Meredith's Magic Wheelchair, Skeletor's Throne

A couple of years ago I made a Skeletor cosplay that I'm pretty proud of.  The character is a lot of fun to play around with and gets really great reactions from the crowd wherever I take him.  I never knew how completely I would enjoy running around as a campy 80s cartoon villain, but I love it.

So when we were talking with the folks from Magic Wheelchair earlier this year about what we could build for them to unveil at San Diego Comic Con, I was over the moon excited when they mentioned Meredith, a young lady from Austin, Texas who wanted her chair dressed as Skeletor's Bone Throne.

This was already a project I'd been noodling over so I could have it for photos of my own Skeletor costume.  So as luck would have it, I'd already worked out all of the details of exactly how I would build it.  Modifying my plan to fit a wheelchair would actually be pretty straightforward.

Here's the end result:

To see how we built it, read on...

Building Trazyn the Infinite for Games Workshop

Back in July I was at San Diego Comic Con unveiling a pair of Magic Wheelchair cosplays we'd built when I got a text from my contact at Games Workshop. 

"What would it take for you to build a wearable version of Trazyn the Infinite?" he asked.

For thems of you who don't know, this is Trazyn the Infinite:


"I'll need three months and here's a price," says I.

"Okay," he replied, "thanks anyway."

That was at the beginning of the convention and I tried not to think about it too much.  But I tend to be pretty inexpensive for the kind of work I do, so I had a hard time shaking this one off.  During a fuel stop on the way home, I couldn't help but text the question:

"Just out of curiosity," I texted, "how much were you expecting to spend?"

"The problem wasn't the price," he replied, "it was the timeline.  We need it in Nottingham in September."

"Alright," says I, "I'm going to hate myself for this later, but if we begin right away we can pull this off."

By the time the project was fully approved we had just about six weeks before Trazyn had to be walking around the show floor halfway around the world.

Awesome.

This build was done using every kind of tech I have in my shop as well as some old-school analog techniques. Normally I'd like to break up a project like this into sensible parts so you can see how each piece came together in a nice, palatable little package.  But that's not at all how these things actually happen.  In this case (like so many of my builds) all of the parts were largely done simultaneously.

So this writeup will seem like it jumps all over the place. Pieces were being 3D printed, CNC carved, hand-sculpted, painted, vacformed, rigged, weathered, and rebuilt all at the same time in the great whirling slide puzzle that is my workshop.  So here's the whole fabrication tornado in largely chronological order.  Try to keep up...