Taking my forearms from zero to hero in 9 steps and 9 hours

Or “An Arkham Asylum gauntlet build on a tuppence ha’penny budget”.
I thought I’d post up about my first scratch built set of AA gauntlets.  They’re made from foam matting, the type of which may be sold by a little bit helpful super market retailers’ Value range and some cheap surplus camping studs and leftover bits of strapping that most Stormtrooper costumers have kicking around.

I’m not in the slightest claiming they’re (game) screen accurate as the initial template was done off the top of my head from memory, they’re deliberately smaller (short arms, you see) than the humongous articles Batman actually rocks in-game and I don’t agree with the colour scheme used by official merchandise.

Also; black spray paint I have kicking about, blue I do not…

1) 12:02
I measure my forearms before I plan out my templates for printing onto card using a vector drawing package.  This has the added benefit that I can scale the shapes up later if I want to have a go at some matching shin armour.

2) Print them off and cut out the shapes.  Only need one set as I can flip them over for the right and left arms to make things simpler. 

Or not as we’ll see…

3) Draw round these onto the mat.  I can reuse one of the shapes, sans grooves, to make the back section of the gauntlets.  Also, unlike the templates, I’ll make the backing a single section with a partial cut to allow them to fold round the arm as the foiled backing glued onto the mat lends itself to a natural joining material.

4) I save the section cut out to form the grooves as it was easy to do while keeping it in one piece and these can be reused as a bracer to attach the fins too.  In another bit of serendipity, the spacing of the fins can be measured equidistantly using the small rectangular sections cut out to put the poppers through to act as fastenings…

5) Hot glue the front section onto the rear.  Hot glue the fins to their strip of foam.  Hot glue the strip of foam to the outside of the arm.  Erm…  Which one is that though?  All the flipping of the template has confused me and the fins point in opposite directions. 

Nevermind, it’s hot glue I can rip one off and start again.

6) Attach the camping poppers and webbing for fastening round my arms and it’s off to the Batspray cave!

7) While waiting for the first coat of pain on the left gauntlet to dry, I spot that when I took off and re-glued that set of fins I put them on the wrong side.  Which technically means it’d have been easier to take off the other set and glue them the other way round!  Bah. Back out with the glue gun…

8) Rinse and repeats for several coats of paint.

9) And there we are, 21:44 and both gauntlets finished in half a day.  The dangers of being at a loose end and there’s nothing on telly…