Scott's Tron Costume

Last updated Thu Nov 1 14:23:39 EST 2001
This is the costume that I've made for Halloween 2001.

The parts

So far, here is a list of the parts i've bought for it... And some parts I still want, so that I can complete it:

Construction

The first thing that i wanted to work on was the helmet. The helmet in its original state has some black logos painted onto it, so i decided that the best way to remove the logos was to sand them off. I figured that when i glue the elwire to it, and it was painted, there'd be a better chance of the glue just popping off chips of paint. I disassembled the helmet, leaving the inner pads glued into place (they'd be a pain to reglue back in.) but pulling off useless things liek the chin strap and ear guards... no need for them.

Once I started to sand down the parts of the helmet I realized something. It looked really good with a matte finish. I ended up sanding all of the logos off with 80 grit sandpaper, then going over the whole helmet (in two different directions) with the 80 grit to give it a consistant matte finish. It looked really good once i was done with it.

I tried to use the same method (80 then 200) for the frisbee, which had black and metallic red logos painted onto it, but it didn't work as well. I instead tried the wire brush attachement on a drill, and then whisked away all of the coloring with that. Unfortunately, I might not have time to complete this portion of the costume. I'd like to get a small 3v lithium inverter and mount concentric circles of el wire onto the frisbee eventually... we'll see what happens.

Here's a shot of the helmet and frisbee after I sanded off the logos.. the center of the frisbee feels odd, but that rough texture will make the elwire glow a lot more nicely.


Ah.. such humble beginnings...

Anyway.. back to the helmet. I spent the better part of an evening attaching leads to the elwire (pics of this to come), and then threading the 10 foot strand of the wire around the helmet, gluing it in place. My fingers were coated in glue by the end of the night. After the 10' of the thicker wire, it looked like this:


10 feet of wire done... 6 feet to go

It felt like it was lacking something, so I added another 6' length of the thin wire, making the cool patterns on the top, and the two ovally shapes on the sides to yield this result:


EL wire, Crazy Glue, Hockey Helmet... whee!

I'm quite pleased with the result. It's not accurate to the film, but I don't really care. (I decided to make a cool looking costume. I do not want it to be accurate... if I was to try to make it accurate, I would go insane sweating the details that no one cares about anyway.) I think it looks very Mobius-esque, which is exactly what I want. :D

Here are some darker pics of the helmet.


...pretty glow...

It tool a lot longer than expected to assemble it this far. The following pics are of an forearm guard which took about 2 hours to do. Granted, some of that time was putting connectors on the power inverters, and gettng intensely shocked in the process, but still. (Getting shocked by 85v AC, 2000hz very low amperage is enough to stun you, but not enough to do any damage. I had to sit down and rest for a half hour to recover. hehe) Each of these took about 10 feet of wire.


The forearm

These are just Forearm protextion thingies with the ELWire woven through them and then sewn on with a running stitch. Nothing fancy. I'd love to do something like the real thing in the movie, but that would be nearly impossible with these materials. (Intricate traces, grid marks, etc. )


The leg

The legs took about 5 hours of work of sewing and figuring out a decent pattern. (and thanks to Therese for helping me by sewing one of them together for me...) Each one uses about 10 feet of wire woven all around it. (Mannequin leg courtesy of a friend. I've been meaning to make it into a table lamp... hehe)


All of the body parts

And here are the two arms, the two legs, and lots of extra wire which i will be wiring up to myself. eventually, i will buy a dirt bike chest protector, and crazyglue more wire to it.

One experiment that I did, involved taking one of those sets and hooking it up to a "Titanium" 9v battery,and the other up to a standard energizer. (The Titaniums cost twice as much.) The Regular one was very bright for about an hour and a half, was visible for another hour and a half, then was completely off. The Titaniums lasted about another hour longer for the 'visible' portion of the above cycle. the Titanium batteries are not worth the extra cost.


Pics by Traycer at Zoltan's party
I went to a halloween party up in Toronto, but forgot the connection wires, so i ended up only having the two forearm thingies and the helmet running. Thanks to Traycer for the pics. :D

I then went to a Halloween party here in Rochester at Vertex, and tied for first place in their costume contest. :D Lots of people took pictures, most of which will probably end up being pics of me in my underwear, since i was walking around in my underwear.


Yeah.. I know I'm out of shape. meh.

For the extra bits of wire, I simply wound it around me in an interesting pattern. To be honest, I didn't know that the back of the chest (see the pic above) looked so cool until I took pictures of it after going to the club. And since it was just wrapped on my body, over white long underwear, it got a really neat glow around the wire, much like the backlit look of the film.


pretty glow...

Problems with the current costume:

COMING SOON: how to work with the EL-wire

Version 2.0?

Some improvements I want to make on the costume:


[an error occurred while processing this directive] Help me! I'm stuck in a web browser!