Boba Fett Jetpack - Secondary Phase

Another update on this beast of a commission, this thing is really turning out to one big piece of kit, half considering fitting it out with real thrusters to see if it'll get off the ground!

Anyway, hit a slight 'bump' with the tubing and ended up figuring it'd be easier to carve the half cylinders out of foam, that way the whole jetpack should be a bit lighter and hold together a lot better.

Here we've got the side panels near the centre cylinder added, there are going to sit flush to the main cylinder which I'm going to sand out of a thick wedge of foam.

I've now added the two wedges to the edge of the main body which I'm going to sand down to make the side thrusters. I've also decided to cut down on the number of layers of foam on the main 'body' which the tubes rest on. This is just because the backplate is considerably thicker than my measurements and cutting one layer of foam should balance this out nicely. 

I'll be taking some parts back to mine to sand them down so I can work on it over the weekend and fit them back in the workshop on Monday. The measuring and cutting is taking a fair bit of time but all is going to schedule and getting those two side thrusters done over the weekend should really get some momentum to the build coming together and the final shape should start coming together real soon.

Till next time, cheers for reading!

Boba Fett Jetpack - Primary Phase

I've been waiting to start this for a while, it's a commission I've been very excited about but not been able to work on. This may be due to some fingers which may have got caught in a bike at work, but that's besides the point, they are now fixed!


I've begun work on a stage prop for Boba Fett's jetpack from Star Wars. For this prop, it wasn't necessary for complete accuracy or detail, all that was required was the correct basic shape; the iconic rocket, the block shape and the three tubes. Just a warning to any die hard Star Wars or Boba fans out there, this is most definitely not a 1:1 prop, but an approximation for a stage routine, but I hope you enjoy it all the same.


Anyway, enough backstory, on with the show!

This is the product of a first session measuring, marking out, cutting and finalising measurements for the backpack. I've drawn out most of the design onto the foam pieces and I've now just got to cut them out, taking my time with this because mucking up the measuring is really not an option!

This is the 'baseplate' of the jetpack as I've dubbed it. This is going to be backed in a thin layer of wood as the two porous surfaces will bond a lot better than foam to plastic. The wood is then going to be glued directly onto the back armour plate, making it a lot easier to take off and create a nice support for it.

This is my evil master plan as far as the jetpack goes. Plenty of pages before this, filled with unreadable scribbling and rough sketches but this is the master page I've been reading from. All my measurements and shapes are on this, so I've been keeping any coffee away from it, any spillages and I am in every sense of the word, screwed!

This is being made for a burlesque dancer's stage show, so the key idea was usability and lightness, so it can easily be taken on and off and not break, hence the simplified design and the main material being foam. The dancer in question is Manchester based called Leon Noir and an absolutely great guy, if you're ever in need of a burlesque dancer for an event or show, I can heartily recommend him, he's been fantastic to work on this project.


This is just the first update for the jetpack, I'll be updating the blog with it's progress as I make it and I'll hopefully be doing this for all future projects so you guys can get an idea of how the props go together and what goes into making them.


Cheers for reading, till next time.

Warhammer 40,000 Mechanicum Tome

Happy new year! Hope you've all had a fantastic year, have a great year ahead and had a brilliant new year's eve, so here is something for reminiscing from a good year ago.

This is a commission of sorts I made a while back, the character it was for was a tech-priest from Mars from the Warhammer universe. This pretty much made the idea for this project for it to be as imposing and huge as possible as when you're mostly robotic weight isn't an issue.

His idea was a huge tome, something he could connect to his belt and carry around with him to look nice and menacing with a weathered look. With this info, I cracked on and as a huge fan of the Warhammer fiction, I'd got a few ideas floating around already.

I decided to go for a fairly simplistic design for the front thanks to the Adepts at the Mechanicum basically being efficient robot men/things. I used a large sprocket from a bike cassette to stand as the cog emblem of the Mechanicum and riveted it to the leather bound ring binder folder I used as a base.

I lined the inside with velvet, held in place by both the hand stitching that runs around the border, and by the rivets. I decided to go with a rich red to match the decadence that seems to be a running theme in the 'grim far future' and to match the red planet!

To make it possible for him to lace the pages up (As he was providing his own) I laced some leather thonging up the spine to make it easy to put the pages in pretty quickly.

The corners of the leather cover weren't that pleasant, so to cover them up and provide a sort of finished feel to the tome, I added some leather corner pieces to add some detail.

To make sure it could be attached to his costume, I screwed on some large chains to provide that menacing look he was going for. These attach to another loop of chain with a padlock to secure it to anything like a belt or backpack.

To secure the whole thing, I added a large hasp onto the side, secured by a large padlock. This helped put some details onto the side as well as adding a nice solid look to the whole design.

Here you can see how it attaches to a belt, not an insubstantial prop I tell you, a thick belt definitely needed, but it fits the brief of 'solid' pretty well. I think it was someone on a steampunk forum who commented on it being 'Marley's chains', fits pretty well if I'm honest!

Lovely prop to make, lots of measuring into working out the size of leather to cut but the velvet came out really nicely in the end. Unfortunately, the guy I was making it for (a friend of mine) was unable to go to the event he was planning to use it for so I've still got it at home.

It's held up pretty well, only problem is that the paint has come off on the chains and scraped on the leather a bit, I'll get round to sealing the chain after a respray and get the paint off with some acetone or paint remover at some point in the future.

Until next time, cheers for reading.