Sheet Metal Armor 2

The next bit that I worked on was the chest piece. None of the medieval stuff that I saw really drew me in, so I ended up going with a simplistic "chest and fake abs" look.

I used an aluminum flat top door threshold (the little metal piece that goes under your front door) as a brace down the front middle (you can see the rivets in the chest in the picture). That helped hold the whole thing upright instead of caving over. The ribs and abs were cut from a cylindrical piece of ducting, so they already had the right shape. I used a couple of smaller pieces between the chest and ribs to bring the contours together.

To connect the front chest to the back piece I riveted an old broken pair of FLOW snowboard bindings over the shoulder area. This provided some padding for my shoulders, and was pretty stable for holding the two pieces together.

For the shoulders themselves I just cut out some chevron shapes from the cylindrical ducting and riveted them to the front and back. I wanted a multi-layered shoulder look, so I did a few of those directly to the chest, and then two more to a black hoodie that I wore underneath. By connecting the lower layer to my shirt, I was able to move those pieces pretty easily, which made walking a little bit more fluid.

I went a little bit ghetto on the chain mail armor for the upper arms. As you can see from the picture above, those are soda can tabs clipped together. There is a great tutorial on how to do these by CraftyMommy (plus she looks a lot better in the chainmail than I do).

The back piece was just a flat sheet of metal with nylon webbing riveted into it to link with the front piece. The front had some webbing riveted to it as well, and metal D Rings were used to tighten and hold the two pieces together (please forgive the crappy MS Paint drawing, I could not get a good angle for a picture).

 The greaves were pretty simple, essentially just some chevrons cut out of metal cylinders and riveted together. I used more nylon webbing and D rings to hold it onto my leg, and some foam at the top to push it out far enough that it did not stab my leg when I walked (lost a bit of blood before I thought of that...).

 The feet were extremely simple as well. Cut out a foot shape, bend it over your foot, and hold it together with the nylon webbing. The boots I wore underneath had a slight heel, so could put one strap under the boot, and the other behind it, and they held on fairly well.

I wasn't sure what to do for the upper legs, and I ended up going for battle kilt type thing... with limited success. My goal was something along the lines of these (photos courtesy of Elads and Figure Realm):

I picked up some fake leather material from the fabric store and some poster board. I traced out the shape I wanted and cut it out of both materials, gluing the fake leather over the poster board so it would hold its shape better. Then I cut some more sheet metal and riveted it over the fabric for an armored look. Finally I riveted the whole mess to a belt (which was backwards so that it could clasp in the back).

The last piece was the shield. I cut a piece of plywood into a generic shield shape, then I bent sheet metal over it and riveted it on.I traced and cut a smaller shield shape in the fake leather, and another smaller one in sheet metal, then riveted these layers to the front of the shield. To finish off the front of the shield I sketched out a dragon head and cut that out of the fake leather too. This was just glued to the surface of the metal.

The back of the shield has an old belt riveted on for my arm, and a dowel rod screwed in place to hold on to. I meant to go back and clean up the back of the shield, but never got around to it.

I think that was it for the sheet metal armor. Questions and comments are appreciated, and please let me know if I left out any sources.