by Fabricatordjinn | Nov 18, 2015 | Uncategorized
I recently debuted an Imperius costume from Diablo 3 at Blizzcon 2015. I have received an enormous amount of feedback on this costume, and the most common question I’ve received is “What did you make that out of, how did you get it so smooth!” Well, here is your answer. I used a type of thermoplastic called Closed Cell PVC Foam, more commonly known as Sintra (brand) or XPVC. XPVC is sort of a hybrid between PVC (like the pipes) and Polyurethane. This mix gives it some truly amazing properties, and makes it surprisingly friendly to use for a thermoplastic. I starts out almost totally smooth, and sands to a near perfect finish. It takes all types of paint, and is by far my favorite material to work with. It is heat shapable, sandable, cuttable by hand or with a saw, drillable, comes in various colors and thicknesses and is in general a wonderfully versatile material to work with. I have even successfully turned it on a lathe. It is commonly used in the FX industry and for vinyl coated signs you see on the street. Instead of going into the technical minutia of XPVCs properties, I have included a link to the Wikipedia article on it HERE. That’s nice you say, what do I need to start? Things you need: XPVC: Sintra/Komatex/Celtec (USA) – Forex (UK/AUS) – Link to good price on Amazon First you need to find it. I get all of my XPVC from a local vendor called San Diego Plastics. It is only really sold by industrial plastic suppliers. If you live near a city,...
by Fabricatordjinn | Aug 22, 2015 | Uncategorized
Gorehowl was and still is one of my favorite fantasy weapons of all time. Its just so brutal and simple, a huge ass cleaver that has slain demigods, demons, and countless enemies of its wielder. I decided to build one on a whim awhile ago, and here are the results! .. Lok’tar Ogar? I wanted to do the OG version this time, not the Iron Horde version. So I installed WoW again and got to model ripping. After a bit of tinkering, I had the model and a solid size reference. Yes. Good. I scaled it up to my size, and found it should be just a little over 4′ long total for maximum choppiness. I booted up pepakura viewer, got a solid size profile of my model and printed out a rough template for the blade. Then, I transferred this pattern to a 1″ thick chunk of Expanded PVC I had been lucky enough to find in the scrap bin for $10 (usually $200+ a sheet). I planned to make the entire back of the axe removable (with screws for reinforcement) until final sealing up, so I bandsawed off the back 2 inches of the blade for later. I created my blade lines with my template and a lot of model turning, then transferred those lines to the new blade blank. At this point, it was time to take the blade blank to the belt sander/orbital sander. this was the first time I had tried to sand out the blade of such a thick and solid chunk of plastic.. and it was just incredibly slow going and tiring....
by Fabricatordjinn | May 14, 2015 | Commissions, Uncategorized
Going through my backlog of builds, this one was one of my favorites! I built this sword back when I was still in Hawaii, and it was one of my very first commissions! A Grey Knight Nemesis Force Sword! I can feel the nerd in me shivering with joy already. Lets get to smiting. After digging around, I found some reference art with a design I REALLY liked by Kano Kun. Simple in shape, devastating in effect. Since this was to be a 1 handed weapon, it needed to be on the lighter side so I decided to build it out of Extruded Polystyrene Foam Board. I then drew up a blade shape I liked, and got to cutting! After drawing my blade lines, it was time to get sanding! I bust out the trusty old Random Orbit Hand Sander and went to work. Foam like this sands like it isnt even there so about 20 minutes later.. It was my first time working with this material, and I didn’t fare too well in the control department. there were too many problems with the blade so I cut out another blank and redid the edges. Much cleaner! I was using my dads shop at this point, so I had access to tools beyond even what I have available now! I bought a 1″ dowel rod and ran it through a planer to flatten out the sides to the width of the blade.. I was then able to cut a channel out of the foam blade and insert the wooden piece in, making it endlessly durable to hefting about and...
by Fabricatordjinn | May 4, 2015 | Commissions, Uncategorized
I was approached by Riot to make a full sized Trundle Ice mace for their upcoming YouTube show, /ALL/ Chat. You can see it adorning their weapon wall along with a number of other excellent stabbing/bashing tools. I only had 2 weeks from their first email to show day, so I had to build this very quickly. Having never done a prop with so much.. MASS before, I had to come up with a quick and effective way to make it lightweight, strong, and use what I had available immediately. I wanted to make it out of Insulation foam, but there was decidedly little of it on hand in Sunny San Diego and I had to go with an old staple, Pepakura! This was the goal! I dug into the game files and pulled out the model for Clubbems, and quickly turned it into a useable pep file (I have included this file below for any who want to use it!) Trundle Ice Mace – Pep File I had to make this thing strong, and cardstock just wasnt going to cut it. The finished version of Clubbems has deep cracks, gouges and blemishes in its face that would require me to take a lot of material out to make believable. Since foam wasnt available, I decided to use 3mm Expanded PVC as my pepakura base. After getting my file ready, I printed out to paper, cut out, transferred to PVC and labelled each face. Yes this was exactly as tedious and mind numbing as it looks. There was a lot of beer involved. Bless audiobooks. After this process, I...
by Fabricatordjinn | Mar 13, 2015 | Personal Projects, Uncategorized
This helmet in my mind is one of the most challenging pieces of the outfit, and thats saying something! Heres what I had to deal with. I started by pulling the helmet shape from the in game model to get the basic shape. After ripping it apart I made a 2 piece template that would fold together into the shape of the whole helmet all at once. There was a lot of trial and error involved in this, but having a model helped immeasurably. In the end, I transferred my base pattern to 3mm PVC and cut each half out. They might be the craziest looking patterns ive ever used! Using a heat gun, I slowly heated up and bent the plastic to the shape of the helmet, using the pattern to meet edges and generally fightin with it for awhile. After a very long time tweaking and gluing, this is what I had. Complicated helmet base in a day! Obviously the tape couldnt stay forever, I glued it all together, then to make it a solid peice I mixed fiberglass resin, PVC dust (from my orbital) and bondo together to make a thick sludge, then slushed it around on the inside of the helmet. There is about a 2mm coat of the stuff holding it all together in there. After it dried, the helmet was rock solid and I could sand and fill it to kingdom come to get rid of those peaks and fold marks. This was a lot of boring sanding, but in the end I got a much cleaner helmet base that was quite strong....
