User:Remi Scarlet/Blog/FurutakaKaiNiCosplay/Day3

'Day 3 New!

Date: 5/24/15
Time spent: ~2 hours

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Purchasing and Fire

So today I went out and bought some PVC piping that would act as various parts of the propset as per yesterday's sketches. All in all, I figured that I would need about 50 inches of 1.25inch diameter piping, 50 inches of 1inch diameter piping, 60 inches of 0.5inch diameter piping and some ~20 inches of 0.75inch diameter piping as internal couplings for the pipes. I also bought some PVC caps which will act as the torpedo heads. While at Home Depot, I also decided to go ahead and stop skimping out and buy a real saw. Let me tell you, using an actual saw meant for cutting pipes beats the hell out of using those cheap arts and crafts knives.

Pictured: A lot of pipes that were a bitch to carry around without a cart in Home Depot and without a car from the store to back home.

So the idea for today's pipe purchases were so I had the materials needed for all the long pipe-y parts of the cosplay on hand. This includes turret barrels, turret barrels, more turret barrels and some torpedoes. Keep in mind, Furutaka kai ni has three cannons and a torpedo mount. That's six barrels and four torpedoes, equalling 10 long stick things. According to my sketches and calculations (which slightly changed from Day 2's), the barrels would be between 8.5 and 9.5 inches long and the torpedoes would be about 15 inches long.

A cool note about the 1.25inch inch piping is that they're just large enough to comfortably, but not too snugly fit the 1inch pipings. What I'll be using them for is the torpedo mount's torpedo housing. If you look at the images of torpedo mounts, you'll notice that there are thin half-pipe encasings on the upper half of the torpedoes. Due to the naturally well-fitted and shaped nature of the 1inch and 1.25inch pipes, I will be doing just that with the two pipes. Due to this, I have also changed my plans about the expanding foam encasing for the torpedoes. Instead, I will likely simply have a wooden base that's sturdy to connect the torpedo mount to my leg and use standard foam board beyond that with holes cut out to snugly fit in the 1.25 inch pipings.

Anyway, so in terms of actual progress with making stuff, I confirmed that I could use heat bending to soften the PVC piping to fit with each other. As it stands, without heat bending you can't fit a 0.75inch PVC into a 1inch PVC as they're just slightly off-sized. However, with application of heat to the PVC, you can soften it enough to "force" the smaller pipe into the larger one. Given enough pressure and once the pipes cool, they'll basically be lodged in there for good so no worries about it falling out.

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  Generally, it's better to use a heat gun instead of an open flame since... well, you can see that the PVC is kind of on fire. Wheeee.

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  When shoved in, the smaller piping will fit very snugly into the larger pipe.

The tip is a bit flat and I'm trying to think of a way around it but... we'll see.

If you're wondering why the hell I needed to do this weird pipe fitting thing, it's because I also had a 0.75inch pipe cap which coincidentally has the same outer diameter as the 1inch diameter pipes. That said, I decided to combine the 1inch pipe and 0.75inch pipe cap together to make it look like a single pipe with a cap. Obviously, aesthetic embellishments will be applied to smoothen out the little line where the pipe cap and pipe actually meet and whatnot, but that comes later.

So now that I had confirmed these things fit together, all I had to do was get the torpedo propellers and they'd basically be done!

...Except life isn't that easy, is it?

Torpedo Propellers

So after thinking about how the hell I could make a small-scale yet intricate propeller system for the torpedo, I figured that it's probably impossible to hand craft something that would look nice, be sturdy and be able to fit onto a PVC's piping diameter. Thus, I decided to opt to one of my favorite additions to cosplay, the 3d printer. After deciding that I would likely need to design an print out my torpedo propellers to make them look top notch, I set to work for an hour or so to come up with the following. The first three images are the propeller portion with the torpedo's main body attached for reference. The fourth image is what I would actually be printing.

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  Long view shot

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  Close up and from the side

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  Diagonal shot

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  The actual part I'm going to be printing

So with this, I figured my issue with the torpedo is solved. For now, I still need to go and print the parts so we'll see if this works as well as I'm hoping.

I'll likely start thinking and working with the cannons next time!