Costume prop heavy weaponry

Status: completed

The other day I posted about some goggles I'd made in rapid prototype fashion for a Mad Max-ish character costume for the local Halloween parade.  That design came to mind while I was working on a slightly bigger prop, a Gatling-style heavy gun.

Many of my projects start in Sketchup, regardless of the intended fabrication method, because I've gotten used to the ability to size parts and check interference visually ahead of time rather than by experience halfway through a build.  I thought something imposing but lightweight would be a good idea for marching in a parade; last year's 11-foot-wide articulated wings (a post for another day) proved logistically difficult so this year, I wanted to stay a little more compact.

An early sketch:

The overall look was sort of self-determining; I wanted a rotating set of barrels with sort of standard proportions.  PVC pipe seemed a good choice for barrel material because it's light, you can glue it with CA glue, and it comes in standard sizes.  I figured I could use PVC couplers, cut into thin rings, as retainers for the barrels since they're pre-sized to fit snugly on the outside diameter of the pipes.

The "disc" that holds the barrels would be 3D printed, easy enough, and I could mount 608-type skate bearings to give smooth rotation around a 1" dowel center-shaft.  I could have gotten away with any sort of bearing, or teflon tape, or really nothing at all probably, but I have like a hundred 608 bearings in a bag so I tend to use them any time I can.

It occurred to me that I could mount a salvaged screw gun ($5 from Goodwill) as a combination handle/drive system and actually have the barrels spin in powered fashion.  Yup:

So I printed the disc parts on our large-format printer (12" cubed, home built FDM printer, that's a whole other article) and they came out okay.  Certainly good enough for light use, and they'll look fine under paint:

I knocked together a frame out of scrap wood from the wood shop, and bent some unnecessarily burly aluminum bar as a front handle.

The whole deal was primered in flat black, and then I repainted some areas in silver and then hit them with "grime" paint as described in the post about the goggles.

I made a stencil from a cartoonish skull-and-crossbones logo I found online and painted my kill-count on the side of the housing:

I'll post a video soon showing the action.  In an effort not to get mistaken for a person carrying an actual heavy gun in a crowd of people, I scrapped the plan to have sound effects and super-bright LEDs in the barrels firing in sequence.  That said, the movement of the barrels alone is pretty satisfying.

I love Halloween.

Post-apocalyptic scavenger goggles

Status: completed.

Nope, not steampunk.

So, here in Portsmouth, NH we have a Halloween parade that's been a tradition for something like 20 years (and some people are pretty serious about it).  The local makerspace, Port City Makerspace, is naturally a resource for the local costume/cosplay/propmaking enthusiasts.  I teach a class in introductory 3D printing and I'm always looking for practical examples of prototyping and rapid design and fabrication to talk about in my class, so of course I used 3D printing in my costume ideas.

I wanted some goggles, similar to cutting goggles, but all the ones I saw on Thingiverse were labeled "steampunk" and that irked me a little.  People should like what they like, but I've become a little biased since the aesthetic has become a bit overplayed and the execution has been watered down, by and large, to people hot-gluing gears onto top hats.  So I decided to spin my own, in rapid fashion.

I pulled out Sketchup and drew these in about 20min:

This is all pretty stock-standard stuff for someone used to Sketchup, the only slightly weird bit was getting the contour on the bottom of the housings where they would fit against my face.  The short version is that I drew a square, put a curved line of the profile I wanted across the square, extruded it to a solid with the contour I wanted on top, and then intersected it with the tubular goggle housings with the "intersect faces" command.  I deleted all the parts I didn't need, and was left with nice contours.

These are 100% about looks; they'll be worn on my head or around my neck in the parade.  I can wear them on my face and see, but the contour is not really "correct" and make them sit a little frog-eyed.  These are props, not intended for actual practical use.

3D printed in PLA and test-fit with some old photography filters from an SLR:

Primed with sandable auto-primer:

Painted with metallic spraypaint and with a little black paint brushed on for "grime":

Let me pause here for a moment and say that if you're interested in distressing objects for cosplay or costume purposes, there are many great resources on Youtube and such to guide you.  One of the best I've seen was the video from Tested where Adam Savage demonstrated some of his tricks for aging examples in his prop collection (you can check the video here.)  His techniques are an exercise in subtlety; his objects are on display and under scrutiny.  I will be taking them to a cartoonish extreme because I'll be wearing these in a parade, at night.

Here are the goggles, assembled, with touches of oxide yellow, burnt sienna, and black paint, as well as some scuffing.  They are padded with EVA foam. The strap is old leather and I attached it with some D-ring brackets intended for picture hanging.  The nose bridge in this pair is a spring; I made two other pair of these goggles and used leather.  Both work fine:

The model is on Thingiverse if you want to print a set, but please be kind and remember that I hacked the model together in (literally) minutes with little regard to fit and precise measurements and sizing.

Halloween is fun.

Video game cabinets

Status: complete

Each year, my employer allows folks in for trick-or-treat at Halloween.  Departments choose a theme (never scary, little kids visit, lame in my opinion) and decorate their area.  The theme chosen as the "best" by the HR department wins a pizza party for that team.  Our theme this year is "arcade" so the area will be decorated with visuals and characters from arcade games - classic games certainly, but the theme is broad and loose so skee-ball, pinball, and modern games will work their way in too.  For me, this was an excuse to build a couple of video game cabinets.

i started with an existing design, i wasn't crazy about the "look" but I liked the efficiency:  http://www.instructables.com/id/A-Super-Easy-Arcade-Machine-from-1-Sheet-of-Plywoo/

A small form-factor cabinet (like, kid-size) from a 4'x2' sheet of MDF.  I decided to scale it up to adult size on a 4'x8' sheet of MDF, and add a marquee on top because I felt it was important to the classic cabinet look.  I drew it in sketchup, fitting everything but the bezel and marquee bottom on a single MDF sheet.

Construction went pretty quickly, glue, brads, and screws hold it together.  Building it at the local makerspace (Port City Makerspace in Portsmouth, NH) meant I had access to the wood shop scrap bin for stringers and corner blocks.

A couple of coats of semi-gloss black paint has it looking pretty good.

The business end of the cabinet, the electronics, will be handled as follows:

• An OUYA console for the brain.  Not the most traditional choice, but it allows quick-play games in HD, in fact, that's exactly what the console was designed for.  HD displays are easy to find compared to 4:3 CRT displays and easier to work with, and they look good (except for old school games).  MAME4Droid means I can also go retro if I want to, at a later date
• A borrowed work display - a 24" widescreen desktop display
• An HDMI to VGA converter cable with audio line-out, about $6 on Amazon
• An X-Arcade Solo controller.  Some people say it's not the most reactive for competitive play.  But it has a quality stick, a pile of buttons, it's heavy-duty, has USB, PS2, and Serial interfaces and works natively with the OUYA.  It also cost $65, which is (at most) $20 more than the components would cost to build my own control panel.  This was a no-brainer for me.

I've tested all the components together, and they all play nice.

I have several weeks before they need to be done, and I'm about 90% done with the first cabinet, and about 60% done with a second.  Tasks remaining:

• Fill holes and paint the second cabinet
• Make plexi front panels for the marquees, with backlights
• Rear-mount the displays
• Come up with a button label scheme that doesn't look like crap
• Choose family-friendly games for the Halloween event

Update 10/29/2014:
Well, that went well... pretty much everyone was impressed.  I think the cabinet finish could have been better, but this was intended as a low-budget, low-effort build from the start so I'm fine with that.  Here is a terrible photo in a dark room on an old iphone with a scratched lens: