternoon, but it was going to make or break the figure. I ended up using a blade shaped mini file to shape out the mouth area, stripes and to get it symmetrical. It was very slow going but necessary.

The plywood that I got split and chipped everywhere. There were a lot of splinters, too many if you ask me.

Once all the sanding was finished it was time to get the pieces primed and ready for molding.

When I do an open back mold, I like to glue styrene to the back of my master pieces. That way when I am casting there is a spill shelf built right into the mold.

I also like to use scrap styrene and a low temp glue gun to build my mold boxes. I was pretty proud of my layout for these molds.

I got a bag of colored hot glue for free, but I love how it shows up in pics. I wonder how much more it is to buy than regular glue?

Smooth-On Mold Star 15 Slow has now become my silicone of choice. Its easy to mix, has a nice balance of flexibility and strength, Arizona Art Supply carries it, and it's the same color as our logo. What's not to love?

The molds came out beautifully, no air bubbles on the surface or major leakage! I was counting on the silicone to pick up every little detail of the wood. It will make the painting and weathering I do later much easier.

I didn't take any pictures of the sanding process, but to get Raksa's head to look like the comic I used my belt sander to file the middle part to a wedge, and then super glued the two outer pieces on. I also used the sander to give the smooth backside a grainy texture.

The first casting looked...ok. The tint I used in the resin worked great, but he was lacking something. Then I remembered that Jackie wanted to carve some extra face detail before I molded it. So after getting yelled at for rushing ahead, I got to redo the head mold. I had used up all my Mold Star 15, but I had some leftover Rebound 25 brush on silicone.

Not really the kind of mold Rebound 25 is designed for, but I made it work.

We also noticed that Crick was having a hard time staying on all fours. Any bumps to the table or gusts of air would knock him down. He also looked a little too 2D. For the second casting I glued styrene spacers between the legs and the body, and bent the body and tail a bit. To do the bending I removed body section from the mold before it had cured all the way and just flexed and held it. The end result was a piece that could stand on its own and had that 2.5D pop that was missing from the first casting. I used Rub'n'Buff for his joints, Krylon Matt topcoat, and several layers of watered down black acrylic paint to finish him off. This will be the way we assemble him from now on. Everyone we do will be slightly different, but I look at that as a bonus.

Over all I am really proud of the piece we were able to create. Hopefully we will have some for sale at con this year, so make sure to stop by. And if you are reading this close to the time it was published, you can help Meredith print the first run of Hinges by supporting her Kickstarter!

Henchmen Mask Kit

2013-04-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

This is a quick tutorial on how to assemble our Venture Brothers Henchmen mask kit, which you can buy here( if it's in stock).

This is what you will get in the mail, but depending on what my plastic supplier has available it may be white(or the angry eye version, the build method is the same):

Now we can start by assembling our tools. This is what I used and suggest, but it is not the end all be all.

1:Sandpaper: Both high and low grit. At least 400 grit, preferably 600 for the high.

2:Dremel with thin sanding drum: This will help you quickly sand out the eyes and clean up the edges of the mask. You can put the mask together without one, but it will take much longer.

3:Paint: I used Krylon Plastic Fusion yellow and Now wagon red. (black primer & black acrylic paint if you have a white mask)

4:Low temp hot glue gun: Make sure its LOW temp! You do not want to warp the plastic or burn your fingers. The cheap little ones work just fine

5: Scissors: Kinda self explanatory

6:Elastic band: So you can wear it!

Ok, now we can start! The first thing we need to do is get the mask into the proper shape. This means sanding, and lots of it

The Dremel really helps out here, just be careful with it. It's very easy to take off too much material. So take your time and get the eyes and the edges cleaned up and smoothed out. You will also want to take your high grit sandpaper and go over the whole mask, this will help the paint adhere. I know the Plastic Fusion brand paint says that you don't have to sand, but don't believe them! After you are done with your sanding, clean off your mask. Either use an air gun to blow it off or rinse it in some water and let it dry. Before you move on really take a close look at it. You do not want to get it all painted up and then realize that you needed to even out an edge. Now if your mask is white plastic you will want to first lay down a layer of black primer. This will help the yellow look "right" without having to spray multiple coats. Get the eye mesh out as well. You do not have to prep it at all, just paint it. Remember to follow all the directions on the spray paint can! This can really affect how the finish looks. If possible hang your mask from one of the eye holes for painting. I didn't not paint the backside of the mask because we will be hot gluing things to it. Let the paint dry overnight. We will be handling the mask a lot so you want the paint to be fully cured before we move on.

All right, at the start of day to your pieces should look like this ^. Now before we glue in the eye mesh there is one detail that we have to do first. To really make the eyes "pop" we are going so make the tiny inner edge of the eye hole black.

If the mask that you got is black plastic, all you need to do is very carefully sand off any paint that on that edge. If you have a white mask you can carefully paint the edge with some acrylic paint. Let that dry completely before moving on.

We are ready to start gluing. Plug in your glue gun and while it is heating up see if you need to trim any of the eye mesh. We want as much overlap for gluing as possible, so don't trim anything unless it hangs over an edge. To start you are going to put a bead of hot glue down along the top ridge of the eye hole. I used colored hot glue to make it easier to see.

Press the top of the mesh down into the glue. You want to see the glue worked into the weave. The safe way to do this is to use a pen or a stick to push the mesh down, and that's how I'm telling you to do it. I used my fingers, but that's because I'm dumb.

After you have let the glue cool down on the top, flip your mask over and press your thumb gently into the center of the eye mesh. You want the mesh to have a gentle bulge out of the eye hole. That, with the black line we added earlier will give the eyes a more 3d look.

Once you have the mesh in the right place you can start gluing it down. Really work the glue into the mesh, and make sure to overlap the edge. Work it in small sections and let the glue cool before moving on.

Once you have both eyes glued in you can add your elastic. Start from the middle edge of the eye and lay a bead of glue out towards the side of the mask. Quickly press one side of your elastic into the glue and let it cool. After it has cooled, top coat the elastic with more glue, overlapping the edges. Once that has cooled down, hold the mask up and pull the other side of the elastic around and touch it to the side of the opposite eye. Adjust how much you have to pull for comfort and then cut off any excess. Repeat the the gluing process and you are all finished! I hope that was helpful, and feel free to post pics of your finished masks in the comments.

New year! New Post! New Tool!

2013-01-11T10:51:00.001-07:00

Alrighty then. 2012 was a super busy year for us here at KnowOne's designs. If you haven't been keeping up with us on Facebook you should hop on over there and take a look see. We definitely keep that page more up to date than our website.....not sure if that's a good thing, but that's the way it is. So now on to my new toy! I have had the various piece parts for a home made vac former sitting in my shop for well over a year now. It was time to put it all together, in the most terrifying and unsafe way possible.

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS IN NO WAY A "HOW TO" GUIDE ON BUILDING A VAC FORMER! I am just showing you the random and hazardous way that I heat up thermoplastics and use suction to create objects. There are many other sites with plans (both free and paid for) on how to build one of these machines. If you wish to also play with melty plastic I suggest using your preferred internet search engine and finding proper plans. KnowOne's Designs is not responsible for any burnt fingers or seemingly random appearances of fire in your work shop. This can be seriously dangerous so.....don't be dumb.

OK so remember when I said that I had all the parts just laying around? That was a bit of a stretch. I had most of the parts, and then just made do with scrap lumber and cheap, undersized hardware. I was trying to build this as close to free as I could, alright?! But at the end I had a functioning tool, so that says something. When building a vac former, you first need to decide the size of your "platen" or as it is commonly known, "the bottom part with all the holes in it". The idea of spending hours drilling tiny holes, in a perfect grid, into a piece of aluminum, was abhorrent to me. Instead I based my entire design off of a 26"x18" baking pan that already had holes in it. Lazy? Definitely. Smart? I would like to think so. This way I could use a regular 26"x18" baking pan as the top of my oven box. To finish off the platen I needed a wood bottom with a hole in which to put the shopvac hose. Did I have a piece of lumber 26"x18"? Of course not. So I made one by splicing some other wood together with a 2"x4". I also put some support blocks between the top of my platen and the wood base to keep it all from crushing when suction was applied. Then all the seams were sealed with caulk.

And no, I did not trim those exposed screws. They add to the challenge.

See how many holes that is?! No way man. Not this guy.

For the next part I needed a heat source. $18 later I had my grocery store electric griddle. Almost all electric food devices use the same kind of heating element, and I think that the shape of the griddle will lead to a more even heat distribution over the plastic. Plus it already had mounting points and its own hardware. All I had to do was strip the plastic off of it and drill 4 holes into my pan.

My frame for this monstrosity started off as a pile of rusty old angle iron. The kind that has the slots in it for shelving. Sadly the slots did not quite line up with the top pan, so off to the trusty drill press.

Now this next part got tricky. I needed to get the 4 main legs attached to the platen and the heating element. What I ended up doing was stacking some lumber on table at the height that I wanted the platen to be. At this point all I wanted to do was get this thing together without contracting tetanus. The final assembly is held together with bolts, screws, 2x4's, and my hopes & dreams.

This part really sucked. I had to get Jackie to come out and help. At that point she had not seen any of the build process. Let's just say she was a bit underwhelmed and far less enthusiastic than I would have liked.

Now that my FrankenFormer was standing on its own, I needed to build an oven box around the heating element. Off to my local ACE for some aluminum flashing. I wanted a 5in box but the smallest width that they had was 6in. So I settled for an 8in roll that I would trim in half.

Not going to lie, I was terrified that my drill was going to catch the flashing and eviscerate me. Luckily we had no instances of spinning metal or horrific injuries.

Once the box was assembled I sealed all the gaps in structure with foil tape.

Now to hold the plastic, you need to build two frames that you can sandwich the plastic between. I made mine out of window screen stock. It was boring to build so I didn't take any pictures. I also tried an elaborate magnet system to hold the frames up to the box, which failed. So instead I use binder clips to hold it up. Not very high tech, but look at this thing. Its probably for the best. I got my first piece of plastic up there, turned the thing on, and waited......... It just was not getting hot enough. So I did what any sensible person in my position would do. I cut the thermometer prod off of the griddle power source. Now when it is on, it is ON. I may have just increased my chance of a shop fire by, like a lot, but its ok. I have a fire extinguisher somewhere in there. So its all cool. After all that messing around I got my first successful pull of what will soon be a new offering from KnowOne's Designs: a Monarch Henchmen mask from Venture Bros!

I hope that this was entertaining and enlightening More posts to come with 10x as much melty plastic and at least 2x as much new stuff!

Steam Punk Power Supply

2012-07-26T19:20:00.000-07:00

So a while back I talked about building a prop for a local web series Mantecoza. Well it is finally finished, thanks in good part to my father, Kenneth Backer. He helped out tremendously on this build. This was a very interesting project for me, as I normally do replicas or work off of some one else's designs. We were basically given free reign on the design. I just had to incorporate the light fixture that was provided. We also had to finish it in 2 weeks, so ya know, decisions had to be made fast and there was no turning back. Jackie did a quick sketch of our basic idea for the "reactor", but because of the time constraints we ended up not being able to incorporate all of the complexity of her original work. Such is the fate of most concept art.

Once we had our basic ideas it was out to my dad's garage to see what we had laying around to build this thing with. Wood from an old desk: check. PVC pipe so old and heat stressed it was browning: check. Random fittings, valves and switches: check.

Now we were going to need more than that to make this thing look the part, so it was off the the $.99 Only store and thrift shops to find lights and other doodads. Pro Tip: $.99Only is the best place to get LEDs. $1 gets you a battery pack, round circuit board with 7 Leds, mechanical switch and a resistor!? Try pricing that out at Radio Shack.

Always look at the clearance items at Michaels.
The rivets were some scrap-booking sticker.

My dad found this gem at Savers. No idea what it was for, but we cut the guts our, ran 1 AA to the knob switch and attached it to the terminals on the gauge. It actually worked! we were able to control the needle with the knob. I added an on/off switch and some other dummy switches on the final piece.

With the casting from my hardware store silicone fuse mold we began to lay everything out.

We used several different spray paints. A bright hammered finish on the joints, a darker hammered finish on the back board, and a rustic bronze on the pipes them selves. I don't remember the brand or the exact name. Cut us some slack, we were in a hurry. I would also like to note that I hate wood. We used 3 cans of high build filler primer and 1 can of hammered paint on that back board and the grain still came through!

Did I mention that this needed to light up? And be pretty? I didn't? Well it had to do both, be small, light weight and run on batteries. Well the $.99 Only store provided the light sources, but just plain white lite shinging out of this thing wouldent cut it. Luckly Jackie had some leftover fantasy film from her Wasp wings. A little heat, armature wire and some glue and we had our prettiness! We also needed tubes coming out of the center of this "pixie warp core". My dad took some PVC fittings and used his oscillating sander to give them a curve that would fit the center of the fixture. With a small screw in the center for support we just 5 minute epoxied them right on

After that it was time for the final assembly and testing.

The thing worked like a champ!

And one last shot on set.

I want to thank everyone over at Mantecoza for giving my dad and I a chance to work with them. It looks like the series is going to be great, and everyone reading this should shoot over and check out their website and facebook page!

Quora v3 and N01 program

2012-06-05T12:17:00.000-07:00

Well our first con with a booth went great! We have pics up on our facebook of all our costumes, but i was really excited that we got to show off our latest Tron costumes. The v3 Quorra has to have been the most complex piece I have done to date, with countless solder joints and wiring. And of course, one of the two joints that came from the factory failed. But besides that set back it was great! Now i needed a costume to go with Jackies, so i decided instead of doing something from the movie, I would create my own Tron style character,N01. Simple El jacket and a helmet with sound responsive El in the grill. Both were a huge hit at the geek prom.

Commission Requests

2012-05-23T23:39:00.000-07:00

So not really a post, but more of an FYI. If you would like to commission my wife and I to build you a specific prop or costume please send an email to us with the following information:

1:Your name and contact info

2:Character or Prop name and source material (movie/game/anime etc.) OR concept art/detailed description if you want an original work

3:At least one reference image (the more the better)

4:Date you need it completed by. Most projects we require 4-6 weeks. We still have day jobs you know! But depending on the circumstance we may be able to work faster, although a rush fee will apply. On the other side of the coin, if you want 10 suits of armor it will take longer.

Now a quick word on pricing. We are two people building everything by hand, not a factory in China. Almost all projects will be over $100. Very complicated or time consuming ones can run into the $1000's. I am putting this up here because you would not believe how many people have hit up my wife asking about a Deadpool costume but only wanting to spend $40 on it. And no, there is no set pricing. Everything is based off of material costs, complexity and time, which changes drastically from project to project. All other terms will be negotiated on an individual basis. We will try and keep our pages updated with our availability, but we will not take on new commissions if our work load is too heavy.

Thank you!
Garrick Backer
Jackie Backer

Wasp Armor

2012-05-11T01:16:00.000-07:00

With the Avengers movie out and everyone excited already for a sequel, my wife wanted to build an Avenger costume. Since the only choice from the fist film was Black Widow, and we have a good friend with a great Widow costume, she picked The Wasp from the comics. This build was split between the two of us. She will have a post up about how the design came about and how she put the suit together. I'm going to show off how I built the armored pieces. Now since we are in a time crunch before PHXCC, sculpting, molding, and casting pieces just wasn't going to happen. Lucky we have EVA foam to make our lives easier. This foam is commonly known as Foamies or Craft Foam but it is also the same material they make some of the anti-fatigue floor mats out of. The best part of working with this foam is that when heated and pressed it will take a shape and keep it, so with that in mind we looked about for something to use to form the breast plate. What we found was an over-sized Easter egg.

After cutting it down to a appropriate size I used plaster to make solid copies. On a side note, don't try and rush de- molding plaster of paris. You will just end up with a mess.

After only one failed pour I had my forms!

To put pressure down evenly on my foam I took a scrap piece of acrylic that has been laying around my shop and used a dremel to cut it in to shape. After gluing my forms down to a board I used my heat gun and my make shift press to get this shape. I still ended up on my hands and knees pressing this into place.

My parents said I could do anything when I grew up. So I gave a floor mat boobs!

After my wonderful wife gave me the shape she wanted it was off to seal this up for painting. EVA foam is very porous and does not paint well if you don't prep it right. A mix of white glue and water will seal it up. The glue I used is a craft glue called Sobo that you can get at any craft store, but regular Elmer's glue will work as well. I use about a 2 parts glue to 1 part water mix. And by that I mean I totally just eyeballed it. But if I had to guess I would say 2to1 is about right.

Now even though its been sealed I want a primer layer down before I start painting.
This is just one coat of Plasti-Dip out of the spray can. The high gloss shine goes away after it dries.

Now I just recently discovered acrylic spray paint, and I think I'm in love. Super high pigmentation, excellent coverage, flexible, low odor, fast drying time, mixable and blendable. The only draw back is that they average $10 a pop. Oh and you have to shake them for at least 3 minutes or you can ruin the whole can. The Liquitex brand they now carry at Michaels craft stores. They don't have as wide a color selection as the Gold brand (which Arizona Art Supply carries) but you can color match to their regular acrylic paints which might come in handy in the future. The Gold brand Chrome came out more like a bright silver, but chrome in a can never looks like the real deal. The Liquitex transparent yellow was tricky to work with at first but I think I nailed the metallic yellow look that my wife wanted. To top the whole thing off I clear coated it in a gloss acrylic sealer and glued to the suit using fabri-tac. My only failure was the hands. The clear coat wont dry on vinyl and the yellow will flake if it does not have a top coat. But we did get to coin the term "handruff" at free comic book day, so all was not in vain. Check out the other half of this build here oneblackcatsuit/wasp

Hardware Store Silicone Mold Makeing

2012-04-22T02:35:00.000-07:00

So occasionally I will have a budget of pretty darn close to $0 to do a build. I am working on a prop for a steam punk web series called Mantecoza ( http://mantecoza.wordpress.com/ )and I needed to make 4 copies of this oversized fuse. In a perfect world I would just run down to my local supply store Ball Consulting
and pick up some platinum Polytek mold making silicone or order some from Smooth-On. But we don't live in a perfect world, and I don't have the extra cash to spend on materials right now. So I started Google-ing different ways to make molds, and ran across people using hardware store %100 silicone caulk. Now everybody seems to have there own recipe, some thinning it with naphtha or adding acrylic paint and glycerin, but that would mean more money and time. So I used what I had: clay, %100 silicone caulk, soapy water, and Bondo fiberglass resin jelly. (Ok so I cheated a bit. I also used some mold release. Its the only non-hardware purchase you need to make for this to work, and if you are going to be casting in your new cheap-ass mold you will need it anyways. Pics with the can to follow, also a good video on this is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0KrE3G4t_o) After getting the fuse set half way down in the clay, and using the domed head of a bolt to make registration keys I was ready to start applying the caulk. I laid down a bead all the way around the base where the fuse met the clay. After getting my fingers good and wet I patted down the caulk. That seems to work better than trying to spread it out. I then laid 3 beads going along the length of the fuse and patted them down as well. The fist layer is the most important, so I tried not to trap any air between the silicone and the fuse. The internet also taught me that this kind of silicone cures by moisture, so the water isn't going to harm anything. It also taught me that if you lay down to thick of a layer that the outside will skin over and the caulk will not cure all the way through. So for this mold I did 3 layers on each side, letting each layer cure overnight. Now 6 days to do a mold might seem like a long time, but lets remember that I just bought 2 tubes of Ace brand 50 year %100 silicone caulk for FIVE DOLLARS. Cheap is not going to be fast, but it is going to be cheap. A mold this size took a little over one tube to do.

After getting one side done, I sprayed mold release over the silicone and clay and did a jacket of Bondo fiberglass resin jelly. Its like regular Bondo but it has fiberglass fibers in it already. I don't really like the stuff, and doing a regular fiberglass and resin jacket would be lighter and stronger, but I've had half a can sitting around my shop for over a year and it seemed like a good time to use it. I cut a piece of mattboard and Bondo-ed it to the back as well so when I flip the mold over and remove the clay it will stand on its own. You could use cardboard as well.

As you can see the mold came apart nicely! I was pretty surprised actually. With my luck I figured that not only was it not going to work, but it would ruin my original as well. A quick test cast proved what I had hoped, that you can get a decent looking cast from this method. Now let me take a moment here to say that this IN NO WAY is better than buying professional mold making silicone. But if you have a tight budget and don't mind having to do some clean up on your cast pieces, this way works.

The results are in! Experiments in water putty part 2.

2012-02-28T13:01:00.000-07:00

So two months in and I have already broke my resolution....but I have had a crazy month! Birthdays and moving stuff and getting stuff have eaten up my time. But on to the topic at hand!As a glaze or small spot filler the water putty is useless. It just chips off,but when used in thicker amounts, more like bondo,it has performed very well. They were not kidding when they said it was rock hard though, and next time I will make my application smoother so i have less sanding to do. Now the only thing left to try with this stuff is to see how it works with fiberglass mat. And as a fun announcement I will be splitting a booth with my artist friend Meredith httwww.iniquitousfish.blogspot.com/ at phoenix comic con this year, so please come by and see us!

Experiments! With water putty part 1.

2012-02-07T01:04:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, resin, bondo, fiberglass, spot putty, silicone, urethane, etc is not cheap. Like a lot of us I don't just have money to throw around. I am always looking for inexpensive substitutes, and I think I may have found one. Not saying that this is breaking news, this product has been around a while. But it is news to me, and I am here to share it with you. A while back my father got me a great book, "The Prop Builder's Molding & Casting Handbook" by Thurston James.

If you are at all interested in how to do the kind of things I do in this blog, this book is a great place to start. Some of the references are a bit dated, and its more geared for theatrical prop making,but it still is a wealth of knowledge. It has a whole chapter dedicated to working with hardware store products, which is where I came across Durham's Rock Hard Water Putty. Its a water based wood filler that does not shrink, and can be sanded, cut, drilled and when dry has many of the same characteristics of wood. The book details how to use it for casting, but I wanted to try it as a spot putty and for reinforcement. I worked 2 batches, one the pancake batter thickness that the book described best for casting and the other the peanut butter thick paste the instructions on the can told me to do. Now I am doing something that I would never tell anyone else to do, testing an unknown product on works in progress. But what the hell, I like to live a little.

I got to work on things late tonight so all I got done was prep and application. The book says that the putty can set in as little as a half an hour, but my shop is pretty chilly right now, and that's making it take longer. All of these will get some more progress posts in the coming days. Thursday is my birthday! Doesn't really apply to the post but I am excited anyways. You should be too!

quorra dress mk2

2012-02-01T13:19:00.002-07:00

Sadly I didn't get many pics of this build. This was made for a local customer. The Quorra light design had to be changed a bit because light tape as very little flexibly side to side. I think for the most part we got the look down. This piece runs off of 3 9volt's. It was also a successful test of my vac formed disk mount/hub.

Quorra helmet post deux

2012-01-31T23:27:00.000-07:00

Sanding. Sanding sanding sanding. SANDING! So that's what i have been doing. And guess what? I still have to do. More. I will do my best not to warp the damn card stock ever again.

Proton Pack bucks

2012-01-26T00:25:00.000-07:00

I have been working on this project for years now. I bought these pack bucks off of ebay thinking that it would be cake to start pulling shells. The were in awful shape and all the details and cosmetic plates were wrong. And it was to big for the vacuum table i had access to. So with the help of my friend from www.toddcookdesigns.com we went to work on rebuilding the bucks. The 6 piece and the matching spacer had to be completely remade and Todd laser cut all of the cosmetic plates from acrylic. We managed to pull one quality shell but had to many failed pulls to try and start offering any. So now I'm back at it to try and rework them again . Hopefully it wont be much longer before I can get consistent pulls.

Quorra helmet.

2012-01-25T23:43:00.000-07:00

Well this has been a pain in the ass. My wife did a wonderful job on the pep build (file from prop zone I believe) and in the process of adding the resin, bondo and fiberglass I managed to warp the face a bit. So now I am going to have to add more bondo and reshape the cheak area. I'll post some progress epics in a day or so.

Proton Wand body

2012-01-18T19:40:00.000-07:00

First of all a shout out to ProtonCharger over at GBFans.com for the great pep files. I really cant believe it took so long for someone to do a proton pack in pepukura but he has done a great job. Here is my build so far, from paper to first coats of resin. I opted to try SmoothCast 300 for my resin instead of using regular Bondo autobody resin. I'm hoping that it will be easier to sand. Also I reinforced the side walls with mattboard. That kept the sides from rippling. I tend to get impatient while doing the first coats and soak the cardstock to the point it warps. The extra thick sidewalls kept that from happening.

New year, new post!

2012-01-11T01:02:00.000-07:00

So I am really, I mean really bad at this blog thing. But it is a new year and I will be posting on a regular basis. My wife and I bought our first house at end of 2011
so now I have a proper workshop. It just needs some insulation, lights, more outlets, an A/C unit... so there will probably be some progress pics of that coming soon. And because of the home buying process I have not gotten much done. But I did manage to squeeze some work in on a proton wand body. Haven't decided if this is going to be a one off or if I'll mold it.

Daft Punk 'd TRON EL jackets

2011-06-02T19:03:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the super long time in between posts. We have been slaving away on Tron jackets for the group Daft Punk 'd. I designed and built all of the light panels. The jackets were supplied by Daft Punk 'd. I used A4 sized EL sheets that were cut and spliced together to create the different shapes. One jacket can be run off of either 4 9volt batteries or plugged into a wall unit.

Simple El Design.

2011-03-09T23:25:00.000-07:00

Here is a jacket that I made for a friend. It runs on a 2 AA driver and is one uninterrupted piece of EL. Very simple but I like the flow of the design.

Tron Inspired EL Jacket

2011-01-06T18:02:00.000-07:00

So here's some pics of my prototype Tron inspired EL jacket. The reflective tape that was used for the flash in the light pics turned out to not hold up to regular ware, so it wont be used in future jackets. The disk mount was an piece of back armor from an old motorcycle jacket. It just seemed to have the right kind of shape for the Tron universe. While EL wire is much more affordable that EL tape or sheets I am just not as satisfied with the finished product. Unless someone just wants a bargain basement price on a jacket I will be focusing on EL tape in the future.

Photo Dump!

2011-01-05T22:52:00.000-07:00

Here are some Photos of some of my earlier works. Hope that you enjoy them and feel free to ask any questions!

Batman and Robin (Full Disclosure: While the majority of my Batman and my friends Robin costume were done by me, some pieces were done by other artists, most notably the cowl and eye mask)

Black "Suit" Spiderman

Deadpool (to be fair, my wife did all the sewing, I just made the eyes and the equipment)

The first non-post Post!

2010-03-24T18:09:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone, My name is Garrick and this is my show off blog/online portfolio of my costumes and props. I will also try to put any useful tricks or techniques that I stumble across to help anyone else out who enjoys creating their own props and costumes. Coming soon in my first real update, Deadpool begins and the back log of finished work!