One of the first skills I taught myself after UNplugging was working with fiberglass. I've made more than a few parts for my car (I'll post these later) so it was the obvious material choice when deciding how to construct the armor plates.
If you look closely at the BBN in the movie, you'll notice that it appears to be several plates of metal covered by multiple layers of leather. This actually makes construction a whole lot easier as I won't have to sand/apply body filler/sand/check/repeat which is the normal process when making anything out of fiberglass.
Anytime you're working with fiberglass it's a good idea to have a mold if at all possible. Whenever I need to make something I usually check two places: my house, and; the dollar store. What you want is something made out of plastic that's the rough shape of the end piece you're trying to make. You want plastic because the fiberglass resin won't stick to it so it saves you the trouble of taping up the item and applying vaseline (which you'd have to do with anything but plastic).
So, let's take a look at the pieces from the uniform that I need to make:
1. A breast plate. The plate itself looks simple enough, it's the detailed trimming that makes it complicated but we can deal with that after we get the 'glassing done.
2. Sholder plates. These are again simple but decorated.
3. A cod piece. Even in the movie this is just a flat piece of square metal.
4. A back plate. Now this one is more complicated. If you pause it in a few spots, what you'll see is that there are actually two seperate plates joined in the middle by a recessed and seperate piece of leather. After looking at it more closely, this appears to be a movement related structural choice. The middle piece (which is just leather) allows both sides of the body, and the arms, to move more naturally than if they had a single plate across the entire back.
5. Forearm guards with attached blades. These are by far the coolest part of the uniform. I'm going to have to figure out a way to make these but use blades that bend or he's going to gash the first person he comes into contact with while trick-or-treating.
6. A belt or sash. This is just a piece of fabric from the looks of it.
7. Boots. I have no idea how I'm going to do this part yet.
8. Karate uniform in black. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
My son is 95th percentile on height for his age, but 20th percentile on weight. Consequently finding appropriately sized plastic items to use as molds proved to be interesting. If he were a bit more, a-hem, rotund it would have been a lot easier because there's plenty of tupperware in my house that's round-ish.
After some spelunking through my closets, I found something that closely approximated the size and curvature of his chest. How bout a friggin trash bin:
For the sholder plates I found a water jug that had a pretty decent shape on one side.
Since I need a front plate and a back plate, I made a couple of molds off of the trash bin. One of them turned out terrible so I'll probably use the leftovers of that for the cod-plate.
I found a soda bottle that was about the right shape for the arm guards so I made a couple of molds off of that. In retrospect this is one of the last things on the uniform I should bother making but they're already done so I'll keep truckin'. I left my thumb in there for scale, not because, you know, I'm an idiot at taking pictures.
After some trimming with a dremmel and a bit of sanding around the edges, we now have a complete set of toddler sized armor plates that weigh next to nothing. Sweet.
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