A Boy and His Spacesuit - Part Three

Show Time.
And finally, the debut of my Hallowe'en spacesuit build.  My apologies for not having a full range of pictures, but by the time I reached the end of the process I was more interested in finishing up and getting to bed at a reasonable hour than in thoroughly documenting the process.

Like any good Canadian, I own a hockey bag, which was just barely big enough to fit everything in for the trip to work.  Even without adverse weather conditions, I literally couldn't see my way clear to wear this outfit for the bus trip downtown.

Some shots from my day at work*:

Overall, I consider this to have been a semi-successful project.  I regret not having time to do more elaborate footwear, the paint didn't really adhere to the plastic bucket that made up the collar, so there was a lot of peeling and flaking, and I would have liked to have added lights and sound effects.  So, not perfect, but still good enough to be one of the prize winning costumes.

Sadly, there wasn't a lot of competition.  As I commented to a co-worker's tweenage daughter who was in attendance, Hallowe'en is the only time of year that you get to dress the way that you really want to dress all the time. Why would anyone pass up that kind of opportunity?

- Sid

*  My apologies for the quality of these shots, or more accurately, the lack thereof. If you've wondered if it's really worth it to buy a digital SLR instead of just using your smartphone, wonder no more.

Oh, and in the interests of mild irony, the young woman in the Top Gun outfit posing with me is the previously cited new employee who is unfamiliar with Jean-Luc Picard's standard handoff to Commander Ryker.

 
Postscript

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to wear a spacesuit, I'll be happy to lend out my outfit to the curious.  It's not as much fun as you might think.  Peripheral version drops to zero, the helmet and coverall raises your body temperature, the gloves limit your manual dexterity, and the weight of the whole thing - boots, backpack, armpieces, helmet, etc. - starts to become a burden surprisingly quickly.

And let's not forget, my creation is a pale imitation of the real thing.  The current NASA EVA suit - the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU - weighs 109 pounds or 49.5 kg.  It will keep an astronaut alive for 8 hours, with a 30 minute backup life support unit in case of problems with the main system. The main limitation of my hamster habitat helmet was lack of air flow, even with the ventilation holes in the top.  But all I had to do was open the visor or take off the helmet - neither one of which would be a viable option for someone working on the outside of the International Space Station.  If something goes wrong in those circumstances...trust me, it takes very little time to use up all the air in a domed helmet.

A Boy and His Spacesuit - Part Two.

Paint, Epoxy, and Bolts.

My god, it's Steampunk Barbie's spacesuit helmet! was my first thought when I saw this odd item sitting in a recycling bin as I made my way home from a Sunday gym visit.  Provenance aside, it looked as it might be a perfect solution to the helmet problem for my 2012 Hallowe'en spacesuit, so I scooped it up along with a variety of other intriguing bits and pieces of plastic and acrylic from the bin, stuffed it in with my water bottle and towel, and headed home with a renewed interest in costume creation.

A bit of research revealed that my new collection of material was the remnants of someone's discarded Habitrail® dwarf hamster habitat.  (I include this evidentiary screen grab as a response to the mild scepticism with which that information was greeted at work.)

However, I wasn't entirely certain that this unexpected find would actually work as a spacesuit helmet.  In other words, would it fit on my head?  By carefully carving away at the bottom of the habitat, I was able to create a suitable opening, and tried it on.

To my relief, it was a perfect fit.  Now all I had to do was figure out how to make it work...

Obviously I couldn't use it the way it was - some people might be able to work with a pink spacesuit, but my approach to this sort of thing is more old school, so a good coat of paint was in order.  I decided that a mix of classic NASA spacesuit white with orange accents would go nicely with the blue coverall that I'd purchased, so it was off to Home Depot™ to do some shopping for paint, masking tape, and whatever else might catch my eye as a possible spacesuit accessory (which, as it turned out, included a pair of black and white work gloves.)

Before starting to paint, I did basic assembly on the vambraces - forearm pieces, for those of you with no background in the terminology of medieval armour.  I trimmed out the ends of the plastic covers, epoxied them together with some segments from toner cartridges, and the basic pieces were ready to go.  I also chose a selection of ornamental bits and pieces to be painted orange, and I was ready to go.

The only part of the costume that would require special care during the painting process was the helmet, since I wanted the visor left clear. I carefully masked the appropriate area, nominated the far corner of my living room as the paint booth, and started painting.

As the saying goes, don't try this at home. Seriously, don't.  If you live in an apartment, partitioning off and drop sheeting an area for painting is not really a practical thing - if I didn't live alone, or if I still had a cat, I don't think I would have attempted something that resulted in paint fumes, overspray, and general mess to the extent that this project did.

As October 31st came closer, I decided that I'd need to make a few compromises.  My original plan included some kind of elaborate boots and greaves to match the look of the arm pieces, but prudence dictated something more modest - a ten dollar pair of nylon winter boots from the Salvation Army store filled the gap instead. I also had to come up with some kind of collar and backpack for the body of the spacesuit.

One of my Home Depot™ purchases was a four gallon bucket, more for future utility usage than as a costume element, but a quick check showed that the helmet would fit perfectly into the top of the pail.  I sketched out an approximate profile to fit over my shoulders, starting chopping away with a utility knife, and voilá, one slightly retro spacesuit collar, ready to be painted white.

In fact, the whole thing was starting to develop a bit of a retro 50s spacesuit feel, so I decided to continue in that direction with the backpack and the collar.  The chassis for the backpack was a chopped-down infant car seat that someone had put out for pickup, and I added in a selection of colourful bits and pieces to suggest oxygen tanks, a sort of regulator, and so on.  I added some lengths of white plastic hose to connect the air supply to the collar, bolted the collar to the backpack, glued some decorative bits to the outfit, and I was pretty much ready for Hallowe'en.

- Sid

 (And then there were the parts that I didn't use...)

A Boy and His Spacesuit - Part One.

Space Cadet!

In tribute to Tom Corbett, the original Space Cadet.

Did you ever wonder how big your head is?

In the case of most people, it's not a question that comes up in conversation all that frequently, but when I decided to build a spacesuit for Hallowe'en, I needed to have some idea of how large my head was for the purposes of helmet construction.  Result:  the cardboard mockup to the left.

Originally, I wanted to build something quite elaborate and polished in execution, but I quickly decided that I'd have to be prepared to compromise.  After all, I didn't have access to a workshop, I had neither the facilities or the required skills for building molds or doing vacuum forming - and let's face it, this was just something for one day at work.

Nonetheless, I spent some time looking at source material for inspiration: Star Trek, early NASA suits, Red Planet (not a great movie, but interesting spacesuits), Alien, Armageddon, Prometheus, and so on - as the expression goes, aim for the Moon, which seemed appropriate under the circumstances.

As I pointed out in my original posting, a lot of movie spacesuits consist of a fancy overall and a helmet, accessorized with life support packs, electronics, gauntlets, communications apparatus, and so on.  In fact, in the case of the Defying Gravity suits shown below, there isn't really that much in the way of greebly dressing, just the basics.

I've had a casual desire to build some scale model Warhammer 40K scenery for some time, and as a result there was a collection of odd bits and pieces of plastic and metal tucked away in my storage closet.  I already had a discarded ray gun that had probably been part of some kind of lazer tag game originally, and I found a couple of matching plastic covers of some sort, perfectly sized to be forearm pieces when combined with a couple of empty toner cartridges from work.  However, I knew that I couldn't rely on found objects for the entire costume, so I logged onto eBay in search for some affordable (read "cheap") coveralls.

I was fortunate enough to find something that had a slightly different look to it - coveralls with twin zippers that extended all the way from the neckline to the ankle, thereby giving them a sort of 1960s G-suit feel.  They were a Buy It Now item, so no need to wait out a bidding process, and priced within my modest project budget, so I placed an order for a medium outfit in blue.  (In retrospect, the grey and orange would have worked better with my final colour scheme, but c'est la vie, hindsight is always perfect.)

As I mentioned in my original posting, I had found the website for a company selling acrylic domes, and using the mockup of my head as a reference, placed an order for two 11x14 inch oval domes.  Or at least I tried to.  No ill will toward EZ Tops/Global Plastics, I suspect that most of their orders are for larger quantities than my modest request, but, um, guys? It does no harm to answer e-mails in a timely fashion, and order fulfillment and shipping seems to take an awfully long time as well.

As the delivery of the oval domes took longer and longer, I began to worry that I wouldn't be able to finish the costume, and unfortunately started to procrastinate as a result.  After all, if I couldn't make the helmet, there was no reason to work on the rest of the outfit.  And then one Sunday afternoon as I was making my way home from gym, something odd in a recycling bin caught my attention....

- Sid

Like Christmas shopping on Boxing Day.

I know, it's November 1st, but wouldn't this be an interesting change from zombie makeup for Hallowe'en?  The mismatched eye colour is a nice touch as well.

For the benefit of the curious, this is the endlessly talented Emilie Autumn in the role of the Painted Doll from The Devil's Carnival, a short horror film - for want of a better category, it qualifies as fantasy just as easily - written by Terrance Zdunich and produced and directed by Darren Bousman.

- Sid