So Sunday was work day number two on the HEV suit…finally time to tackle the upper body and abdominal armor. I wanted to stick with building parts out of whole pieces of foam rather than trying to exactly match the papercraft version since that seemed to have worked out well for the limb pieces. After much deliberation with Patrick I settled upon making the armor from a basic vest like structure with each side built out of two halves of a foam piece. The back (which is still an issue), naturally formed a v-shaped opening which allows opportunities to do a simple backplate which is present in the action figure model but not truly in the game model. But that’ll be for another day.

The collar was mainly Pat’s creation. I made the front logo plate out of a few layered pieces of foam and he tested out different shapes for the collar till it came out the right size and height. We ran out of grey foam making the vest so had to resort to red for the collar for now. Since the inside should be lined red anyway, it seemed like the reasonable choice. Once I get more grey foam I’ll just cover the outside of the collar with it.

Once we were happy with the way everything generally fit together we started to make the final versions by layering the grey on top of the black. The collar ended up being created completely from scratch again out of red. This time I only hot glued the edges of the grey layer to the black, both to save on glue sticks and to give the armor more flexibility since there’s greater movement on the shoulders and arms. The main issue was trying to keep the gap between the two sides of the vest 5 inches apart (size of the base of the logo plate). A single foam strip seemed to do the job for now but since it also has velcro to attach itself to the base of the logo plate, I may reinforce it later with cardboard. That little bridging piece is quickly becoming on of the most essential joints in the whole suit so it deserves some reinforcement.

The abdominal plate armor turned out to be the simplest and most elegant part of the build. I just sketched the general shape onto a piece of foam and made two more copies below it and cut it all out. I layered them on top of each other with about an inch of overlap (about two inches would have been better in retrospect). I scored the center rectangle to give it a flatter profile (;like in the action figure) and reinforced this center with a strip of cardboard in the back. It doesn’t work like the actual plating is supposed to, as in slide over each other to let me bend forward and stuff, but it looks good. And since it’s a separate piece from the chest armor it’ll give me some degree of rotational figure (again, just like in the action figure).

There’s still a ton of more work to be done. The collar needs to be finished and somehow attached along the length of the armor (probably with velcro since it’s hard to take off the vest if the collar’s permanently attached). The back still needs a ton of work; it needs to be closed but also needs to have some degree of give for when I move my arms around. I have loftier ideas involving LEDs for the backplate but we’ll see in the future if that pans out. The iconic orange ribs are still missing as are the orange pieces bordering the opening underneath the logo plate. Oh and the logo itself. There’s also the whole belt thing and the upper arm armor. As I said…a ton of more work to be done. Also, now I know what it feels like to wear a corset. I wonder how the plated armor will feel like after 5 hours of constriction.