Gene Simmons Destroyer Costume

Step 2 Start the Armor

For the armor, I was lucky enough to find a set of kid’s football shoulder pads at Goodwill for $3.00. I disassembled them (TIP: Use a drill to drill out the rivets from the back, not a Dremel tool. A Dremel makes the rivets get hot enough to melt through the plastic. Please don't ask me how I know this.) and wound up with a perfectly good shoulder yoke and two rounded plates to use as shoulder caps. I sanded the embossed logos off of the shoulder caps with wet/dry sandpaper, but left the ones on the sholder yoke alone, as I was planning on covering the yoke with plastic anyway.
After a round of dumpster diving, I found a stack of 5-gallon plastic soy sauce buckets behind a Chinese restaurant, and those were the raw material for the rest of the armor.

I used some armor patterns I found online (Google “vambrace patterns” for the arms, or see the ones included below), and just eyeballed the rest based upon the shape of the shoulder pads.  I scaled the patterns to fit my son’s measurements, made paper patterns of all the pieces and cut them out. (For you armor buffs out there, I used the vambrace pattern for both the upper and lower arm, because that seemed to more closely resemble the original costume. The rerebrace pattern didn't look right at all.) After some minor adjustments to the paper patterns, we were ready to go.
The upper and lower arms, breastplates, abdomen plates, yoke covers and collar pieces were cut out of bucket plastic with a jigsaw and sanded lightly. I probably could have gotten away without the breastplates and yoke covers, but I wanted the armor to look as little like football pads as I could manage, and I had a whole lot of buckets. (TIP: Cut the armor pieces so that the curve of the bucket follows the curve of the armor piece. Bending the plastic against its molded curve is a royal pain.)
I used a heat gun to help the arm pieces retain the proper curve. Simply heat carefully to soften the plastic, bend into shape(use gloves), dunk in cold water to set the new shape, repeat as necessary.

 

Comments

[mrcrumley]

 With gracious shout-outs like this, you can steal my stuff anytime.

[RavingMadStudios]

You are truly a gentleman and a scholar. Thanks for letting me use the pic, and thanks again for the rockin' Thor 'ible.