Shoulders. If we didn't have them how would we say (shoulder shrug).
Which is why I wear protection.
You wouldn't even think to leave the house without a helmet on but
have you ever stopped to consider the second most vulnerable body part from
random things falling from the sky? That's right, your shoulders.
Protect your shoulders - it never hurts.
(whistling sound)
(clink) Didn't hurt.
Shoulder armor may not protect from falling lawn darts.
Hey everyone today I'm going to show you how to make a steampunk mechanical shoulder...armor.
I just wanted to show you how cool it looks with the steampunk mechanical
arm pattern which is available separately. I'll put links in the
description below and in the upper right hand corner but...man, that looks really
cool together, so just some inspiration. Anyways let's make shoulder armor.
Start by printing out the pattern, making sure the scale is set to actual size. You can
verify that everything is perfect by measuring the print guides. Some of the
pattern pieces are larger than a normal sheet of paper, so you're gonna have to
tape them together. I like to use my window because it makes it easy to see
through the paper and see the alignment markings. I also get to see the great
outdoors. Now grab some scissors and start cutting out those pattern pieces,
cutting as close to the black line as possible without removing it. I find it a
lot easier to cut out the inside parts of pieces with a knife rather than
scissors. You should end up with a nice stack of pieces. Once your pattern is cut
out, get out your foam. If your foam keeps rolling up on you, a pair of ankle
weights can be a great solution to that problem. Maybe you have a really fit
friend you could borrow some from. Thanks fit friend.
Carefully trace your armor pattern onto the foam, making sure to mark the alignment
points. Extend them to the inside of the pattern so they still exist when you cut
out your foam. Some pattern pieces get traced more than one time and piece
number three gets flipped for its second time. Mark the dotted lines on the main
pieces. Those will be indentations. Mark the center of all the places you
need to punch a hole. Just remember, although you cut two piece number 6s, only one of
them gets the holes. Now we can carefully cut out the pieces we just drew on our
six millimeter foam. Remember, whenever you're using a very sharp knife be
careful where your fingers are so you don't chop them off. When you cut out the
circle and the other rectangularish-sort-of-piece from piece number one, just
leave them in their place cuz you're gonna need them there later.
That's our six millimeter foam cut out. Now let's do the two millimeter foam.
This is a great time to use up some scraps. If your pen runs out of ink while
you're tracing and it frustrates you so much that you want to throw it away,
maybe just...don't. Instead, put it in your drawer for safekeeping because we're
gonna use it later. One thing to think about before cutting out all these fancy
pieces, is you might want to skip ahead and just make the main shoulder first to
make sure it fits. You'll also want to save the 9 millimeter disks we're
cutting out right here cuz we'll use them later. While we're punching things out
let's take our six millimeter punch and punch the holes on one of our piece
number sixes. Now we can plug in our glue gun and adjust the temperature so it's
not too hot and won't burn our hands off as well as being quicker to cool so we
can make our project faster. When using hot glue it's best to glue smaller
sections at a time so the glue doesn't cool before you have everything lined up.
As you can see I've started by gluing the two piece sixes together. Next comes
a technique I like to call "cutting out and putting back in, but just not putting
all the way back in." So we'll take the two pieces we cut out from number one
and glue them back where they came from, the difference being we're not gonna
push them all the way back in. This is a handy trick when you're working with
thicker foam and want to add some more dimensionality. It seems to work best if
you can glue small sections at a time. That way it's easier to keep the recess
equal all the way around. Now glue the dart on piece number two, gluing about
five centimeters at a time. Hold the edges together until the glue cools
while pressing down against a table. If you're new to using hot glue and foam I
have a video with tips on how to get nice smooth seams
and the link will be in the top right corner. Glue piece one and two together,
lining up alignment points E, F and G. It's a good idea to make the indentations
along the lines that we drew before this thing goes 3-D, so let's do that right now.
A plastic gift card works great for this because it's about the right width and
the corners are nicely rounded. Pretty simple technique with this, just keep on
rubbing until you've got nice lines. Glue the sides together at alignment mark A.
My foam wasn't cooperating and wanted to bend the wrong way so I used a hair
dryer to heat it up and shape it a little. Now piece 6 (the neck guard) gets glued
so the center of it lines up with the seam along the top of the shoulder. It's
important to note as seen here that it gets glued beside pieces one and two
rather than on top of them. This piece is important because it also
helps the other piece of foam stay curved going over the shoulder. Now is a
good time to check and make sure this is gonna fit over your super muscular
physique before continuing on the rest of the project.
Check.
Use a bit of sandpaper to rough up the foam along the bottom edge of the torso piece and then
glue in piece number four, overlapping on that inside edge. You want to end up with
about six centimeters of piece number four sticking out the bottom. With that
done we can move on to the pauldron. We'll start by gluing the darts on piece
3 and 3A. You want to make sure that the ends of the dart line up
properly and you'll probably have to pull a little bit on the top part to
make that happen. If you haven't already, make sure you punch the four millimeter
holes for the hinged rivet. Glue the two halves of the pauldron together along
the center line which will give you an inside-out pauldron which you can then
turn inside out from being inside out. Now piece five can get attacked by a
gift card and a hole punch. Grab some webbing and a D-ring. I happened to find
exactly what I needed in a set of head weights...on my head.
Make a mark seven centimeters in from the edge of the shoulder and the width
of your webbing, and cut a slot along that line. Watch out that your fingers
aren't underneath your knife blade. That would be bad. Cut a piece of webbing 11
centimeters long. Sand around the center seam on the pauldron, glue the webbing to
itself with the D-ring in the center and then glue the webbing and D-ring down to
the pauldron. So now, when you want to put it together, you can take a second piece
of webbing, put it through the D-ring and then feed it through that slot you made and
that'll hold the pieces together and yet still allow motion. Now cut five strips
of 2 millimeter foam that's 12 millimeters wide by 76 centimeters long.
If you don't have foam that long you can cut more strips that are shorter. Now
we're gonna use those strips to make a rim that goes all the way around the
outside edge of all the pieces. The way I found worked best was to leave the strip
a bit longer on the ends and then trim it off once it was glued down. Where two
strips met I would overlap one over the other and again trim it off after it was
glued. I also glued a strip along the top edge of the neck guard to cover up that
ugly seam. Piece 38 might be a little long on one end just depending on how piece
four is glued so you may need to trim a little off the top of both of them
before you glue them down. You can now glue a strip along the bottom edge that
overlaps a bit of each piece 38. Now we'll run the same strips around the outside
edge of the pauldron, and the pauldron extra flappy-bit...thing. Although those
joints around the edge are quite obvious it's kind of okay because we're gonna
cover them up, right now...with piece 33 on the upper front corner, piece 32 on the
lower front corner, and two piece 32s on both back corners. Piece 34, 35 and 36 on
the pauldron, and four piece 34s on the pauldron flappy bit. We'll make some
pivoting rivets from quarter inch outside diameter vinyl tubing which you
can see a tutorial for in the video linked in the upper right hand corner or
in the description. Don't make those permanent yet but you can use them to
put your shoulder armor together so you can try it on. Alright well there's the base
shoulder armor. It's kind of the point where everything else grows from.
Although we're doing steampunk shoulder armor today this is also a great base if
you wanted to do some sort of fantasy armor...like with big spikes coming out of
the shoulder or something like that...or something like that. And that would look
cool too, but I'm not gonna do that. Instead I'm gonna take this plain shoulder armor
and show you how to make it all steampunky by adding some fancy
accoutrements and the strappy bits...it's gonna be awesome.
And you can watch it right here, right now in this next video link which you
can click. (clicking sounds) Right about here maybe. Or here. It's gonna be good. And as usual I'm
gonna be hanging around in the comments for the next hour or so, so if you have
things you'd like to say or criticisms or comments or you just want to say
g'day I'd love to hear from you there. Now I highly recommend watching the next
video, it's super great and you're gonna love it.
See ya.