Wee Ninja - Part 4

Last night I got quite a bit done. It was also a good night to illustrate why I do this stuff. It would be easy in this format to completely gloss over any mistakes that I make because honestly - how would anyone else know? My plan is not to ignore my epic failures but highlight them in the hopes that if anyone who happens to see this blog and wants to actually go out and try and make something you'll have the benefit of my trial and error without having to screw up yourself.

Part 1 of last night involved the completed front and back armor plates. I did a test fit on the Wee Ninja - he was pretty excited which was cool. I immediately encountered a problem though. There's a reason why childbirth is a massively traumatic experience for a human woman as opposed to an animal like a Zebra (who can pop out a foal and then start running almost immediately afterwards). The reason is that human kids have massive heads. Eventually the child grows into their head, but till then they're shaped like an orange on a toothpick.

In terms of construction of the plates and how they attach together I was going for authentic and durable. This was my first mistake. Authentic is good to a point. Durable is good to a point. But the point all that falls down is when it doesn't take into account the unique issues of trying to get the outfit around a melon sized toddler head.

Here's the original way I had attached the plates. I used some more leftover bag straps and some brackets and left a lot of slack so that I could adjust how they sat. If I was making this for me this method would have worked out just fine.



The problem for the Wee Ninja though, was that the straps don't come far enough apart in this configuration for me to comfortably put the armor on. It took a little wiggling, but if something happens to him while he's wearing the thing it needs to be quickly removable.

I measured up where the plates will need to sit, then went about the process of installing snap buttons to replace the long straps. It worked out well, and should be easier and safer to put on the kid.



I also finished the sword. I recently installed a bunch of exterior motion sensor lights and I had a leftover junction box cover which I cut up with a dremel and painted to replace the broken tang. In terms of painting the blade of the sword, I first attached a piece of tape the edge side then used an exacto knife to create the wave edge that's charactaristic of true Japanese swords. The wave actually gets there during the sharpening process: you cover the edge with clay and bake it - anything not covered ends up a different color. There's multiple designs that you can do, but the wave setup was easiest for me so I went with it. I used some graphite wheel paint I had left over from one of my car projects to paint the blade. I figure it's a ninja sword - shiny probably isn't the best thing. I like how it turned out:



After all that, the next part was pretty simple, but tedious. In order to make the trim pieces for the sholder guards, I first had to attach the trim pleather and mark it up. Since this part is oddly shaped as opposed to the breastplate, the exacto knive/tracing paper method wasn't really an option. I just had to go slow and make sure that I got the design the same on both sides.



It actually worked out pretty well:



From there it was more drilling, then pushing twine through the pads.



I then attached the pads to the sholder straps, and changed out the twine I used to attach the sword for something more elastic. Here's some pics of where I'm at now. More to come!