Warhammer 40,000 Space Marines Part 3: Boots

When last I wrote about this project, I had a fully-assembled backpack.  Working on the other end of things, it was time to make some boots.

Here's one of them:


For assembly details and a quick video of them in action (with my new, huge legs) read on...



Like so many pieces of this costume, the first step was to make a Pepakura model:

It was not small:

Since the left and right boots are essentially the same, I settled with making the one pep model serve as the form for both sides.  Once the paper model was assembled, I reinforced it with fiberglass:

When the fiberglass had set up, the next phase was the "grinding down the hard edges" phase:

Here's the toe after a few minutes worth of working over with an 80-grit flapwheel grinder:

After oodles and gobs of sanding and filling and sanding and filling, the toe form was painted with a high-heat paint:

The back of the boot required a bit more work to make it ready for forming.  In addition to all of the smoothing and fairing I did on the toe, I split it down the center and laid it open so it would form as two halves.  Here's the two halves joined along their bottom edges and reinforced with additional fiberglass:

The first pulls made a good fit with the other armor pieces:

The initial plan was to fill the back section of the boots with foam and make them into a pair of 10" high platforms.  Strapping the wearer's feet on top would gain the needed height for the character.  Initial tests proved this idea to be pretty clumsy in practice:

Back to the drawing board, I glanced over a few pictures of drywall stilts.  Then I sat down and doodled out this little gem during lunch:

I emailed this image to Ryan Kertz of Kertz Fabrication and he agreed to take on this part of the project.  In short order, he had the first working prototypes:

Adding a bit of duct tape (because every build needs at least a little) I tried them out:

The mobility was good and it was actually surprisingly easy to adapt to walking around in them.  As an added bonus, the cutouts for the uprights make a stop that limits the movement of the ankle to about 20 or 25 degrees in either direction:

The narrow footprint made up for the fact that the ankle had no sideways movement.  Unfortunately, adding the very large footprint that the boots needed meant that the wearer might twist or break something if they stepped on an uneven surface.  To counter this, I added a bit of wobble to the bottom of the stilt by inserting a soft rubber gasket between the bottom of the stilt and the inside of the sole.  Here's the rubber gasket taped in place:

Assembling the boots began with the making of a plywood sole with the toe section attached with a piece of piano hinge on the bottom:

The vacformed toe piece was stapled onto the front end:

Then the rest of the boot was stapled onto the sole:

With the stilts bolted in and the shin armor in place, the wearer's knee is located just above the character's knee:

This means that the hip is in just about the right place too:

I still need to add the rubber soles to the outside of the boot, but for now, they work:

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