I tried to make a spacer out of paper like so many have done with Halo armor suits. The idea came to my mind after looking at some results over at 405th and after printing and glueing an Iron Man faceplate. As Venkman71 also described the spacer to be a bitch to scratch build and as my foam spacers didn’t come out like I wanted them to look, I was thinking about trying it with paper. Because the thread with the Pepakura proton pack seems to be frozen, I got pepakura designer and made the spacer myself.
I used the 3D Model for Google SketchUp done by Martin from here. Credits to him!
I cut away everything except the spacer and experimented some hours until I got the dimensions as accurate as possible (some changes are needed perhaps in the future) and then edited every flap to be big enough so cutting out the paper would be less hard and glueing would be time-effective. All in all I needed about one hour and a half for cutting and folding and about 2 hours for glueing the pieces together (sometimes this can be a cruel thing to do).
I tested it with normal paper and it came out somehow awkward, but anyway, just look at the pictures:
The spacer:
The edges of the spacer:
Look how the edges round themselves inside because of the glue hardening process:
The “round” upper area of the spacer before the “arm” begins:
Closeup of the round part of the “arm” on top:
I glued an additionial piece of paper inside this part. When using thicker paper or more sheets inside, this can come out perfectly round after resining.
Foam spacer and paper spacer:
My personal opinion about this technique after trying this piece:
PROS:
- It is easy as hell. To imagine cutting everything out of wood or foam consumes way more time than printing, cutting, folding and glueing.
- Using paper, noone has to get special equipment. Scissors and glue will do. For those people who want to make a cardboard pack, I could imagine glueing the paper onto the cardboard and then just cut like hell. Also here a time saving element.
CONS:
- As some of you already know, paper alone does nothing, it’s not stable and needs to be reinforced. As some of you also know, the guys with the halo suits are doing this with 2 coats of resin before they add some layers of resined fibreglass.
- Fibreglassing is a problem. Resin and fibreglass mats are not cheap like paper or cardboard. Additionally, you need a respiration mask and some experience (I won’t explain here).
- BUT: What you will get out of it is a fibreglass shell and you will have a hollow spacer which can be important building a proton pack. A hollow spacer has lots of space for electronics, amplifiers, speakers, etc. That’s the reason why I tried the spacer.
- Normal paper is too thin and a pepakura spacer can’t be resined good enough when using this thin material because it is just too awkward and unstable.
- BUT: There are more types of paper. When getting thicker paper which can still be cut precisely (scissors or scalpel or whatever cuts paper) you would get a pretty stable thing. The disadvantage using thicker paper is that the spacer in the end would come out a tiny bit smaller, because it has to be resined from the inside.
This is all I have to say for now about using paper for the spacer. I will try to get my hands on thicker paper (almost cardboard like, but thin enough to cut and fold) this week. Then I’ll try the same thing with this type of paper. When it is stable enough, perhaps I’ll try resining it. Additionally I have to make some changes on the flaps and the spacer in general because I found out that some flaps are too large and some are on the wrong side which makes glueing more difficult.
Let’s see if this technique is ■■■■ for the proton builders or if it comes out good.
