Spraying the
Hardshell Coating

The foam that the armor is made of is pretty darned tough to begni with, but it can be made rediculously tough by spraying it with a liquid plastic hardshell coating - and that is exactly what we intend to do! 

Once all the foam parts have been assembled, cut to size and sanded smooth we will apply a primer known as "styroprime" (from Industrial Polymers). Once that sets we mix up "Styro Spray 715" and spray it onto our armor pieces using a gravity fed hopper sprayer to blast it out at 100psi (hello industrial air compressor). This stuff sets into a very strong plastic in about 20 minutes. It does run a little bit so we will have some plastic icecicles to cut & sand off of the bottom of our pieces, but that's a small price to pay for having amazingly tough hard plastic power armor!