It is March once again, which means... well, updates!
It has been almost a year since I posted much of anything regarding Ricky (my minifigure costume), and I would like to change that. With Ricky's birthday coming up in a few days, I wanted to improve something about the costume itself. He is also going to show up at a robotics competition this weekend to represent a team there, which further prompted me to give Ricky an update.
There were two things which I have been wanting to do with the costume for a while now; cooling system (with a fan mounted inside the top of the head) and padding on the bottom of the legs so that he's not so loud when he walks around on hard surfaces. I decided to do the padding for now as I am having difficulties with the cooling system.
(I need to mount two 6 volt batteries somewhere on the costume, preferably on the outside, but am having trouble figuring out where would be the best place to do so. Ideas would be appreciated!)
To make the padding, I simply used some leftover foam sheets and cardboard lying around from when I finished the costume. I cut thin strips of each, layering two foam sheets between the bottom of the feet and a strip of cardboard. This way, the foam won't get all torn up as quickly because of the cardboard acting as a sort of extra protection.
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| The three layers. As you can see, the bottom of the feet really took a beating in all my walking around... |
I did the same thing on each foot, however, decided only to put padding on the sides and not the front and back. I figured that the foam boards on the sides take most of the force while walking anyway, and I didn't really want the front/back cardboard to get bent up somehow.
After that, I just used Gorilla Tape to keep everything in place! I really like that tape... It's the best I've used so far.
That's about it for this costume update! I was originally going to do this in a video, but things just didn't work out. I'm considering uploading a series of posts detailing how I built the costume, that way if anyone is interesting in making their own I can show them some tips!
Keep an eye out for updates on my upcoming brickfilm starring Ricky in minifigure-scale! I'll mostly be tweeting about it, so if you have a Twitter account feel free to follow me! Or, if you don't, you can just keep checking my Twitter feed on the side of my blog. :)
Until next time, have a great week!
