Welcome to The Forge

okay, so I went out today and bought:

• fiberglass resin
• fiberglass cloth
• spray adhesive

but I haven’t started because I feel like I’m missing something. I’m pretty sure I need liquid hardener to go with the resin. I’m gonna rewatch the tutorial just in case.

EDIT: yeah I need the liquid hardener…

timetravellingmarauder asked: I'm glad I found your blog. I've been looking to take up a new hobby -- my hands have a bad habit of getting restless. In high school for my art class I used to make model set designs out of foam. I'm super excited at re-finding this stuff :) Thanks!! And good luck on your Ironman project!

Thanks! Glad I could help. Once I finish the helmet, I’m gonna try to do something with foam.

So you’ve been to the forums. Some kind soul on the internet has made their .pdo available to you for free. You know what you wanna do. You just need to put it together. Here’s what you need for the paper stage of the project. Observe.

• Hobby knife
• Extra blades for hobby knife.
• White Cardstock paper 110lb
• Glue Gun
• Glue Sticks for glue gun. You will need them.
• Cutting board

You’ve cut out all your parts and glued them all together. Stage 2.

• Fiberglass resin
• Spray adhesive
• Liquid hardener
• Fiberglass cloth
• Spray paint (if you have to paint)

If you have any doubts, refer to these video tutorials. On my sidebar, I have a widget with Amazon links to some of the supplies you need. Check those out for reference on what these supplies look like and read the reviews to see what people think of them.

Some tips:

• Make sure you have a good solid cutting board. You’re gonna be cutting a lot of paper. Since it’s thick card stock paper, you’re gonna have to push down a lot.
• Work in an area with good lighting. You wanna be able to see the lines you’re cutting along.
• Scoring a line means dragging the blade along the line just enough for it to bend. Don’t push down when scoring or you’ll ruin the piece.
• If you see a file on 4shared and it tells you to make an account, do it. It’s free and you’ll find that most people host their .pdo files there.
• Glue guns WILL FUCKING BURN YOU. Proceed with caution.
• The more you cut, the more blades you’ll need. Also depends how much you cut. Took me a couple of days to wear out one blade so take that for whatever it’s worth.
• If you have shaky hands or you don’t really wanna take chances, use a ruler when you cut.
• Listen to music. Don’t try to watch a bunch of episodes of Law and Order while you cut or you’ll ruin a piece. Trust.

Ok so for a long time, I wanted a stormtrooper helmet and I looked up how to make one and that shit was way too much work. Molding and clay and cutting and all types of shit I didn’t have the money or time for. So I bought one. It’s kinda sucky but whatever, that’s not the point. So I kept looking up helmets that I wanted and I decided that Iron Man was the best choice and looked up how to do it myself. That’s how I found therpf.com

The Replica Prop Forum is a place where people post props they’ve found, bought or made themselves. Some people on the forum use a program called Pepakura to design 3D models, flatten the image so you can cut it out, and make it so you can put it together on paper or foam. In the program, you can view the model, move it around, play around with it and print the pieces you’ll need to put it together.

On the forums, you can find .pdo files for Pepakura that people have built their models from. Some people post them because they like to share, some people sell them. But if you google [name of project].pdo, you might find something good. But look at the forums for ideas or just to see the awesome things people come up with.

Next, I found a series of video tutorials that take you through the process of building armor or a costume from the .pdo stage all the way to painting the final product. You can watch those here. He has 2 sets of tutorials, one for paper/resin and one for foam. I started with paper but he says foam is easier so I don’t know. It’s your choice. Do what you want. Frankly, foam is cheaper but I hear it doesn’t last as long or have the detail that paper/resin has.

Next round, materials.

So I recently learned how to assemble props and helmets using paper and it’s actually pretty fun if you know what you’re doing. So my first project was building pieces of Iron Man armor.

I started with the right palm piece which was simple but the easiest part was the helmet. When you have bigger pieces, you have more leeway with cutting and gluing. I’ve posted most of my progress on the helmet and I’ll post anything else I do as well as a list of materials and sites so you can learn how to do this stuff if you want.