I'm realizing that I'm juggling quite an assortment of projects right now. The projects I've posted about so far are still in progress, but none has progressed enough for an update just yet. So instead, this week I'll introduce yet another.
In April of 2024 I attended an event in the California dessert called Neotropolis. There we become citizens of a dystopian cyberpunk city on the planet Kepler 609c. I adopted the persona of a hard-boiled data courier for hire called Ais (pronounced somewhere between "Ash" and "Ace") with an aesthetic heavily inspired by the Cyberpunk 2077 game and The Expanse TV series.
As I started planning my costuming, I immediately knew that a cybernetic arm would have to be part of the look. Given how central cybernetic upgrades are in the genre, I knew that a cyborg arm, if done well, would put my costuming up to the next level. I used EVA foam for the construction, with a few upcycled bits for greebles, and 3D printed parts for detailed elements containing electronics. All was mounted to a stretch fabric sleeve allowing me to slip it easily on and off.
Overall, I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. But there were definitely some lessons learned that I'm not going to incorporate to a new and improved version for 2025.
One challenge I had was that I wanted it to be form-fitting on my forearm but I needed a way to fit my hand through the narrow wrist section. My solution was to split the forearm into top and bottom halves, with the plan that the stretch fabric they were attached to would pull the two sides together. That kind of worked. Kiiiiind of. But it ended up leaving a larger gap than I expected, and with repeated wear, the foam and fabric became stretched at the wrist.
For the next version, I'm going to trying for a smarter approach that, hopefully, will give a more seamless result. For this version I'm installing a zipper that will close snuggly around my wrist when worn. The idea of installing a zipper in an EVA foam construction would not have occurred to me if it weren't for Downen Creative Studios' book but it really is perfect for this project.
Installing the zipper was it's own challenge, since you really can't sew directly to 2mm foam. To overcome this, I used an idea I gained from Cowbutt Crunchies. Specifically, I sewed the zipper to a strip of pleather, with the plastic side of the pleather facing upward. Then I used contact cement to stick the pleather to the foam, since it gives a super strong plastic-to-plastic adhesion. A thin strip of the foam had been removed to accommodate the zipper.
I wish I had gotten step-by-step photos of this process. I need to make a point of being better about documenting my work. If all goes according to plan, the zipper will be completely hidden in the finished piece.
The other pig lesson learned from the original version was that the elbow "joint" I had constructed was too bulky to fit through the sleeve of my jacket. So when wearing the jacket I could only wear the forearm section of the arm, and try to play it off as the whole thing. That mostly worked but isn't ideal. So this time I'm building with that allowance in mind. But that's a topic for a future post.
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