If anyone has seen the latter two Captain America movies, you know Bucky Barnes aka the Winter Solider, has an awesome metal arm. After my halloween plans of being the joker (Heath Ledger version) were crushed when my school banned clown costumes, I had to resort to Plan B: building this sucker. I was going to make this a full costume build, but I didn't take many pictures of how I made his jacket, if you really want to know, ask me in the comments, and I might do a blurb on it. Anyways I made this whole costume in less than 2 weeks using the following....

Step 1: Materials

Worbla, or another thermoplastic. ( I used less than half of a jumbo sheet. )
Craft foam
Wood glue
Metallic silver paint
Black acrylic paint
Primer paint
Masking tape
A sharpie, or other writing stick.
Tin foil
Red paint

Optional: a mold of your arm. I made one out of duct tape and expanding foam. If you need a good tutorial, this guy made an awesome one to follow:

Step 2: Patterning

As always I started out by making a pattern. I covered my arm mold in aluminum foil and then taped over that with masking tape. You could also just cover your arm with aluminum foil (cling wrap works great too), and tape that over. However I must tell you that doing this without an arm prop is much harder, as you'll see later on.

It is important to leave spaces between each detail, so you have enough space to put everything on.

Step 3: Baby Steps

I did not take a picture of the first step, but it is VERY IMPORTANT. Before I cut apart all of my little pattern pieces, I traced the two main piece out onto the worbla and cut them out, so I had a spot to put all of the details on.

I cut the pattern apart and traced it onto the form, before I cut that out as well.

Step 4: Sandwiches and Painting

I heated up those two main pieces and wrapped them around my arm mold. Then I took all of the foam details and and put them in worbla sandwiches (basically I heated a piece of worbla up, put the foam in between, then put another piece of heated worbla over that). I cut the sandwiched foam/worbla details out and heated them before sticking them onto the base pieces.

IMPORTANT NOTES: Make sure the glue side of the worbla is on the table when you make the sandwiches, or else the detail pieces will be difficult to stick to the main pieces. Labeling things are also very useful in this project because many pieces look the same.

Once again I got lazy taking pictures, but I coated it in two layers of wood glue than 2 layers of primer, than metallic silver spay paint. You could stop here and add your star, but I decided to weather it, which I thought made it look 1000000x cooler. I did this by watering down black acrylic paint, and just slathering that all over the arm. I waited a few seconds than wiped it of with a towel.

I'm really bad at free handing things and making them symmetrical so I printed out a star, and traced it onto the the shoulder of my arm, then painted that red. I lightly outlined the star with a fine pointed sharpie. To weather that, I took a pencil and very carefully scrapped away some of the paint, then covered the star with black paint and followed the same process of weathering as I did before.

Step 5: Done

Amazingly I was able to finish all of this before Halloween, and while the rest of my friends dressed up as cats (no joke they actually did), I walked around school with a metal arm.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments :)