Shoulder Armor Progress Update

My last progress update for this is now about three months back – since then things have been progressing slowly (lots going on)… Here’s the photos, showing the current state of things:

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The work I showed in the last update – the basic forming of the spikes, and the early refinement work on the two halves of the shoulder armor – it was very exciting to get to that point but the work that was to come afterward was rather more challenging than the basic forming or the first-pass refinement. Making those two halves really match, and fitting the spikes to them was a rather daunting task.

My first thought was to use my contour gauge to measure the two halves along certain reference lines, and use the measurements to match the two halves to each other. However, this proved to be rather difficult – structurally speaking the parts weren’t well suited to being measured that way (pressing down on the part with the contour gauge would change the elevation you’re trying to measure) and the areas where I want the most precision (like the contour of the “fringe” around the edges of the shoulder armor) would not be measured very precisely by the contour gauge. I experimented with the parts while they were still separated but came to the conclusion that I’d make a lot more progress by joining them together and then refining the part by eyeballing it, mostly… This process is a bit different – rather than trying to see if anything’s wrong, fixing it, and verifying the fix is correct, I just proceed with various other work, and fix things as they come up. It’s probably not going to be a super-precise match but I’ll do my best with it…

Another bit of work I did was to recast the shoulder spikes and begin fitting them to the shoulder armor. This is another tough problem of matching front to back: the front and back spikes have to point off at the same angle relative to the mid-plane, they have to be at the same distance from the midplane and at the same distances from the edges – so there’s a lot that could go wrong… For now I’ve just cut the shoulder armor part to provide flat surfaces for mounting the base for each spike, and temporarily glued the parts in place. I expect these will require some refinement later on, so I may remove them and re-position them as things progress.

Seeing the part looking so close to its final look, it’s a bit surprising just how big the armor is. It almost dwarfs the chest, as I believe it should… What’s nice, though, is that depending on the viewpoint it can have a real massive look or it can appear more moderate.

Oh, lest I forget – the other thing I’ve been working on with this project (quite a bit, actually!) is the mechanism for the shoulder joint. It’s been rather challenging trying to figure out a shoulder joint mechanism which would be robust, easy to recast, and which could use readily available aftermarket polycaps. I believe the work has been successful, but I’ll post another update with more detail about the shoulder joint work once I’ve got more stuff ready to show.

1 Comment(s)

  1. This is coming out great. The hard work really shows and I’ll be looking forward to the next update.

    Scramble | 2008-08-26 | Reply

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