Which is why I wear protection.

You wouldn't even think to leave the house without a helmet on but

have you ever stopped to consider the second most vulnerable body part from

random things falling from the sky? That's right, your shoulders.

Protect your shoulders - it never hurts.

(whistling sound)

(clink) Didn't hurt.

Shoulder armor may not protect from falling lawn darts.

Hey everyone today I'm going to show you how to make a steampunk mechanical shoulder...armor.

I just wanted to show you how cool it looks with the steampunk mechanical

arm pattern which is available separately. I'll put links in the

description below and in the upper right hand corner but...man, that looks really

cool together, so just some inspiration. Anyways let's make shoulder armor.

Start by printing out the pattern, making sure the scale is set to actual size. You can

verify that everything is perfect by measuring the print guides. Some of the

pattern pieces are larger than a normal sheet of paper, so you're gonna have to

tape them together. I like to use my window because it makes it easy to see

through the paper and see the alignment markings. I also get to see the great

outdoors. Now grab some scissors and start cutting out those pattern pieces,

cutting as close to the black line as possible without removing it. I find it a

lot easier to cut out the inside parts of pieces with a knife rather than

scissors. You should end up with a nice stack of pieces. Once your pattern is cut

out, get out your foam. If your foam keeps rolling up on you, a pair of ankle

weights can be a great solution to that problem. Maybe you have a really fit

friend you could borrow some from. Thanks fit friend.

Carefully trace your armor pattern onto the foam, making sure to mark the alignment

points. Extend them to the inside of the pattern so they still exist when you cut

out your foam. Some pattern pieces get traced more than one time and piece

number three gets flipped for its second time. Mark the dotted lines on the main

pieces. Those will be indentations. Mark the center of all the places you

need to punch a hole. Just remember, although you cut two piece number 6s, only one of

them gets the holes. Now we can carefully cut out the pieces we just drew on our

six millimeter foam. Remember, whenever you're using a very sharp knife be

careful where your fingers are so you don't chop them off. When you cut out the

circle and the other rectangularish-sort-of-piece from piece number one, just

leave them in their place cuz you're gonna need them there later.

That's our six millimeter foam cut out. Now let's do the two millimeter foam.

This is a great time to use up some scraps. If your pen runs out of ink while

you're tracing and it frustrates you so much that you want to throw it away,

maybe just...don't. Instead, put it in your drawer for safekeeping because we're

gonna use it later. One thing to think about before cutting out all these fancy

pieces, is you might want to skip ahead and just make the main shoulder first to

make sure it fits. You'll also want to save the 9 millimeter disks we're

cutting out right here cuz we'll use them later. While we're punching things out

let's take our six millimeter punch and punch the holes on one of our piece

number sixes. Now we can plug in our glue gun and adjust the temperature so it's

not too hot and won't burn our hands off as well as being quicker to cool so we

can make our project faster. When using hot glue it's best to glue smaller

sections at a time so the glue doesn't cool before you have everything lined up.

As you can see I've started by gluing the two piece sixes together. Next comes

a technique I like to call "cutting out and putting back in, but just not putting

all the way back in." So we'll take the two pieces we cut out from number one

and glue them back where they came from, the difference being we're not gonna

push them all the way back in. This is a handy trick when you're working with

thicker foam and want to add some more dimensionality. It seems to work best if

you can glue small sections at a time. That way it's easier to keep the recess

equal all the way around. Now glue the dart on piece number two, gluing about

five centimeters at a time. Hold the edges together until the glue cools

while pressing down against a table. If you're new to using hot glue and foam I

have a video with tips on how to get nice smooth seams

and the link will be in the top right corner. Glue piece one and two together,

lining up alignment points E, F and G. It's a good idea to make the indentations

along the lines that we drew before this thing goes 3-D, so let's do that right now.

A plastic gift card works great for this because it's about the right width and

the corners are nicely rounded. Pretty simple technique with this, just keep on

rubbing until you've got nice lines. Glue the sides together at alignment mark A.

My foam wasn't cooperating and wanted to bend the wrong way so I used a hair

dryer to heat it up and shape it a little. Now piece 6 (the neck guard) gets glued

so the center of it lines up with the seam along the top of the shoulder. It's

important to note as seen here that it gets glued beside pieces one and two

rather than on top of them. This piece is important because it also

helps the other piece of foam stay curved going over the shoulder. Now is a

good time to check and make sure this is gonna fit over your super muscular

physique before continuing on the rest of the project.

Check.

Use a bit of sandpaper to rough up the foam along the bottom edge of the torso piece and then

glue in piece number four, overlapping on that inside edge. You want to end up with

about six centimeters of piece number four sticking out the bottom. With that

done we can move on to the pauldron. We'll start by gluing the darts on piece

3 and 3A. You want to make sure that the ends of the dart line up

properly and you'll probably have to pull a little bit on the top part to

make that happen. If you haven't already, make sure you punch the four millimeter

holes for the hinged rivet. Glue the two halves of the pauldron together along

the center line which will give you an inside-out pauldron which you can then

turn inside out from being inside out. Now piece five can get attacked by a

gift card and a hole punch. Grab some webbing and a D-ring. I happened to find

exactly what I needed in a set of head weights...on my head.

Make a mark seven centimeters in from the edge of the shoulder and the width

of your webbing, and cut a slot along that line. Watch out that your fingers

aren't underneath your knife blade. That would be bad. Cut a piece of webbing 11

centimeters long. Sand around the center seam on the pauldron, glue the webbing to

itself with the D-ring in the center and then glue the webbing and D-ring down to

the pauldron. So now, when you want to put it together, you can take a second piece

of webbing, put it through the D-ring and then feed it through that slot you made and

that'll hold the pieces together and yet still allow motion. Now cut five strips

of 2 millimeter foam that's 12 millimeters wide by 76 centimeters long.

If you don't have foam that long you can cut more strips that are shorter. Now

we're gonna use those strips to make a rim that goes all the way around the

outside edge of all the pieces. The way I found worked best was to leave the strip

a bit longer on the ends and then trim it off once it was glued down. Where two

strips met I would overlap one over the other and again trim it off after it was

glued. I also glued a strip along the top edge of the neck guard to cover up that

ugly seam. Piece 38 might be a little long on one end just depending on how piece

four is glued so you may need to trim a little off the top of both of them

before you glue them down. You can now glue a strip along the bottom edge that

overlaps a bit of each piece 38. Now we'll run the same strips around the outside

edge of the pauldron, and the pauldron extra flappy-bit...thing. Although those

joints around the edge are quite obvious it's kind of okay because we're gonna

cover them up, right now...with piece 33 on the upper front corner, piece 32 on the

lower front corner, and two piece 32s on both back corners. Piece 34, 35 and 36 on

the pauldron, and four piece 34s on the pauldron flappy bit. We'll make some

pivoting rivets from quarter inch outside diameter vinyl tubing which you

can see a tutorial for in the video linked in the upper right hand corner or

in the description. Don't make those permanent yet but you can use them to

put your shoulder armor together so you can try it on. Alright well there's the base

shoulder armor. It's kind of the point where everything else grows from.

Although we're doing steampunk shoulder armor today this is also a great base if

you wanted to do some sort of fantasy armor...like with big spikes coming out of

the shoulder or something like that...or something like that. And that would look

cool too, but I'm not gonna do that. Instead I'm gonna take this plain shoulder armor

and show you how to make it all steampunky by adding some fancy

accoutrements and the strappy bits...it's gonna be awesome.

And you can watch it right here, right now in this next video link which you

can click. (clicking sounds) Right about here maybe. Or here. It's gonna be good. And as usual I'm

gonna be hanging around in the comments for the next hour or so, so if you have

things you'd like to say or criticisms or comments or you just want to say

g'day I'd love to hear from you there. Now I highly recommend watching the next

video, it's super great and you're gonna love it.

See ya.