Henchmen Mask Kit

This is a quick tutorial on how to assemble our Venture Brothers Henchmen mask kit, which you can buy here( if it's in stock).

This is what you will get in the mail, but depending on what my plastic supplier has available it may be white(or the angry eye version, the build method is the same):

Now we can start by assembling our tools. This is what I used and suggest, but it is not the end all be all.

1:Sandpaper: Both high and low grit. At least 400 grit, preferably 600 for the high.

2:Dremel  with thin sanding drum: This will help you quickly sand out the eyes and clean up the edges of the mask. You can put the mask together without one, but it will take much longer.

3:Paint: I used Krylon Plastic Fusion yellow and Now wagon red. (black primer & black acrylic paint if you have a white mask)

4:Low temp hot glue gun: Make sure its LOW temp! You do not want to warp the plastic or burn your fingers. The cheap little ones work just fine

5: Scissors: Kinda self explanatory

6:Elastic band: So you can wear it!

Ok, now we can start! The first thing we need to do is get the mask into the proper shape. This means sanding, and lots of it

The Dremel really helps out here, just be careful with it. It's very easy to take off too much material. So take your time and get the eyes and the edges cleaned up and smoothed out. You will also want to take your high grit sandpaper and go over the whole mask, this will help the paint adhere. I know the Plastic Fusion brand paint says that you don't have to sand, but don't believe them! After you are done with your sanding, clean off your mask. Either use an air gun to blow it off or rinse it in some water and let it dry. Before you move on really take a close look at it. You do not want to get it all painted up and then realize that you needed to even out an edge. Now if your mask is white plastic you will want to first lay down a layer of black primer. This will help the yellow look "right" without having to spray multiple coats. Get the eye mesh out as well. You do not have to prep it at all, just paint it. Remember to follow all the directions on the spray paint can! This can really affect how the  finish looks. If possible hang your mask from one of the eye holes for painting. I didn't not paint the backside of the mask because we will be hot gluing things to it.  Let the paint dry overnight. We will be handling the mask a lot so you want the paint to be fully cured before we move on.

All right, at the start of day to your pieces should look like this ^. Now before we glue in the eye mesh there is one detail that we have to do first. To really make the eyes "pop" we are going so make the tiny inner edge of the eye hole black.

If the mask that you got is black plastic, all you need to do is very carefully sand off any paint that on that edge. If you have a white mask you can carefully paint the edge with some acrylic paint. Let that dry completely before moving on.

We are ready to start gluing. Plug in your glue gun and while it is heating up see if you need to trim any of the eye mesh. We want as much overlap for gluing as possible, so don't trim anything unless it hangs over an edge. To start you are going to put a bead of hot glue down along the top ridge of the eye hole. I used colored hot glue to make it easier to see.

Press the top of the mesh down into the glue. You want to see the glue worked into the weave. The safe way to do this is to use a pen or a stick to push the mesh down, and that's how I'm telling you to do it. I used my fingers, but that's because I'm dumb.

After you have let the glue cool down on the top, flip your mask over and press your thumb gently into the center of the eye mesh. You want the mesh to have a gentle bulge out of the eye hole. That, with the black line we added earlier  will give the eyes a more 3d look.

Once you have the mesh in the right place you can start gluing it down. Really work the glue into the mesh, and make sure to overlap the edge. Work it in small sections and let the glue cool before moving on.

Once you have both eyes glued in you can add your elastic. Start from the middle edge of the eye and lay a bead of glue out towards the side of the mask. Quickly press one side of your elastic into the glue and let it cool. After it has cooled, top coat the elastic with more glue, overlapping the edges. Once that has cooled down, hold the mask up and pull the other side of the elastic around and touch it to the side of the opposite eye. Adjust how much you have to pull for comfort and then cut off any excess. Repeat the the gluing process and you are all finished! I hope that was helpful, and feel free to post pics of your finished masks in the comments.

New year! New Post! New Tool!

Alrighty then. 2012 was a super busy year for us here at KnowOne's designs. If you haven't been keeping up with us on Facebook you should hop on over there and take a look see. We definitely keep that page more up to date than our website.....not sure if that's a good thing, but that's the way it is. So now on to my new toy! I have had the various piece parts for a home made vac former sitting in my shop for well over a year now. It was time to put it all together, in the most terrifying and unsafe way possible.

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS IN NO WAY A "HOW TO" GUIDE ON BUILDING A VAC FORMER! I am just showing you  the random and hazardous way that I heat up thermoplastics and use suction to create objects. There are many other sites with plans (both free and paid for) on how to build one of these machines. If you wish to also play with melty plastic I suggest using your preferred internet search engine and finding proper plans. KnowOne's Designs is not responsible for any burnt fingers or seemingly random appearances of fire in your work shop. This can be seriously dangerous so.....don't be dumb.

OK so remember when I said that I had all the parts just laying around? That was a bit of a stretch.  I had most of the parts, and then just made do with scrap lumber and cheap, undersized hardware. I was trying to build this as close to free as I could, alright?! But at the end I had a functioning tool, so that says something. When building a vac former, you first need to decide the size of your "platen" or as it is commonly known, "the bottom part with all the holes in it".  The idea of spending hours drilling tiny holes, in a perfect grid, into a piece of aluminum, was abhorrent to me. Instead I based my entire design off of a 26"x18" baking pan that already had holes in it. Lazy? Definitely. Smart? I would like to think so. This way I could use a regular 26"x18" baking pan as the top of my oven box. To finish off the platen I needed a wood bottom with a hole in which to put the shopvac hose. Did I have a piece of lumber 26"x18"? Of course not. So I made one by splicing some other wood together with a 2"x4".  I also put some support blocks between the top of my platen and the wood base to keep it all from crushing when suction was applied. Then all the seams were sealed with caulk.

And no, I did not trim those exposed screws. They add to the challenge. 

See how many holes that is?! No way man. Not this guy.








For the next part I needed a heat source. $18 later I had my grocery store electric griddle. Almost all electric food devices use the same kind of heating element, and I think that the shape of the griddle will lead to a more even heat distribution over the plastic. Plus it already had mounting points and its own hardware. All I had to do was strip the plastic off of it and drill 4 holes into my pan.

My frame for this monstrosity started off as a pile of rusty old angle iron. The kind that has the slots in it for shelving. Sadly the slots did not quite line up with the top pan, so off to the trusty drill press.













Now this next part got tricky. I needed to get the 4 main legs attached to the platen and the heating element. What I ended up doing was stacking some lumber on table at the height that I wanted the platen to be. At this point all I wanted to do was  get this thing together without contracting tetanus.  The final assembly is held together with bolts, screws, 2x4's, and my hopes & dreams.

This part really sucked. I had to get Jackie to come out and help. At that point she had not seen any of the build process. Let's just say she was a bit underwhelmed and far less enthusiastic than I would have liked.












Now that my FrankenFormer was standing on its own, I needed to build an oven box around the heating element. Off to my local ACE for some aluminum flashing. I wanted a 5in box but the smallest width that they had was 6in. So I settled for an 8in roll that I would trim in half.

Not going to lie, I was terrified that my drill was going to catch the flashing and eviscerate me.  Luckily we had no instances of spinning metal or horrific injuries.



Once the box was assembled I sealed all the gaps in structure with foil tape.

Now to hold the plastic, you need to build two frames that you can sandwich the plastic between. I made mine out of window screen stock. It was boring to build so I didn't take any pictures. I also tried an elaborate magnet system to hold the frames up to the box, which failed.  So instead I use binder clips to hold it up. Not very high tech, but look at this thing. Its probably for the best. I got my first piece of plastic up there, turned the thing on, and waited......... It just was not getting hot enough. So I did what any sensible person in my position would do. I cut the thermometer prod off of the griddle power source. Now when it is on, it is ON. I may have just increased my chance of a shop fire by, like a lot, but its ok. I have a fire extinguisher somewhere in there. So its all cool. After all that messing around I got my first successful pull of what will soon be a new offering from KnowOne's Designs: a Monarch Henchmen mask from Venture Bros!


 I hope that this was entertaining and enlightening  More posts to come with 10x as much melty plastic and at least 2x as much new stuff!

Steam Punk Power Supply

So a while back I talked about building a prop for a local web series Mantecoza. Well it is finally finished, thanks in good part to my father, Kenneth Backer. He helped out tremendously on this build. This was a very interesting project for me, as I normally do replicas or work off of some one else's designs. We were basically given free reign on the design. I just had to incorporate the light fixture that was provided. We also had to finish it in 2 weeks, so ya know, decisions had to be made fast and there was no turning back. Jackie did a quick sketch of our basic idea for the "reactor", but because of the time constraints we ended up not being able to incorporate all of the complexity of her original work. Such is the fate of most concept art.

Once we had our basic ideas it was out to my dad's garage to see what we had laying around to build this thing with. Wood from an old desk: check. PVC pipe so old and heat stressed it was browning: check. Random fittings, valves and switches: check.

Now we were going to need more than that to make this thing look the part, so it was off the the $.99 Only store and thrift shops to find lights and other doodads. Pro Tip: $.99Only is the best place to get LEDs. $1 gets you a battery pack, round circuit board with 7 Leds, mechanical switch and a resistor!? Try pricing that out at Radio Shack.

Always look at the clearance items at Michaels.
The rivets were some scrap-booking sticker.

My dad found this gem at Savers. No idea what it was for, but we cut the guts our, ran 1 AA to the knob switch and attached it to the terminals on the gauge. It actually worked! we were able to control the needle with the knob. I added an on/off switch and some other dummy switches on the final piece.

With the casting from my hardware store silicone fuse mold we began to lay everything out.

We used several different spray paints. A bright hammered finish on the joints, a darker hammered finish on the back board, and a rustic bronze on the pipes them selves. I don't remember the brand or the exact name. Cut us some slack, we were in a hurry. I would also like to note that I hate wood. We used 3 cans of high build filler primer and 1 can of hammered paint on that back board and the grain still came through!

 Did I mention that this needed to light up? And be pretty? I didn't? Well it had to do both, be small, light weight and run on batteries. Well the $.99 Only store provided the light sources, but just plain white lite shinging out of this thing wouldent cut it. Luckly  Jackie had some leftover fantasy film from her Wasp wings. A little heat, armature wire and some glue and we had our prettiness! We also needed tubes coming out of the center of this "pixie warp core". My dad took some PVC fittings and used his oscillating sander to give them a curve that would fit the center of the fixture. With a small screw in the center for support we just 5 minute epoxied them right on

After that it was time for the final assembly and testing.

The thing worked like a champ!

 And one last shot on set.

I want to thank everyone over at Mantecoza for giving my dad and I a chance to work with them. It looks like the series is going to be great, and everyone reading this should shoot over and check out their website and facebook page!

Quora v3 and N01 program

Well our first con with a booth went great! We have pics up on our facebook of all our costumes, but i was really excited that we got to show off our latest Tron costumes. The v3 Quorra has to have been the most complex piece I have done to date, with countless solder joints and wiring. And of course, one of the two joints that came from the factory failed. But besides that set back it was great! Now i needed a costume to go with Jackies, so i decided instead of doing something from the movie, I would create my own Tron style character,N01. Simple El jacket and a helmet with sound responsive El in the grill. Both were a huge hit at the geek prom.