Brother Edward's
Adeptus Astartes Power Armor

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
Project Start October 2003

Making the 
Foam Armor Pieces

Now that we have rubber molds for all of our armor parts it is time to pour in the expanding urethane foam to make the actual pieces. This is 3lb molding foam (meaning that a 1' by 1' cube of the stuff weights 3lbs). It is pretty darned tough on its own, but after we hollow out these pieces their strength will be somewhat compromised - so after each piece is cast and sanded to fit the wearer we will give it a spray coating of hard plastic to make the armor truly tough.

First we make the foam pieces though...


 
 

Here we see the back half of a backpack. To the left we see a shell mold. Unlike our rubber molds we do have a few hard shell molds that are left over from a previous mold making train of thought. As it turns out this one worked just fine to give us a backpack while we awaited more rubber for a proper backpack mold!

Most of our pieces do come from true rubber molds though, and the helmet is one of our trickiest parts to cast! It is cast in two pieces, front and back halves. When cutting the excess foam off we have to wear respirators so that we don't inhale the fine dust. Here Scott shows off one of our first helmets!

 

Here I am (Brother Edward) test fitting a helmet that has been hollowed out! This helmet has a few dings in it because we didn't have enough mold release in the rubber mold (my bad!) but we can patch up all these dings and nobody will suspect a thing once we're all finished!

 

Here we see a helmet atop the front half of the chest. This chest piece is an evolutionary step on the path to a true chest piece. Just like the backpack this piece was made from a shell mold. Those wrinkles and angle lines all need to be sanded smooth (and they will!) once that is done and the piece is perfect it will be thoroughly painted and sealed and a new rubber mold will be made of the "perfect" chest piece. This way all of our future chest pieces will come out perfect to begin with.

 

Here's a shoulder pad. The excess will be trimmed off and imperfections sanded smooth
prior to the hardshell spray.

Here is the front half of a greave (lower leg armor). The excess will be trimmed off and the piece will be trimmed to size to fit the wearer (me) then it will be glued to its other half and then it will be ready for the spray on hardshell coating.

 

That should give you an idea of the foam stage!