Suit of armor in sheet metal...

(a lesson in why you should wear gloves when making sharp things)

Hey everybody! I have been building random costume stuff for fun for a couple of years now and I thought it might be worth sharing some of my projects. I am going to start with some that I have already finished, so it may be a little light on the progress pictures. If you have any questions or critiques feel free to comment.

One of my first projects was a suit of armor that I made for Halloween in 2010. The suit is made primarily out of sheet metal and pop rivets which you can pick up from your local hardware store. The eyes are red LEDs which I installed in the helmet.

The first thing I built is the gauntlets. These are based on an instructable submitted by the user Deathcapt. I went with a black glove as a base, and modified the plating design to cover more of the hand and smooth things out while still allowing a full range of motion.

Each piece of metal is riveted to the glove rather than another piece of metal (most of the main armor will be metal riveted to metal). Riveting directly to glove allows a lot of motion for your hand, while overlapping the metal plates makes it appear as though the metal is secured together directly. To make these you would need a couple sheets of ducting, some tin snips, a rivet gun, and some pop rivets.I would highly recommend wearing protective gloves while making these. I chose not to do so, and I was bleeding more often than not.

For a while I was torn on what to do for the helmet. My first idea was a crusader style bucket helmet... but about halfway through the build I decided that looked terrible. After some serious thought (aka doing some image searches on "helmet"), I decided to make a modified Boba Fett style helmet.

The guys at thedentedhelmet.com have some awesome Boba Fett helmet templates, and I used these as a starting point for my helm. WizardofFlight over there provided the templates that I used.. The main section from the templates that I used was this section (minus the ear flaps): 

I printed the template provided, cut it out, and traced onto the sheet metal with a dry erase maker. After cutting it out and riveting it together, I had the lower portion of the helmet (as you can see, I also left out the vertical strip on the front of the helmet - thought it would look a bit more medieval, and I was afraid the strip would prevent the rest of the piece from curving correctly). The top of the helmet was actually a actually a plastic construction helmet that I bought from a thrift store, cut the top off, and painted a metallic color.

Afterwards, I wired in some red LED lights to make some glowing red eyes. When not lit, the LED I used was clear in color, so they were not obtrusive or distracting. I picked them up from Radio Shack. Unfortunately, I forgot to wire in a resistor, so those fried after a little while. I rewired it after Halloween with some of the big clunky LEDs that I had lying around the house (as you can see in the picture below). They do not look as slick, but I will probably never wear the suit again, and the mannequin in my basement does not worry too much about his vision being obstructed.

You can see some cracking in the upper part of the helmet in some of the later pictures. Unfortunately I dropped the helmet a couple of times while at a Halloween party, and the metallic paint cracked some as it hit the floor and bounced around. Oh well, not the end of the world. 

That is probably more than enough rambling for my first post. If you have any questions or critiques, or if I forgot to credit someone along the way from the design phase, please let me know in the comments. Next post I will go over the chest, pauldrons, greaves and the mail over the upper arms.