ANOVOS take a look at the process that went into creating the First Order Stormtrooper armor….
To reproduce just about anything, you need to create a mold of your original piece. A mold is a hollow container used to give shape to your injected material of choice, or a solid object (often called a “buck” in this case) that can have material formed over it to create copies. There are a few ways to build a mold, and many material options to consider depending on your project.
First you need to determine how many “pulls” (or copies) you will need the mold to generate, and how to best optimize the molds to make the most use of each sheet of material.
Each mold has what is called a “pull life,” which is typically measured in how many times a mold can be used to create multiple copies of a piece before the mold degrades from overuse. Much of a mold’s life is determined by the materials it is constructed from, as temperatures and other normal wear-and-tear affect the mold’s life.
After making earlier versions of our prototype armor out of more malleable materials (to test construction, accuracy of detail, and other factors during the development process), we elected to go with a full-metal mold for our larger key projects such as our First Order Stormtrooper. The pull life of a metal mold is much longer than other alternatives, like medium-density fiberboard (“mdf”) or fiberglass, and can handle the thousands of pulls our factory required.
Metal molds also affect the final product itself! The metal surface of the mold has the advantage of retaining and holding heat during the forming process, creating smoother surfaces and better pulls due to longer work times.
Often, the shorter the work time, the greater the chance a pull will come out poorly and will need to be re-done. As one might imagine, this reduces efficiency and wastes material. Once a pull is finished, there’s no way to go back and re-use the same sheet of plastic so into the scrap bin it goes!
Read more at the link below.
