More quick progress today on Operation: Virtue. Last time we left off with the upper torso, including the cockpit area, chest, and back being fitted and done, and part of the sides of the torso completed. Made some more leaps and bounds since then.
Generally what the work area looks like, though much cleaner than last time. Working in my own garage with a plethora of dangerous sharp objects. Great care is taken in ensuring that neither my partner nor I end up losing a finger or testicle in the delicate construction process.
So we’ve been paint-hunting lately, and have basically come to the conclusion that spray paints won’t work that great on large amounts of cardboard. I do have a fairly large stock of spray paint, but most of it is meant for ‘pla, not cardboard mobile suit armor.
In my own experience, spray painting cardboard usually doesn’t turn out well, in that the spray usually isn’t wide enough, doesn’t cover enough surface area at once, causes your finger to hurt constantly holding down the nozzle, doesn’t cover evenly, and the particles usually end up bouncing back at you once they hit the cardboard. Spray paint adhesion to paper generally isn’t the greatest.
As a result, we’ve been hunting around a little for house paint to use on the project, and my colleague managed to procure a can of off white for current use. Something tells me we’ll need more than just half a quart of white…
The paint generally goes on really well, we just gotta glop it on, nice and thick so it gives a nice rich color and covers everything adequately.
We tested it on the newly assembled shoulder armors first, and it turned out quite well, despite some paint mishaps here and there involving messed up clothing…
Trash can as a paint drying station because nothing else works. You can barely see the painted white, but it covers the duct tape and whatnot nicely. Liking how it’s turning out so far.
As I mentioned in the last post, my colleague is a math whizz. I went ahead and let him draw up most of the pieces, while I used my deft(er) hands to cut them out. I’m honestly pretty amazed at how well he planned the pieces out and how precisely they fit together. All made possible by advanced math skills refined in a grueling trigonometry class.
The schematics for this round’s bout.
We’re having some awful trouble trying to figure out how to fit and attach the pieces onto the actual human body. I’m impressed with my colleague working so well with the measured degrees and the like, and making everything to a precise size in relation to everything else, but actually having the armor stay on the body is a completely different issue altogether.
We’ve come up with several ideas at the moment, including Velcro, belt buckles, hooks, buttons, etc., but nothing’s really been an ace in the hole yet. Gotta keep brainstorming, hope something will come to us.
Front skirt area. The crotch armor is especially impressive, in that my colleague drew up the schematics and actually worked out all the pieces needed to make it look impressively 3D.
Same for the actual front skirt themselves. And here I expected them to be just two roughly cut pieces of flat cardboard.
Gotta put them yellow blocks on the skirts and the yellow crest in the crotch armor next.
Random piece of leftover cardboard that was conveniently shaped like a v-fin. May be used, may not. Looks like the Astray v-fins…
No photos of all our completed work this time, since paint was drying at the time. Overall outstanding progress once again, and only on the second day of work. We used to think we’d have a time crunch too…
Read on the rest of the build:
