DavidRaasch.com

Two late-breaking photos of my Halloween as Ironman!

See here:   http://www.davidraasch.com/?page_id=59

Wow, what a whirlwind the last month has been… and especially the last two weeks!

I decided early on NOT to create some sort of “daily diary” here… or post pics of how my work was proceeding, because of the huge amount of time I felt I needed on this project.

I started planning “this year’s model” on the 4th of July.   But I took my time a bit and didn’t actually start construction until late August.  I should have started a few weeks sooner !

 

This Year’s Model

So, I chose to build an Iron Man costume…. the “most current movie version”, which is the Mark VI armor.  Now, true, this costume seems similar to last year’s costume, War Machine.   However, there were some unique challenges here.  The Iron Man costume is more form-fitting, while War Machine has much more room in the chest, back, and forearms.   Plus, I really wanted to add a WORKING hinge system and a voice-changer to this year’s helmet.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time on those last two items.   Still, I think this was a “better” costume than my War Machine (in terms of accuracy)…because my helmet came out properly, it was lighter in weight (I only used bondo on the helmet), and, like I said, the costume was more form-fitting to my body.

I did also lose about 25-30 lbs.  Plus, I grew out my beard for the first time ever and then had it shaved into a Robert Downey Jr. goatee !

The materials I used were cardstock and fiberglass.  I used a lot more fiberglass this year and a lot less bondo.    For the special effects lighting, I again used ElectroLuminescent (EL) paper.

I changed things up a bit with the hand lights.   I basically gutted the children’s toy Iron Man gauntlets, so that not only could I have LIGHTS, I could have SOUND as well.   However, in retrospect, I found rigging the switches to be VERY tricky.   And when it was finally “showtime”, the switches only worked for about 20-30 minutes before each one got bent out-of-place (glue failure)… and was therefore, dark for the rest of the evening.

The fingers of the gloves themselves had individual / separate “segments” make of cardstock and fiberglass.  Some of these stayed on all night.  Some popped off.    I probably would have been better off re-using my gloves from last year;  they had ten LEDs each that stayed on full-time instead of 3 LED’s on this year’s model.

 

Show Time !

Regrettably, I once again was NOT finished on time for the local “Mystik Pumpkin Festival”, the key child-focused Halloween festival in my area.   I was hugely disappointed by this.

I was ready, however, for the Saturday night closest to Halloween, October 29th.

My wife and I… and several family members… went to a large bar / club called “Funky Town”.  My wife helped me put on the costume in their parking lot.  She took a few photos of me.  I’ve put them in a photo gallery here on this website.  (I’m hoping to get a few more from one of the relatives who was with us that evening.)

Now, I’m something of a perfectionist.  I have high expectations for how my costumes “perform” when worn to various events.   Because of this, my evening at Funky Town was a happy one that was interrupted frequently by things that annoyed and slightly embarrassed me.    Finger sections popping off every now and then.  The lens on one palm-light falling off.  The face plate refusing to stay in-place.

However, EVERYBODY I encountered was still very supportive and even encouraging!

I have to mention that I made several trips “up front” either to get on the dance floor or to go up for judging.  With each trip into the “mob” of people, something would break.   First, my wife was carrying the helmet and let go of the faceplate, which, unknown to me, had had a magnet-and-glue failure earlier.  The faceplate fell, ripping the glued-in EL paper from the eye slits.

We went back to our table and duct-taped that back in.

With the next trip, which was on stage for the first round of  judging (when anybody can come up and submit themselves), the helmet’s chin actually broke in several places (fortunately, few saw it happen).    Also, going up the wooden steps to the stage, my shoes literally sheared off at the soles.  (They were basically sneakers on top of a “sole” made of fiberglass resin.  The resin was sheared.  I still had on my sneakers.)

I figured “that’s it, I’m done!”   No recovering from that for the second round of  judging.    Surprisingly, my wife was in tears!  She told me later she was crying because she had felt so sorry for me, considering all of my hard work on the costume.

Now, you have to understand that I go into such contests with zero expectations of actually winning.   The reason is, in my experience, “cute and clever” trumps hard work and realism every time.  So, I wasn’t really very disappointed about the contest.  I was a bit disappointed that my helmet hadn’t held together.  (I had accidentally dropped it early that same morning… causing cracks and breakage that I had hot-glued… but that was not enough, apparently.)  And I was shocked that my shoes had sheared off!

I was all set to call it a night and get back into street clothes.

However, my friends and relatives encouraged me to remain in-costume… to not go home… and to just wait for the final round, where they call up the top ten costumes.

I figured with all the terrific costumes around..  in a bar that big… (400 -500 people, I’m guessing ??)… I wouldn’t even make it to the top ten.

So imagine my surprise when they told me that they were calling for Iron Man to come back on stage for the top ten!

Three guys re-enacting “Weekend at Bernie’s” took first place.    But I did take second place after all !   I was quite surprised by that.  My falling-apart costume (the helmet had again been hastily duct-taped back together) still held together “enough” for me to win 2nd place… and $300  !!

A big “thanks” to everybody who supported me that night !!

 

 

Why do I do this?

In the final days of building this costume, I asked myself a lot why I was doing all of this.  I’d basically done zero home owner chores for the previous 6 weeks.   All of that was on the “back burner”.   I spent the final week with maybe 5 hours per night of sleep… with several of the days being 12 hour shifts at my day-job, with about an hour-and-a-half in the morning and 2 hours at night working on the costume.    I was physically and mentally exhausted by the morning of the 29th.

Sure, there’s “bragging rights”.  It’s kind of fun knowing that most of the people I run into are totally blown-away by the sheer challenge of such costume-building…. and knowing there’s probably nobody else living within, say, a 5 mile radius who does this sort of thing.    Sure, I get some attention.   A lot of people at the bar asked me a lot of questions that night !

But I think urges me onward is the desire to create.   In a way, this is art.   Sure, it’s art done according to a plan and with the intent to be as “realistic” (if you consider what you see in the Iron Man movies as being the “realism goal”).   But I think it’s an art form, just the same.

I’m certainly not one who has any training or spends any time making things with his hands.  And it’s really NOT the working with the various tools and materials that I enjoy.  (Sanding ?  Ugh.   Fiberglass?  Yeah, gotta love the gloves and the respirator.)   It’s the process of trying to achieve the final goal… the “vision” of what the final product will look and act like… that keeps me going.

Let’s face it:   a lot of people would enjoy BEING a superhero for a day!  And by putting a couple of hundred hours into such a crazy, ambitious project, I get to be one!

 

“THANK YOU!” to a few key folks

I have to “shout out” my sincerest thanks to a few key people.    I did not design this costume on my own.  I learned almost everything from other people. :

1) The folks at the Replica Prop Forums!  (http://www.therpf.com/ )

2) Two specific people at those forums, who answered a lot of my specific questions:

a) “MightyJohn”, who answered my questions about how he attaches pieces to each other.  I also bought some plans on special helmet hinges from him, but ran out of time to implement them.

b)  “indiefilmgeek” — now this guy is truly amazing!  He answered a ton of questions I had about his build.  Not only that, but as he was working on his build this year, he posted frequent, regular updates… including photos…to those forums!    And, get this, his build was way more challenging than mine:  he built an Iron Man costume for his 5 year old son… out of foam… while the kid was obviously still growing !!    See the thread on this at:  http://www.therpf.com/f24/ironman-costume-5yr-old-halloween-pics-pg22-23-a-113546/

 

3) My wife, Terry –  She put up with my messes, the way I stunk up the garage, the dust, the fact that I put all household chores on the back burner for so long… and she even acted as my “squire”, helping me to put the costume on and take it off!    She’s a super wife !

4) God himself !!  – I prayed a lot during this entire process.   Seems a bit silly, I know, to be praying for success in building a costume?   But, honestly, working on a deadline… choosing to do something so audacious… not knowing whether certain connections or build-choices would work or fail… how could I NOT ask God for help?

And that leads me to….

 

Is this a Christian thing to do ?

Some Christians speak out against “Christians participating in Halloween”.  They rightly point out that the day originated as a pagan “holiday”….and it is a day on which Satanists have done (and still do) some pretty terrible things to celebrate and worship Satan.

And for a while, I struggled with this.

However, I have come to the conclusion that whether or not celebrating one day over another is a sin… or if participating in a certain activity is a sin… depends on my own heart’s motivations.

And, once I had grandkids, I came to see Halloween as a wonderful opportunity to have events and activities that celebrate children, celebrate imagination, and celebrate stories.

What the Satanists and other lost souls do on October 31st, I did not start, I am not encouraging, and I do not participate in.

In fact, what I’m celebrating is the channeling of human creativity into the providing of joy.  All human creativity is God-given.  Of course, it’s just a pale shadow of the creativity that comes from God himself.   But God gives us creativity and he expects us to use it to build other people up, and to celebrate Him and His Son, Jesus.

God gave me the time, the energy, the mind-power, the imagination, and the funds that I needed to build this costume!  He’s made an amazing  world that is full of creative people!

And I want kids to know that in this amazing world we live in, if you ask God for help… and you apply your imagination and hard work to a challenge, you can do what may at first seem impossible!

 

 

OK, so for at least three years now, I’ve wanted an outdoor nativity scene for our yard.  But the only nativity scene set that the stores seem to sell is that same one from back in the 60′s… the hollow plastic kind.

I did search online and found several that were basically “white sillouhettes”…. that is, they are made of totally white pieces of plastic or wood.  Sometimes companies make them, sometimes individuals.  But you’re still looking at about $200-300 to get one.

So, it occurred to me that I really like a small, 6-inch nativity scene that I bought from Hallmark (with a coupon, I believe) two or three years ago.  It’s a small sculpture with an LED in the top where the star is:

My granddaughters always turn on the LED and stare at this nativity when they come over.  So, maybe I could make it into a 6 foot version?

Now, most people know I have almost zero woodworking skills.  But this seemed pretty simple.  I learned I’d need a jigsaw to do the cutting of the wood.  

And as far as HOW to enlarge this model, well, I’d learned that in 7th grade art class:    Take a photo of your object.  Using a ruler, draw a grid on your photo.  Now, measure the size of your medium — in this case, an 8 -foot tall piece of plywood;  I wanted my nativity to be at least 7 feet tall.   Draw a grid with the same number of squares onto your medium.  In this case, on half inch on the model equaled 6 inches on the wood.

Then, once you have the grid pattern layed out onto the wood, it’s just a matter of calling upon your art skills to sketch the contents of each grid-square on your photo onto the same / corresponding wood square on the wood!

Before I started sketching, though, I painted one entire side of the wood white (with an outdoor oil-based paint).  In theory, I could have skipped this step, because I just had to come back and paint white over all of my penciled grid lines that I then drew onto the white paint later.   But I really wanted a full white board to work with….something that reminded me of a blank piece of paper.  I believe this made it easier for me to focus on the drawing and not get distracted by patterns in the wood.

After putting on that white coat, I drew my grid and sketched out my sculpture.   I then cut it out with a jigsaw.  Then, I bought a bunch of craft paints from Walmart and painted all the various details.   Now, there are two “problems” that I sort of had with using these paints:   (1) The paints washed off my hands with soap and water, so I knew I’d need to spray or paint a sealer over my paint later on.    (2) I was drifting away from an accurate reproduction of my model; the colors on my model are muted and light… so that the whole thing kind of looks like a tiny marble statue.  But i wanted people to be able to make out Mary, Joseph, and the baby.  And that’s hard to do on a 2-D model without some color.

Note also that I had difficulty reproducing the hands, so I drew them a bit differently.  Plus, I hated the look of the baby Jesus in the original model (he looked like he was two years old), so I completely redid-it.   To help me out, all hand drawings and the baby Jesus drawing were based on photos I found online and printed off to help me out as references.

As for how I intended to light the nativity, I originally wanted the “star” to shoot light both outwards / forwards… and then down on the baby. I had hoped to rig up two halogen lights to do that.   But then at some point, it seemed easier to just stick a floodlight in the ground in front of this thing (like Dad did so many years ago with similar wood cutouts in front of our house as kids).   I still kept a halogen light up-top, though. 

Then the trouble became: what to use for a star?   Every tree-topper star I found seemed too small, so I stuck with one of those in the end.  I had to figure out how to attach it to the halogen light.  But I thought, if I DIRECTLY attached it, then the plastic on the star might melt.  So, I cut and bended a coat hanger.  I wrapped it around the halogen light’s support and then wrapped the wire’s ends around two structural points on the star.  It turned out looking as good as I could expect, for such a hack-job.

So, here’s the final outdoor nativity…. first, a daytime shot:

And here’s a night-time shot:

Not bad, eh?  Oh, I know, it’s nothing to call the media about, but it’s UNIQUE and it focuses nicely on the holy family.   I do need to tone down the light on the baby Jesus a bit, but I was worried that if I didn’t “blast” that light on the nativity, no light would “drift up” to the angel.  Maybe I’ll make it over to the hardware store and buy another flood light today…and then I’ll be able to pull that first light back a bit and then focus the second one on the angel.

As far as total cost?  Well, the wood was $40 (ouch).   I had to paint both the front and the back with some white outdoor paint.  That was $8 per can and I went through 2 cans.   I used some paint-on triple-coat sealer, but I had an entire can left over from a previous project.  I also used some spray-on sealer, but I had that lying around as well.  The craft paints probably cost me $15 total.  And we already had any and all brushes I needed.   The halogen light was purchased at a yard sale two years ago (I think I paid $2-3).  The star was $10.   So, that comes to about $84…. plus the time involved.

So, it cost me at most one-third of what I would have paid somebody else for one.  And now I’ve got one that nobody else has. (Sure hope that sealer holds up in the rain!)

Thanks for stopping by the site!

-= Dave =-

OK, so for two years, my coworkers and friends have been asking me “What are you gonna do to top your Robocop costume?”

Seriously, when you build a costume of a movie character….a costume that’s essentially a robot.. a full suit of armor…. and you build it from scratch / it’s home-made…. how do you top that?

My coworkers were (and still are) pushing for a Transformer…and yes, they want one that actually transforms!   Tall order.

Of course, thanks to the Internet, I’ve discovered that there are PLENTY of other people out there who are amateur sci-fi costume builders.  (True, I may not have any in my neighborhood… possibly not even living within a mile of me.  It’s quite a rare hobby, in terms of percentage of the population doing it.  But thanks to the Web, such folks are easy to find!)

A person on the cosplay.com forums pointed me to a different website.  This was one where people were more focused on building costume sci-fi armor pieces, instead of just any old costume.   That site is www.405th.com (the forums there).

Pepakura aka “What I learned over at the 405th”

So, I spent several weeks, during my spare time,  just reading posts over at the 405th.com’s forums.   And what I learned there was quite remarkable:

Somehow, people have been able to make 3-D computer models of movie characters.  And from these 3-D files, they basically pull out 3-D models of specific armor pieces.    Those files are then put into a $35 piece of software called Pepakura Designer.

Pepakura Designer allows you do rescale these parts (so as to fit your own body)… and then, it does an amazing thing:    It takes the 3-D model and reorganizes it into a bunch of 2-D pages.  On each page, it draws flat pieces of the armor.  Each piece is numbered and usually has some folds on it, which are represented with dotted or dashed lines.

When you print up these pages…. on cardstock… you can then cut them out and paste “like numbers” together ( edge #35 on one piece gets glued to fold #35 on another piece), until you end up with a physical 3-D model of your armor piece!

It’s fantastic!   Using this software, you can build an model of anything, really, out of paper or cardstock or whatever.   (By the way, Pepakura is the Japanese art of building models of things completely from paper.  It is apparently related to the Japanese art of Origami.)

Might not be so easy as all that, Dave

I’ll admit:  I was excited.  It seemed to me that this software would make building my costume WAY EASIER than building Robocop was!

I mean, with Robocop, I had to “make educated guess calculations” regarding how big I should cut out and glue my parts to be.    Sure, I had my duct tape dummy to help out.   But I was determining what part to build and how to shape it… based on photographs of an old guy wearing a copy of the actual Robocop armor that was made from the original molds!

And I did that by rescaling based on one assumption:    That the old guy in the photo had a wrist that was probably about the same size as mine!   That ratio determined the scale value that I worked off of.

Certainly, using Pepakura Designer would take all that math away from me, right?

WRONG.

The problem came with the scaling.  You can adjust the size of your part in the software by either adjusting the scale number (from, say, 1.0 to 1.25)…. or by quickly adding or subtracting to the scale in 10% increments…. or… you look at three little numbers for the height, width, and length of the piece… and you adjust ONE of those numbers.  (The other two numbers will then adjust themselves according to the scale.)

Well, some of my pieces came out too big, some came out too small.   But the thing is, I only really discovered this once I had each part printed, cut, and glued / assembled together !!    That’s hours of work invested only to find your final product isn’t quite right.

This caused quite a slow-down for me, even though I started working on my costume in June.

The fact that the software only allows you to adjust ONE dimension… and then the others automatically change to fit the proportions of the piece… was the key flaw.  (And yes, figuring out exactly what scale number to use overall was tricky too.)

For instance, take my thighs (please!)

War Machine’s thighs are very straight and seem to taper only a  little bit from hip to knee.

Me, I’ve got ham hocks…or chicken legs… I’m wide at the hips and then there’s a large taper to the knee.  Plus, I think my thighs are a bit LONGER, proportionally, than War Machine’s thighs.

So, I measured based on the length of my thighs…from hip down to knee.  Made my cardstock model based on that.   And found that the final product was way-too-wide at the knees and way-too-tight up near the hips!

This meant I had to cut and reglue my cardstock thighs in several places in order to get them to fit.

Anyways, it was truly a learning experience.  Lots of trial-and-error.  And I bet I threw out two-thirds of a full suit of cardstock armor in incorrectly-sized pieces!

I missed my duct tape dummy.  (Oh, I still have the one from Robocop, but that dummy is currently holding-up / storing that Robocop costume.  And I didn’t trust that two years later, it would still be accurate.  Duct tape dummies tend to warp and fall apart over time.)

Why “War Machine” ?

Simple:   Iron Man 2 was coming out that summer.  My hope was that by Halloween, War Machine would be a star!   (Certainly, he already was a legend among the geekier of my friends!   And the folks at the 405th.com certainly knew who he was!)

Unfortunately, Iron Man 2 didn’t have quite the success of the first one, so that character didn’t make it into a lot of people’s brains.

However, the character still had lots of cool features.  He’s still basically an entire suit of armor.  He looks a lot like Iron Man, so some people would still probably recognize that association.

And there was lots of room for cool special effects.  You have the repulsors in his hands, the arc reactor in his chest, and his eye slots, all of which light up.   His mask is hinged, but I knew that would be tricky.

One huge “plus” was that somebody over on the 405th had taken a 3-D model and had apparently done the work to convert it to individual Pepakura files (called “pep files”, for short)… of MOST of his armor.

Reinforcing the cardstock parts

Boy, I could probably babble for hours on this topic.  Different people do different things to reinforce the cardstock.

Most folks will “paint” the exterior of  each armor piece with at least one coat of fiberglass resin (which sells for about $12 per quart at Walmart).  It’s a sticky chemical that you mix with a hardener chemical, then apply.  It hardens to give the cardstock a rather yellow look.  And one layer makes the cardstock stiff enough to do further work with.

Fiberglass resin fumes are dangerous, however, so I had to buy a $35 organic respirator mask to wear when using it… plus disposable gloves.

I used one layer of resin, but in retrospect, I wish I’d have tried doing two or three layers.  What happened is, as the resin dried, it tends to warp the pieces a bit.   And some warps weren’t as noticeable as others.  So, I had to compensate later by bending, squeezing, taping, and otherwise putting pieces into “good enough” shapes later on.   It would have been better to get the parts holding their shapes firmly right away.

Most amateur costume designers on the 405th.com (and most, by the way, deal with armor shown in the Halo video games) use one of two methods to reinforce their armor… on the inside.:

1) Apply a layer of “rondo” (a mixture of bondo with fiberglass resin in order to make the bondo much more fluid and easier to pour into tight areas)

2) Apply a layer of fiberglass (cloth or matte, painted under and over with fiberglass resin)

Video how-to’s are available for each method.  I watched (and highly-recommend) the video tutorials done by Ben Streeper.  They are viewable both on the 405th.com’s forums and on Youtube.

I decided to go with method #1 for just about everything.   Why?  Well, I tried using #1 on my first piece.  Things went well.  So I just decided to “run with it”.   Also, I was a bit intimidated by the idea of using fiberglass.

So, every piece received an inside layer of “rondo”.   The chest and back got the thickest layers.  I wanted them to be strong.  And later, when dealing with how to connect to two pieces to each other for wearing, I decided to fuse the two pieces together at the shoulder.  Rondo made sure that those connections were very strong.

However, I did end up using fiberglass (cloth) near the end of my build.  At first, I tried using it only to reinforce those fused connections at the shoulders.  And then I expanded using it to other weaker connections on other parts.

However, I found that any piece backed by Rondo that was then backed by a layer of fiberglass became VERY strong.   I was really impressed with it.

Let’s get going to the Festival… ABORT! ABORT!

This year, the Mystik Pumpkin Festival came one week before Halloween.  For the three weeks prior to that Saturday, I was waking up really early every single day… trying to cram as much costume work as possible in.

And as of that Saturday morning, it wasn’t looking like I was going to make it.  I had an activity to paricipate in from the early morning until the early afternoon.  So, I picked up working on the costume again at 2 PM.  At that point, I was still drilling holes, putting in bolts, reinforcing parts, and spray-painting!

I had been hoping to have the costume on and be ready for the festival by 4 PM.

But at 6 PM, I finally put down my work and said, enough.  I’ve done all I can.  I’ve given up on certain things I’d wanted to include in the costume, just in the past few hours, in order to meet this deadline.  Time to go.

So, at this point, I had never put on the FULL suit.  And as I put on the thighs and shins, I realized there was a problem.  There was no way on earth that I’d be able to put my shoes on my feet.   Well, with my wife’s help, we did.  But I couldn’t move.    The combined height of those pieces was EXACTLY the height of my legs.  In other words, all the parts touched each other.  They covered my joints.  My joints could not bend.

I knew I’d have to cut the thighs and shins down a few inches.

At that point, I gave up for the night.  I went inside, spent 15 minutes cleaning myself up.  And I went to the event in street clothes.  (My wife, however, was dressed as Cindy Lauper.)  So, I looked a bit stupid.  And we were late to the event, so a lot of activities were over.

My wife felt so sorry for me.   But I was not upset.  I was actually relieved.  I knew that I’d be able to use the next week to fix all of the problems…. just in time for Halloween.  (This year, I decided to sign-up to be in Independence’s Halloween Parade.  I’d never attended it before, even as a spectator!)

Working out the Kinks

And so, one week later, I had worked out a lot of the bugs and actually only had to discard a few special effects for the sake of time:

I cut a good inch-and-a-half off of both thighs…. and shins.   And I reinforced the legs and shins at their edges with strips of fiberglass.  That way, I figured, if they rubbed against each other, the fiberglass would make them very damage-resistant. (Without the fiberglass, two rondo-layered pieces rubbing together tends to create powder, crumbling bondo, or even a crumbling part.)

I also had time to paint and mount my minigun!  (I had made the pep file the previous week, but had run out of time to include it.)

And I reinforced a lot of other pieces with fiberglass too.

Things I ran out of time for

- A better sanding job on all parts

- Voice Synthesizer for that “Robotic” voice:    I had purchased a slightly broken Transformers Optimus Prime costume helmet with voice synthesizer.. off of Ebay…cheap!   I had cut away all the non-essential plastic and parts.   But, in order to make the robotic voice synthesizer work, I had to tape the button “on”.  Usually, you’d just press the button whenever you wanted to talk that way, but I wanted to talk that way full time.  I didn’t trust black electrical tape to hold that button down for hours on end.  So, at 11 AM Halloween morning, I decided to try to hot glue the button in place.  Apparently, some hot glue must have seeped all the way in to the circuit.  No time left to troubleshoot.

- Fitting a mini guitar-amp (with my mp3 player) into the costume, so I could walk around playing the Iron Man soundtrack (including some stuff from AC/DC).    The mini-amp is about 5 inches by 5 inches.  I bought it a mere one week prior to Halloween, at the advice of a coworker.  (It really does pump out the sound.)   Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to quickly create a “pocket” inside the chest piece to hold it in place.

-  Painting on the Air Force insignias and designation codes (white markings on the armor)

- Fixing the fact that the hemlet’s faceplate was too wide.  I figured, if I filled the interior sides in with enough Bondo, I could just sand into those sides until I’d curved them a whole lot more.   No way I had enough time to do this.

- Getting the faceplate hinge to work more smoothly.

Halloween 2010

(I know this is getting to be a very, very long post.  But I want to tell the whole story at once.)

And so, I climbed up into the bed of my pickup truck, ready for my wife to transport me to the Halloween parade.  Only, I couldn’t bend over far enough to make myself sit down.  The chest and abdomen pieces were too rigid for that.

I stepped back down the little ladder I’d used to get up onto the tailgate in the first place.  I got about half-way down it and intended to plop my butt on the tailgate.

Only it didn’t quite work out that way.

Instead, my butt hit first, but then the rest of me went down flat… with a large CRUNCH!     Oh crap, I thought, I broke everything before I even got “out of the gate!”

However, that proved not to be the case.  Once my wife got me on-site, we checked the damage.

My cod-piece had separated at… well… let’s just say… “below me, where nobody would be looking”.  (I’d had to shrink / cut down that cod-piece a week back… by cutting it, overlapping the two pieces, gluing them together, and then reinforcing that glue joint with bondo and fiberglass.)

To my complete amazement, my wife fixed this break “permanently” (it held up for the rest of the weekend), using one long strip of duct tape!

Other than that, my costume seemed to take zero damage from that short fall.  In fact, I slid in-and-out of the back of that pickup truck three times that weekend.  And the only signs of doing that were some light scratch marks on the “butt” of that cod-piece.

Although we were told to be at the parade’s gathering area (parking lots) by 1 PM, the parade didn’t actually start until 3 PM.    So, I had plenty of time for some of the parade’s participants, including a lot of kids, to come over and visit me!   A LOT of parents took snap-shots of me with their kids!  (Wish I had some copies of those !)

The parade started.  It went well.  My wife insisted on following behind me in my pickup truck.  She was afraid I’d collapse from exhaustion or fall or something.

I didn’t collapse.  I didn’t get hurt.

I did have to “hoof it a bit” to keep up though.  I just had to march at a strong, steady pace for two hours.

Yes, I could see out of the helmet just fine.  The eye slits were about 80% covered with the while ElectroLuminescent Tape that I used to simulate War Machine’s “eye lights”.  But that 20% still allowed me to see quite a bit.  (Not to mention, the faceplate didn’t fit quite right at the sides of the helmet, so I had some room to look out the sides.)

There wasn’t really an awards ceremony after the parade.  I had paid the extra money to be an official contestant in the Adult Division costume competition of the parade.

But in the end, there I was, standing there with my wife and maybe 8 other people, waiting for them to start handing out awards.

There was no organization to this, really.  They spotted me, asked to verify if I was David Raasch, and then handed me my 2nd place trophy.

I had not expected to get first place.  I’m cynical like that.  I know that some cute girl in a little piggy costume is going to beat a guy dressed up in a homemade war armor costume any day.

But my wife and I did not stick around to see who got first place.  She was hungry and I just wanted to get out of that costume.

Later on, it occurred to me:  “Gee, Dave, weren’t there an awful LOT of trophies sitting on that table… considering there were only three competitions:  Adult costume, Childs costume, and Float?”

So, I’m thinking my trophy may have been more of a “participation award” (which sort of explains the crazy $25 entry fee).

And then on Sunday….

…our church held a “Fall Festival” / “Trunk-n-Treat” event (like a lot of churches now do).

I surprised a whole lot of my church members with my costume that day!

You see, I had not told anybody at my church, two years prior, about my Robocop costume experience.    They had no idea I had gotten “into” this sort of thing.

The only problems I had, costume-wise, that day were:

- The rear base of the helmet.  In order to put on this helmet, the base at the back of the neck was a separate piece.  On Saturday, that was attached to the helmet via a small metal hinge and screws.  But by the end of  Saturday, the entire area surrounding that hinge broke off. (It had been rondoed only lightly.)  So, on Sunday, I’d resorted to making some quick hinges out of Velcro.  These didn’t hold worth a darn.  I ended up telling my wife to just leave it off.  You can see that its missing in the one photo I have where somebody took a shot of my side and back.

- The darned minigun, which, on Saturday, had kept pointing every direction OTHER THAN the one I had originally set it to…. finally broke free from its bolt on Sunday.   A quick duct-tape job by my wife left it on there for the rest of Sunday.

Following the “Trunk-N-Treat” event, we took a one hour break.  Then, my wife and I went over to an adult Halloween party that we’d been invited to.  I only wore the costume there for about 30 minutes.   I just couldn’t see wearing that costume indoors.  There’d be too high a chance for me to accidentally break a vase or something.

Here is a gallery of photos of my costume, taken over Halloween weekend.

Well, after the success of my homemade Robocop costume, I really was tired.  Somehow, I didn’t have the energy to do something quite so fantastic for the following year.   2009 was a pretty busy year for me.

So, when September rolled around, I knew I had to whip up something cool — a few of my friends would be expecting it — but I really didn’t want to invest much time.

I decided to “replay” a costume I’d worn back in the early 1990′s.   Back then, Spencer Gifts at the mall had a really cool kit.  It was a plastic mask … well, it wasn’t a full mask.  It would only cover half your forehead, and part of your face, including one of your eyes.  The mask had a red lens for an eyeball and that lens had a tiny light bulb (I don’t THINK it was actually an LED back then) that you rigged up to a battery via a wire that went behind your ear, down your neck, and into a pocket.

Then,you applied fake skin over the edges of the mask.  You’d use included colored makeup to make bruises and burns.

It was a pretty cool effect!  I was a middle school teacher at the time and my students really liked it!

But, of course, in 2009, Spencer no longer had those kits.  I watched Ebay for a few weeks and only saw one kit pop-up.  And it’s makeup had been half-used, plus the rubber band on the mask was broken.  That mask / kit sold for $25 plus shipping!

I wasn’t willing to bid that high on it.

So, instead, I ordered some liquid latex.  I bought a silver colored human face looking mask from JoAnn’s Crafts.   And…well, I don’t remember where I got the light or what I used for a lens.

I talked around at work and found somebody who was “into guns”.  I paid them a small amount to take an old leather jacket I had lying around (which was already torn) …. take it out to a field… and shoot it full of holes!     My friend used a rifle and a shotgun to do so.

I bought some colored makeup and fake flesh from some Halloween website.   In the end, I don’t think my paint job was nearly as good as the one I had done with the original kit over 10 years prior.   But it still looked okay!

Oh!  I almost forgot to talk about the gun!   That was a fun little item.

I picked up a $10 toy shotgun from Walmart.  Yes, just $10.  When you pulled the trigger, it’d make a shooting sound, when you pumped it, it made a pumping sound.

Trouble is, it wasn’t a “sawed off” shotgun, like in the movie “Terminator 2″!  (It did, however, have double barrels and it was pump-action.  Ebay and Google had taught me that that was rather rare in a toy shotgun.)

So, I sawed off the handle, but the batteries and the speaker had been in there.  I had to move those parts further up into the toy.

I spray painted the brown / “fake wood” areas a much darker brown because it looked too “toyish”.   I really liked the end result!  Unfortunately, it wasn’t weighted right for me to be able to twirl it like Arnold did.

You can find a short image gallery of my Terminator costume related photos here

.

What’s a BHAG?

Back in 1998, when I was going through orientation with my previous employer, they introduced us to the phrase “B.H.A.G”… short for “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”.   (Well, I prefer to substitute another A-word there.)

The phrase really never meant much to me, until I started planning my costume for Halloween 2008.

The previous year, I had worn a “rerun”.  I brought back a costume that I wore back when I was in college:   Frankenstein.

I had used pieces of 4 x 4′s to create 8  inch heels on those shoes, which made me 6′ 10″ when I wore them.    That, plus the fact that my flat head was made by actually putting a box over my head, made the costume a bit unique.

Mystik Pumpkin Fest

I THINK that was the second time I’d ever attended Englewood’s “Mystik Pumpkin Festival” (but the first time I’d worn a costume to it).   This festival is a terrific event for local kids!

Englewood isn’t very big.  It’s basically a two block older shopping district.  But the merchants and neighbors get together with Independence Park & Rec every year to put on the Mystik Pumpkin Festival for them.

Sometimes the festival is on Halloween itself.  But many years, it’s the week before, so that it doesn’t compete with Independence’s Halloween Parade.   The first year I attended, I fell in love with this terrific “small town”  kids event!   The adults were just as much fun as the kids!

Frankenstein, however, was not my first real costuming “BHAG”.

For some reason, after that first costume, I decided to really “pull out all the stops” the following year.   I wanted something that would REALLY blow people away!

I wanted to try something so crazy, something nobody would expect from me!  I mean, other than a couple of costumes in college, I really hadn’t done anything like this.  And I really had NOT been “into” Halloween for the previous years.   Perhaps it had something to do, not only with Mystik Pumpkin Fest, but also with becoming a Grand-dad.   I wanted to have fun with my Granddaughters.

But again, I really wanted to try something that would be considered “over the top”.  And let’s face it, how many 40-year-old men do you see running around in Halloween costumes, especially cool ones!

And so, for some reason, I decided to try to BUILD a Robocop costume.  Not buy one, build one.  I Google-searched for guidance… and found basically two sites with helpful information:

www.cosplay.com — The Japanese apparently create costumes, wear them to conventions, and then often act out scenes in them.   This is called “cosplay”.  Many costumes there, especially ones that mimic armor, are built using combinations of cardboard, craft foam, and other lightweight materials.

www.robocoparchive.com — A terrific place to see what sort of Robocop costumes people have built.

As I built Robocop, I took photos of my progress and posted in a particular forum over on that site.  Here is a link to that forum, in case you’d like to read through it:

http://www.robocoparchive.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=1405

(The same photos in that forum thread are also here on this site.)

I started that forum thread in early September.  However, if you read through it, you’ll see that I’d already been working on the costume for several weeks.  In fact, I had started in April by creating a “duct tape dummy” of myself.

What’s a “duct tape dummy”?   Well, it’s basically a mannequin that you create out of a mold of yourself.   Only you make the “mold” by wrapping yourself in duct tape, and then cutting the mold apart in the back and “stepping out of it”.  You then stuff the mold with some sort of filler.   This creates a dummy that is a copy of your body shape (or at least one that’s a “close” copy… the duct tape does bend and flex a bit with the stuffing).

Well, that thread has a lot more details in how I built my costume.  So, if you’d like to learn more, please go there first.  But feel free to post questions (comments) here, if you’re curious.

The final result turned out pretty good, considering it was the first time I’d ever done anything like this !!:

(And yes, the gun was something I purchased.  It’s a BB-gun replica.  The only other parts that I really purchased as-is would be the motorcycle visor that I put inside the helmet and the rubber gloves.)

You’ll find a gallery devoted to that costume (and its parts) here.