Vault Suit 101, Episode 6: That Blasted Pip-Boy 3000

PAX is long over, and I STILL haven't finished the chronicle of finishing up my Vault 101 costume...  But fear not, weary blog-reader!  This is the final installment of the construction phase: the completion of my Pip-Boy 3000.  Unfortunately, I was so busy building the damned thing, I forgot to take a ton of pictures.  I'll do the best I can to fill in the gaps, though.  Let's get started.

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The last time I showed you the progress of my Pip-Boy, it was in pretty sad shape.  I hadn't even finished cutting out all of the pieces!  It was a pretty hectic week, that's for sure.  I did get all of the pieces cut out eventually, but before I could put them all together, I needed some sweet green LED action.

Purdy, ain't it?  No?  Well, you'd be right about that.  This was the first time I'd ever really wired LEDs into anything.  I took the wires from an old game controller I'd taken apart a long time ago and separated them out.  After I wired it all together, I positioned the LEDs about where I wanted them, and then glued the wires down to the inside so they wouldn't wiggle all around and come lose.  The tape was just there to hold everything in place while the glue dried.  This is something I plan to experiment around with more in the future.  Maybe, you know, even learn the "right way" to do it.

Once I was sure the lights worked, I started gluing all of the parts together.  It looked a little something like this:

Again, the green stuff is dry floral foam, the gray and red bits are kid's craft foam, and the cylinder began its life as a Pringles can that I reinforced with some paper mache.  I filled in the cracks with some wood filler I picked up at the hardware store (mixed with a little water ... it was a bit too thick otherwise), and I put the two halves together with some little hinges, also picked up from the hardware store.  Keeping it closed, though...  Well, that's a story for later.

For the screen image, I took a screenshot of the status screen of the Pip-Boy in game, resized and brightened it up a little in Photoshop, and printed it out.  I cut out all of the status bars with my trusty X-Act knife and scored some of the lines so the light would shine through brighter.  Oh, I also printed out the little gauge for the Geiger counter.  I also put some screws in some key places, just to finish up the look a bit.

Annnd ... this is the part where I forgot to take pictures.  The painting part.  After it was all put together, I put four or five coats of gesso over the whole thing.  That filled in a lot of the foam texture and gave me a good, solid layer to sand.  And holy shit, did I sand.  I used a fairly fine grain sandpaper (240), paying particularly close attention to the areas that would naturally see the most wear and the sharpest lines (like around the screen).

Then it was time for paint!  For the base coat, I painted the whole thing black with matte acrylic paint.  For the second coat, I dry brushed the whole thing with a dark olive green, making sure to let the black show through in some of the deep, dirty crevasses.  Once that coat dried, I "scratched it up" with some steel colored dry brushing on the corners and high wear-and-tear areas.  Once it was done, it looked just like this:

A close up of some of the details.

Wearing it!  It ended up being a little less bulky than I had originally thought.

So there you have it, a Pip-Boy 3000 that looks like it came straight from the D.C. Wasteland.  Someday, I'd like to build one that actually kind of works, but that's way beyond my skill level at this point.  Speaking of it working, I did mention that it lit up, right?

Picture taken on the showroom floor at PAX, courtesy of my awesome friend Will.

And that's it for the construction part of this project.  For now.  In my next entry, I'll talk about what I learned from this build and maybe even put up some long overdue pictures from PAX 2012 itself!