December 2011 – Arms, Armor and Awesome

If you’re going to work with foam latex, then you will need something to cure or “bake” it in. You can not use an oven you bake food in, because of chemicals put off by the baking process of the foam latex that would make any food cooked in it, toxic. The design that we used is a slightly modified version of one we found online. The key difference is we doubled the dimensions which ended up increasing the volume of the oven by a factor of five!! This may not sound like much but the more air there is in the box, the long your heating will take and more power you will need to maintain the heat.

I would love to tell you have a set of plans that I could link or that I could build another should I need it, but if you have followed the progress of this costume then you know we did a lot of this from intuition and a couple good guesses. Continue reading →

Now, the dreads took us a little while to figure out the right material, but we settled on expanding polyurethane foam. The only place we could find it is Silpak, and we had to phone order it, ended up using two gallons. We used the SP 200-4 type, it was the lightest foam. If you live in the Burbank/Los Angeles area though, you should be able to go to their storefront and get the foam there. The dreads were still pretty heavy, after some messing around we finally balanced them out so they wouldn’t be a bother, but that’s a later post.

So, we made, I dunno, maybe 60 dreads. That may have been too many, but I was concerned about bald spots, so I made sure that everything around the side was covered, and that we had enough different sizes in there to look right. Continue reading →