February UFO Sightings in the Workshop

Once again, as time goes flying by, I find myself looking around the shop and pondering the huge drifting piles of things I've been working on in between more serious projects.  It turns out I have the attention span of a chipmunk when it comes to these kinds of hobby projects and I seem to be building a collection of started things just a bit faster than I've been building my collection of finished things.

With that in mind, here's just a handful of the UnFinished Objects scattered around the shop lately.

First off, I got a bit excited during a slow day a while ago and decided to break out a handful of helmets that are in progress lately:

The Sabine Wren helmet, Primaris Space Marine, and Samus Aran are all cast from my molds.  The Havoc Trooper is 3D printed from files made by Marko Makaj.  The rest are kits I've picked up from other makers recently.  These kinds of things are good for me to keep on hand whenever I get frustrated and need a thing I can finish in a hurry and feel accomplished.

On an unrelated note, I decided to make a replica of Jarnbjorn, the axe which Thor wielded before he got his hammer, Mjolnir:

The head was printed from a file I got at Do3D.com.  The handle is a scratch build I've been tinkering with whenever I find a few extra minutes and happen to have whatever tool I need in my hand.

For the past however many months, I've had my Cobra Commander helmet mold sitting on the bench where I do my fiberglass layup.  So whenever I mix up a bit too much material, I end up with another helmet blank.  Once they get trimmed a bit and painted dark blue, the Cobra Commander helmets become Cobra infantry trooper helmets.  At some point I should probably quit:


I have a steady stream "someday" projects lined up.  So whenever the once in a while happens and there's a few days where my fleet of 3D printers isn't doing anything important, I have them constantly cranking out parts so I won't end up waiting on the printers when I have time to tinker on fun stuff.

One such frivolous project is the Halo rocket launcher prop that I don't need at all, but I've been wanting for ten years.  At this point almost all of the parts have been printed, so it's nearing the prep and paint and make it look cool stage.  In the meantime, it's huge:


Speaking of huge, sometime last year I started making parts for Paz Vizla, the heavy infantry Mandalorian.  One of the more interesting parts was his heavy blaster.  Here's most of the printed parts all lined up together:


While I've already molded and cast most of the pieces and parts, I haven't quite made time to make a mold for the main body.  That changed last week when I finally got around to turning some scrap MDF into a cradle for it:


At the rate I'm going, I'll be casting parts sometime next week:



As usual, there's tons of other works in progress scattered around the workshop, I'm about to wrap up a couple of builds all at once, so stay tuned for more interesting articles coming soon.

February 2016 UFO Sightings in the Workshop

I've been running behind on bloggage again, so if you're waiting on the last three articles detailing the building of the Death Watch Mandalorians, the final articles about finishing the Ironman armor, or the next installment in my series of Possible Demises, I'm sorry.  The wait will continue.

Instead, I'm just going to share a stack of photos of things that, like all of my recent blog entries, haven't been finished yet.  These are just a few of the UnFinished Objects (UFOs) sitting around the shop.  First up...

A bunch of Star Wars stuff.

As you may have guessed from the last few posts, I'm neck-deep in Star Wars builds.  I started by just making a Flametrooper helmet.  That was cool, but then I decided I needed a Captain Phasma helmet.  Then the Lady Shawnon mentioned she'd be willing to wear that complete suit of armor.  It turns out that was all the inspiration I needed to get started working on that.  Here's how it looks right now:


Somewhere along the way, inspired in the way that only sleep deprivation and toxic fume inhalation can achieve, someone mentioned that we could use the same molds to make the TIE Fighter pilot armor too, so we should hurry up and make that helmet as well.  There were a few hiccups along the way, but here's a snapshot of the prototype in progress:


Of course, shortly after starting on that helmet prototype, someone pointed out that the shoulder armor for the TIE Pilot actually isn't quite the same as Captain Phasma or the standard stormtrooper armor.  Instead, it's a bit elongated.  The gauntlets are different as well.

As it turns out, the gauntlets are the same ones worn by the flametroopers.  So now I've got another reason to make the rest of the armor to go with the helmet I've already made.*  The shoulders are the same ones worn by the snowtroopers.  So I'm on my way to making those as well.  To that end, I had my friends at DO3D.com churn out the models for the snowtrooper parts I didn't already have:


Then, since I was feeling like keeping them busy, I also tasked them with modelling the heavy repeating blaster:


I need this.  See, once I've built the codpiece for the snowtrooper, all I'll need is the ankle spats for the standard stormtrooper, then I'll have accidentally made all of the variations of First Order armor in Episode VII just in time for the next movie to come out and really mess up my sleep schedule again...

On a (slightly) more serious note, I'm very near to finishing my book.  You can pre-order it here: LINK.  To illustrate some of the processes that I'm writing about, I've been building all sorts of cool stuff.  Like these big-ass rifles for example:


Here's an early work-in-progress photo of the armor that goes with them:


There are also projects that aren't science-fiction centric, like these wolf dagger stabby things:


So that's all kinds of exciting.

I'm really looking forward to wrapping up the last bits of the book though, because then I can move on to some of my other fascinating projects.  

The next thing I'll break ground on will be the T-60 Power Armor from Fallout 4.  Here's a preview of the digital models:


Somewhere along the way I'll be dusting off my aborted Halloween project from last year, the Deathstroke armor:


And finally, since I need a new project to distract me from my distracting projects, I picked up the first couple of pieces of the motion tracker prop from Aliens:


So there's a lot to look forward to.  Stay tuned...

*The first reason was FLAMETHROWER!



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UFO Sightings

I've been working long hours trying to crank out a couple of paid projects that I'm not really allowed to write about just yet.

Not being able to show off my work has been wearing at me though, so here's a collection of pictures of UnFinished Objects (UFOs) that I've got in the works right now.

First up, I've decided to dust off the Republic Commando project again.  To make progress, I printed out a bunch of the remaining pep models.  Here's half a suit of armor in the "before" stage:

Since I'm swamped, I coerced Trevor the Walking Mannequin into putting the peps together.  Here's the gut guard (aka "space-age tighty-whities"):

Here they are reinforced with fiberglass:

Whenever I'm taking a break from paid projects, I've been tinkering with my new and improved Halo 3 EVA helmet:

I've been making molds like crazy too.  In the past month I've burned through fifteen gallons of silicone moldmaking rubber and today I should be getting five more.  Here's some molds in progress for a commission:

All of these molds are for a pair of projects I can't write about just yet.  So I can't show you the insides:

I also can't show you any of the raw casts all put together:

 

I can't show the other pieces I'm working on either:

 

This last pair of projects also has me doing more lifecasting than I've done in years:

 

I've been making arms, hands, heads, boobs, and even teeth:

Suffice it to say,  I'm looking forward to having the current project lineup finished and delivered so I can show them off.  It'll all make sense soon.

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