Space Marine Army and Such

Okay.  Been a little bit since the last update.  Mostly because nothing has been going on.  I've been working mostly on building up a new Space Marine army.  Being poor, I'm also attempting to make it for as free as possible.  So the past week or so has been devoted to crafted a Rhino APC out of cardstock.  In case you were unaware, such a thing is an insanely tedious task.  Anyway, another hour or two worth of work and I'll have it assembled.  Just need to paint it after that and repeat another couple times or so and I'll have the vehicle portion of the army taken care of.

Anyway, in events regarding the armour project, I've purchased the extension pipe for the aluminum foundry.    Just need to find a hair dryer with a cool setting/deactivate the heating element in one without a cool setting and the rest is history.  Relating to that, I found some more plaster while cleaning out my garage yesterday.  With that, I'll hopefully have enough to make the mold for my rosarius, as well as remake the mold for the purity seals, which I messed up on my last attempt.

Regarding cleaning the garage, I've gotten rid of a ton of crap in it, so I'll have a nice decent space to work with out there for making the armor/creating terrain.

We've finally hit a nice dry spell after a fair amount of rain, so I'll be heading out to the river in the next day or so to start scavenging some clay from the sediment.

More news to come.

Sculpt, Mold, Press

So, at the moment I'm on the verge of considering the original plastic idea a complete bust, at least for it's orginally intended purpose.  On the other hand, I think it'll be perfect for making the second part of my purity seals.  Unfortunately, though, this means that the cost of my project is going to go up a little.  But, I may have at least a cheap solution to the problem.  Apparently, those cheap "For Sale", of "Garage Sale" signs they sell at various hardware stores are made out of certain typ eof plastic that might just be perfect for what I'm trying to do.  From my understanding, those are just a couple bucks a sheet, which shouldn't be too bad.  Still, that means I'm not going to be able to control the thickness of the sheets as I had originally hoped I was going to be able to do.  So, I have something of a solution.  Once I have the parts vacu-formed (which will be much further down the line on this project) I'll line the inside of each piece with some fiberglass.  This should make it nice and firm.  Problem being, it's going to take another price hike to accomplish this.

Another price concern is plaster.  It's not monstrously expensive, but I'm going to need a pretty large sum of it for this project.  I'm starting to get a little disappointed at how quickly my prices are going up just a couple of days into the project, but I suppose it was to be expected.  Still, I'm going to try to negate the problem by take as many other monetary short cuts as I can.

So some good news.  I've started work on the second part of my purity seals.  Finally nailed down the design I want to use, and sculpted it out yesterday.  Afterwards, I got the last bit of plaster left in my garage and made me a nice mold.  Used my plastic in it, but like a jerk, I forgot to apply my releasing agent, making it stick to the mold and become worthless.  I'll try again a little later today, hopefully with a bit more success.

Speaking of scuplting, I worked out the design for my Rosarius.  Sculpted it out this morning.  Now I just need to wait until I can get my hands on some more plaster.  In addition, to make this properly, I'm going to have to construct some new equipment.  Fortunately, this will be very much on the cheap.  To make this thing right, it's going to need to be made of metal.  As such, I'm going to be constructing an aluminum foundry.  I was really excited to find that I can get most of the parts for this completely free, since it's mostly just made out of trash.

Eventually, I'll get to posting the pictures of everything I've discussed.  My camera is a smidge more than a decade old and has next to no battery life anymore, making it really difficult to get pictures when I need them.

Plastic, Paper and Pennies 2: Electric Boogaloo

Okay, so I've got those pictures for the various steps here:

1. Place your strips in the coffee.

2. Place pennies on the ends of the strips to keep them at the bottom.  After a couple hours, flip the strips over.

3. I didn't get a picture of my tearing the actual seals, so here's just a random strip of paper.  After your strips are dry (either by letting them sit out or by hair dryer), make tiny little tears along the edges.

4. Rip up the bottom of the seal.

5. Crumple into a ball.  Roll it around in your hands.  Get it good and wrinkled.  You're done when all the stiffness is lost from the strip.  It'll seem to have an almost cloth-like feel to it.

6. And you're done.

I'm currently working on making the wax seal portion.  As I said, I'll post that as soon as I'm done with it.

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Regarding the plastic that I'm attempting to use, I'm starting to have some doubts.  It's too bubbly and inconsistent at the moment.  Anyway, I'm going to try and give it a little more time to prove that it's actually useful, but in the meantime I'm coming up with some alternate courses of action.

Plastic, Paper and Pennies

Okay, so I've got several different parts of this project going on at once here.  Just in general, there's a lot of waiting in between construction times.  I started on the "pre-cast" the other night.  I'll post more about that once I finish getting the rest of the supplies.

Regarding one of the most important parts of this endeavor, I've started collecting the plastic that the armor will eventually be made out of.  Buying the actual styrene sheets is fairly expensive considering shipping costs and such, so this was obviously the first thing I had to look into getting around.  It's got a few kinks I'm still trying to work out, but I more or less have my solution.  Instructables is a great place for finding all sorts of guides to doing things you never knew that you wanted to know how to do.  This particular tutorial is a guide on making the precious plastic I need.   As I said, the sheets of plastic are made of polystyrene.  As it turns out, foam cups and those big foam packing blocks are also made out of polystyrene.  As it turns out, if you combine these materials with some acetone, they will break down into a liquid state where they will eventually dry and harden.  Now, thus far, I've noticed two problems.  The most obvious problem being that it takes a lot of foam to make just a little plastic.  Just experimenting, I dropped in about 7 styrofoam cups and only got a small puddle of plastic out of it.  The next problem would be bubbles.  While the plastic is drying, it has a tendency to form lost of tiny little bubbles, which is sort of a problem.  Either way, I'm working on correcting the issue.

Now, for the fun part.  You can't have Space Marine armor without all the fun little doodads hanging off of it.  Having some time on my hands, I decided to start working on some purity seals.  While the one picture is very nicely done, mine are going to look significantly more weathered.  This is a fun and cheap one to follow along with, so feel free to make your own:

1.  First of all, you're gonna want some approriate text for your seals.  A good place to look for those would be on Lexicanum where there are quite a few Space Marine quotes, dedications, prayers, litanies, etc.

2. After finding some appropriate text, you'll need a suitably gothic or medieval looking font.  Just go here and pick your favorite.

3.  Now you can just as easily use any word processor that allows you to adjust your margins and such, but I prefer to use Scribus to actually set up the text for my seals.  What I did was go into the program, make two text boxes that were two inches wide each, top to bottom in length, and added in my chosen text and font, adjusted the size until it filled up as much of the space as it could and then printed.

4. With your inspiring words printed, cut them out.  I found that it's best to only leave just the tiniest space in between the words and the edge of the paper.  You'll see more clearly what I mean when I post the pictures.

5. Now, you have two strips of paper with some words typed on them.  Now we're gonna add in that look of wear and tear that'll make it look properly cool.  Get a decent sized baking dish or some sort.  Fill it up with coffee or tea.  I prefer coffee.  It's a little darker and will stain better.  Place your seals flat at the bottom of the dish and put a penny at the top and bottom of each one to keep it from floating to the top.  Let them sit for an hour or two.  After that, just flip them over and let them sit for another hour or so.  Really, it's up to you how long you leave them in for, but the longer they stay, the darker they'll be.

6. After they are yellowed to your satisfaction, take them out of the dish and place them on a sheet of wax paper or tin foil or whatever you prefer.  You can now either let them air dry or, if you're impatient like me, use a blow dryer.

7. Once dry, you can start to "distress" the seal.  This is my favorite part.  Start off by making a number of tiny little tears in the sides of the seal.  Don't make them too big or you may rip up more of the seal then you want to.  Put as many as you want and space them out however you please.  At the bottom of the seal, actually tear out some chunks of the paper.  This'll give the bottom a nice ragged appearence.

8. Finally, after your ripped and torn the paper to your liking, start to crumple it up into a ball.  To give it that really properly old and mistreated look, crumple it and roll it around for a good long while.  Keep doing this until all the stiff is completely taken out of the paper.  When you're done, it should feel more like fabric than paper.  If you've done your tears right, then the whole thing should have a nice dog-earred and ragged look to it.

That done, you have a nice purity seal.  If you're still not satisfied with the yellowing, feel free to put it back in your coffee bath for a while longer, then dry and repeat until you're happy with it.

By the next post I should have some pictures of the process to add.  In addition, I'm going to start working on the actual seal part.  If you want to, you can just do this with some sealing wax and a proper stamp, but I'm going to work on making something a little bit more "Imperial".  I'll post the results of that once I get around to finishing it.  Until then, enjoy.