Roman centurion / Mark Anthony costume

We'll the roman costume using the brass discs ws a complete disaster, it made the shirt ridiculously heavy (especially for a 5year old!)
So undeterred I found a number of old signs at work which were printed on fomex and set about making a new costume for Seth using the fomex to replicate the steel.

A good coating of gold paint covered the old sign content, and photographs really well!

(The shirt is nothing to do with the costume)

Still lots more to do to this, more straps and a little ageing to stop it looking too new. 

More tomorrow.

Ok, new year new project! The kids have a Shakespeare day coming up in march, where they are encouraged to go to school dressed as their favorite character. Seth with almost no prompting from me, has decided he wants to go as Mark Anthony (from Anthony and Cleopatra). This is handy as while skip diving at work I had come across hundreds (possibly thousands) of piezo discs, which as everyone knows, are thin discs of brass which when a current is applied vibrate to produce a sound. But ignoring that feature they look just like roman scale Armour, as worn by the higher ranking officers. Perfect. :-)

 

These are a few of the discs, using an old hole punch I can make a neat hole in each one for assembly.

Here is a section laid out to get an idea of how it will look, the answer is fantastic!

Probably wont use it but I'm also looking at the lower ranking paneled roman Armour (there is a possibility that the brass Armour may be a little heavy! )

More soon...

I finally got the wings finished and working, so with my fingers crossed, I sat through two performances during which they worked flawlessly! 
It was brilliant! 
Molly did a fantastic job and I think she loved the attention and the enthusiastic response from the audience.

Obviously I needed to have a go with them :-) so I bought some festive cheer to the office for the afternoon. While there were calls for me to do a full striptease routine I manfully resisted, if only because the tight bastards only tucked a fiver down my Y fronts.  

This years Christmas card photo?

Now I need to think of something else to do!

Molly's Articulated Wings costume test3

Mollys wings more or less complete and ready to go! 1st dress rehersal is today so fingers crossed everything works :-)
The feathers ended up being made from paper with steam curved barbeqe skewers as the spines, I wanted big feathers and this seemed to be the best, and cheapest way of making them. The fluffy bits are cheap (£3 for 2m) feather boa's from the market.

Overall i'm really pleased with how they have come out, I think molly is too. :-)

Finally got the wing mechanism working smoothly. One of the problems I was having was getting them to work  when pulled by a 7 year old girl, who isn't quite as strong as I am. Apparently. Arranging the leavers to give the right mechnaical advantange to overcome the elastic needed to return the wings to the folded position did take a number of trial builds.

Next is making the wing shaped peiices and then making lots of nice big feathers. the end is in sight!

New project! Articulated angel wings.

Well its school play time of year again, This year I gave the children only one request, make sure they were given a part that required wings.

Seth was assigned the part of narrator, (As were all his year) so no wings there. Molly on the other hand is...drum roll please...THE ANGEL GABRIEL! only the most kick ass of all the angels and well deserving of a magnificent pair of wings.

By the next morning we had version one in card ready to test, it was OK but could be better so morning two saw an improved version.

 

 



 So there we go, transfer the shapes to foamex for the next version (after adjusting the pivots to allow the wings to move with less input from Molly)

Next version should be up on Monday :-)

This is far to much fun for the kids to use it :-) 

The plan is to mount the control box on the dashboard eventually so that drivers of any size can reach it. 

It has surprisingly good Off Road ability, however after half an hour we are already talking about how to get a little more speed out of it. 

And after playing tetris with the garage contents I even managed to fit everything in without having to dismatle it!

Obvioulsy there is still lots to do, I can't see it being "Finished" untill next spring, painting the chassis will have to wait untill we get a warm weekend to sart with! I'm also building a fake engine to cover the motors and batteries at the back. 

Karl