props

Fallout 3 replica weapons

Fallout 3 replica weapons

Ryan Palser, aka Flickr user citizensnips, built this impressive replica of the AER-9 laser rifle from Bethesda’s runaway hit RPG Fallout 3. He’s also got some work-in-progress shots of a replica A3-21 plasma rifle that is shaping up to be even more impressive. Nice work, Ryan–let us know when it’s finished! [via Propnomicon]

Holy smokes Iron Man costume

Holy smokes Iron Man costume

t may look like a CG rendering from a big-budget movie, but it’s really just a photograph of Colorodan Anthony Le wearing his $4,000 homemade costume.

[Le] used thin, high-impact urethane for the armor, cutting it into plates and joining them with some 1,500 rivets and washers. He sculpted a clay helmet mold and then used a liquid resin mix to create the final product…He also added a small servo motor that opens the faceplate, as in the movie, and built a gun out of pipes and a motor. LEDs in the eyes and chest-plate further add to the illusion.

DIY prop french fries

DIY prop french fries

Eric Hart added a pic of these homemade prop fries to the MAKE Flickr pool. Natalie Taylor Hart took on this project. She began with an old scrap piece of upholstery foam. She set the fence on the bandsaw and cut thin strips out of the foam. She then ran these strips through the bandsaw […]

Adam Savage’s Blade Runner Blaster

Adam Savage’s Blade Runner Blaster

Mythretirer Adam Savage has a post up this morning on that one Boingy blog about the latest in his lifelong series of personal replicas of Deckard’s handgun from Blade Runner. There’s more shots of the build as well as pictures of the original prop and two of Adam’s earlier replicas. The very first one uses the famous contoured handgrip from Italian toymaker Edison Giocattoli’s TG-105 ‘Super Thur’ ray gun, which also appeared in a prop from Joss Whedon’s Firefly.

How-To:  Make riveted chain mail

How-To: Make riveted chain mail

There are scads of tutorials flushing through the tubes that will show you how to twirl old wire coat hangers into rings, cut them up, and link them together with pliers to make the ubiquitous “butted” chain mail, in which the individual rings are either unjoined, soldered, or glued together. But this recent Instructable from armourkris, for the truly dedicated, shows you how to make a much more serious–and to my amateur eye, authentic–mail, in which each ring is flattened, punched, linked, and then riveted closed.

How-To: Make a giant octopus

YouTuber bluworm took on the task of making a great big octopus puppet for stop-motion animation in a film by his friend Daniel Lennéer. Along the way he produced this informative and entertaining video describing the casting, sculpting, and armature-work that went into it, as well as showing off some of the finished animation (starting around 5:00). Besides the cool propcasting info, I gotta give it up to bluworm for his video editing chops–this is definitely one of the most watchable how-to videos I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a bunch of them. [via Propnomicon]