DareDevil Costume Debut

I had the good fortune recently of being invited to an Avengers themed birthday party up in Los Angeles. Of course, I could not refuse, and this seemed like a great opportunity to field test my new DareDevil costume.

I posted about this costume earlier, but as a reminder it was built by David Pea's UD Replicas up in Canada. The suit is top quality, and fits really great. Sadly, the suits have sold out, and as of this writing, I cannot say for sure if David will ever be offering them again.

The cowl was purchased from Reevz Costumes & Sculpture. He delivered it to me incrediblly quickly, and I'm extremely pleased with the quality. Fans of the movie suit will notice that it is not accurate to the suit, but is more a comic book styled cowl. Of course, I would have LOVED to add a leather cowl with the tinted lenses on it, but with all of the other projects going on right now, I figured this off the shelf solution would work just fine. And it absolutely did. It's a beautiful sculpt, and the color is a very decent match for the UDReplicas suit. It's not PERFECT, but it's very close. With as much experience as I've had with tinting urethane, I'm amazed that it's as good as it is.

The billy clubs were built by me, in one hour, on the evening of the party. I got the invite at about 5:30, and by 6:45 I was on the road to the party. I will make a blog post showing the build shortly.

Overall, the costume was very comfortable, though as would be expected, pretty warm. The cowl was the killer. As it's urethane, it does not breathe AT ALL. The minute you put it on, your head starts sweating. I wore the costume as a complete unit for about 2 hours before taking off the cowl. It's totally do-able, but I'm thankful there was a cooler outside area for the party. I'm not sure how something like this would fare at a daytime event. The left boot continues to dig into the back of my heel, but this is pretty standard for a new pair of boots. I'm glad I've had a few opportunities to wear them lately, as this has helped to break them in. I'm still getting plenty of use out of those Ampoules, which I discovered in France a few years back while hiking. They are a life saver, and no costumer should be without.

Batgirl: Spoiled Teaser Is Now Online

I had the good fortune of helping out on this upcoming series recently. Not only did I build a few of the props for the series, including some batarangs, mini batarangs, and the grapple gun, but I also shot a very in depth behind the scenes featurette that will be released shortly. I'm EXTREMELY proud of not only the work that I did for the project, but also for all the other good folks who did much more heavy lifting than I did.

Please check out this trailer, and let them know what you think:

Body Work and Engine Mounts

Bo and I originally had agreed on a location for the engine, based on the direction I wanted to go with the build. BUT, after thinking about it for a couple of days, I decided to go with a much more conventional solution. This meant NOT lengthening the drive shaft, but instead keeping the engine in its same relative location to the differential.

I personally cannot believe I actually just wrote that, and understood everything I said. Bo will make a gear head out of me yet!

Anyhow, I spent literally four hours last night with a tape measure, a level, some pencil and paper and Adobe Illustrator trying to figure out the optimal height for the engine. You wouldn't know it, but there's actually a lot of factors to consider, and I wanted to make sure I triple checked everything.

Even then, there's still room for mistakes. The good news is that even if I am totally wrong, we can always undo what has been done. It may not be fun or easy, but it's not like we're pouring concrete or anything.

Here's how things look as of right now. We have the engine on jack stands, set at the height we want it to be relative to the frame, which is all the way down on the bump stops. This will be the cars "Display Height." When I park, I will blow all the air out of the bags, and this is the height it will sit. The critical measure in this position is the height of the engine relative to the available space inside the shell.

You can see that the drive shaft is in place.

Here you can see Bo starting to build out one arm of the passenger side motor mount. The current design will have three arms, forming something of a tripod.

And here he is, Bo The Welder, earning his moniker.

But it's not all blogging and video making for me! I'm doing work too! I've been focusing on body work on the drivers side of the car. The gas cap recess is looking really good, as is the main seam long the leading edge. This is just about ready to be hit with a coat of heavy fill primer in order to reveal all of the flaws that will require attention

I've also put together a couple new episodes of the web series lately, so if you are behind, episode 23 is the most recent.

MattMobile Latches Received

With some help of a fellow user on Chicks Love The Car, I got my latches today.

If you want to order a set of your own, you can get them from www.biscoind.com

Aparently, they don't always have them in stock, so you may have to wait a bit, but I got mine immediately. Their pricing structure is a little weird, and the punchline is that it's about the same cost to order five sets as it is to order one set. So order five, then sell them to your fellow builders.

Here's the part numbers you want to get:

91-751-52 Latch
91-674-52 Keeper

Here's a link to a PDF with info on this particular latch and others from the series:
http://www.biscoind.com/southco/91-751-52.html

ZF1 Electronics Video

Just a quickie, showing the Superkrates electronics in action.

Oh, Also, No Big Deal... THE SUSPENSION IS DONE!

I'm not really sure how I managed to forget to post about this, as this represents a very significant milestone in the build. The front and rear suspension is now pretty much complete.

In the name of full disclosure, we still need to install the shocks on the front, but we're waiting to do that until the engine is relocated. But other than that, the entire operation is done. All the bushings have been replaced, parts have been sand blasted and painted, and everything is back together with the air bags in place where the springs used to be.

More Sanding and Primer

I won't bore my dear readers with photo after photo of micro progress on the paint and finishing of the body, but since I'm still just starting out, and a lot of this stuff is new to me and the blog, so work with me people.

First up is the gas cap on the drivers side. I figured I had done a pretty good job of smoothing out the seams and putty, so I deployed the old spray gun and whacked it with a couple coats of the heavy build primer I picked up a couple of weeks ago. I started to run out of air pressure near the end, so the paint got a little clumpy. But since I plan on sanding almost all of that down, this is not of concern to me.

Another part of the car I'm working on is the back hood. I sanded the seam, puttied it up, and then just like the gas caps, attacked it with a coat of heavy build primer.

Tomorrow I will sand this stuff down and see where else I need to putty and smooth.

MattMobile Gas Cap Recess Installation

Bo has been working like a mad man on the chassis and suspension, but I've been staying busy too. When not bothering him with lame questions or filming video.

The main thing I've been working on is the installation of the gas cap recesses. There are two on the car, one on each side. As with the nose cone, these struck me as great opportunities to test out techniques and materials to see how they work.

The first part of the process was filing down the edges of the recess part so that it fit snugly into the cut out on the body. I did this with a set of metal files and my dremel tool. After that, I used a five minute epoxy to anchor the piece in place. I only put four TINY beads of epoxy on the edges. It was just meant to hold it in place so it wouldn't shift while I was laying in fiberglass resin.

I don't have a picture of it, but I clayed up the edges from behind. The thought was that this way, the resin won't just drop straight through when I brush it into the cracks. Though this proved effective, it was a bit of a hassle getting the clay removed once it was done, and it also left an oily residue I had to reckon with.

However, after a little bit of work, this is what the top side looked like:

Once that had cured, I removed the clay and went underneath the car to brush on some more resin, and then lay in some matting. I need to do another layer of this, but this will help to bond the cap recess to the body.

After some work with the sanding block, it looked like this:

I did another pass with the fiberglass resin to fill in the deep cracks. After that was sanded, I hit it with a pass of short strand kitty hair.

For the second side, rather than use clay, I lined the inside with duct tape after filing the recess down to size. At the time of this writing, the first layer of resin has been brushed into the cracks, and is now curing.

With the extra resin I had mixed up, I brushed it into some of the deeper cracks along the seam lines on the body. When the body was made, the mold pieces were not registered perfectly, and left some gaps here and there. Rather than fill those with putty, I decided to brush in a little resin. Not only will this fill the gap, but it will also add strength to the seam.

DareDevil Cowl Arrives

Shawn Reeves once again hits it out of the park with this beautiful custom sculpt of the iconic DareDevil cowl. Though not sculpted for me personally, this thing fits PERFECTLY. Honestly, I cannot imagine something fitting better than this cowl. An excellent piece of good luck. This really finishes off the DD costume, which means it will for sure be ready for SDCC. If I get really bored, I may even wear it to AX, but I'm not sure.

I still want to get some billy clubs, but worst case I can just saw a couple dowel rods to length and paint them.

If you'd like a cowl of your own, please check out Shawns website, and drop him a line.

http://reevz666.com/#home

ZF-1 Kitbash Parts Work

A lot of work has been done recently on the ZF-1, namely prepping kit bash parts for molding. For the parts that are freestanding, the plan is to excise them from the model kit, then prep them so they can be molded properly and easily. This may include claying them up, or building sytrene dams onto the piece.

here's the bottom half of the ship, which has a large section of it that is used in the bottom front of the ZF-1, and a couple little pieces that sit right above it.

After cutting

And here's the top half of the main hull. The center spine of this needs to be removed and is used in the scope cup. One of the vents to the back of the hull is also used in the scope cup.

Here are the desired pieces removed. They still need to be cleaned up and trimmed, but you get the idea.

I need to take some pictures of the prep work that has been done, and the mold boxes. The scope cup is finished being assembled, though with the recent acquisition of the remaining model kit, I have two new parts to add on. Getting much closer to being done now!