Projects: Doctor Octopus Costume

I wanted to do another somewhat involved costume after missing last year. Initially I thought nightcrawler would be fun but I don't have black hair and wearing blue body paint isn't much fun with clothes on. Thankfully Spiderman 2 had just come out so Doc Ock was born.



Constructing the arms out of thousands of little articulated disks, while tempting, was going to take way too long for a costume. So instead I used some flexible downspout tubing - that stuff you see people use to pipe water away from their houses. I thought about having the arms just hold their shape with spray foam but since the pipe tended to want to snap back into place I figured one good whack during a party would break the foam inside and send the arms flailing. Heavy guage copper grounding wire to the rescue. I think I used 6 or 4 guage, I can't remember, it was whatever was available at Home Depot.

The little adapters to connect that flexible tubing to rectangular downspouts worked well for giving me something squarish to bolt to the rest of the costume. And since I'm an EE and know the pains that conduit can save, I ran some tubing through the arms to make pulling wires and whatnot a whole lot easier.



So on to the arms. This was a lot of trial and error, but I ran the grounding wire through the tubes, clipped the ends and bent them at an angle so they'd be held in place in the downspout tube and then just started bending. I had a friend help me here, I'd bend the arms, hold it against my back and ask how it looked from the front. Too close? going to gouge someone's eye out? It took about a half hour to get them mostly right.

Once I was happy with that I filled the tubes with "Great Stuf" expanding foam adhesive. It hardens pretty stiff, sticks to the plastic tubing, and isn't quite as hard to work with as whatever that green crap I used in the Duff cans was. While it dried I had to prop up the "conduit" tubing so it came out of the general center of the arms. It had a tendency to want to move to the side.



Painting. I needed the ridges of the tubing to be silver and the valleys to be black so it would look like a bunch of metal disks stacked on top of each other. I tried masking out the ridges with rubber bands or tape but it never seemed to work and was taking too long so I elected to just paint it all silver then paint it again by hand with black.

Krylon metalic spraypaint worked pretty well for the arms. It looked better than just grey but did tend to pool and drip more than I would have expected from spray paint. A few coats and we're on to detail work.



This ended up not being too bad. Since it was lots of detail work I could break it up over a few nights for about an hour a shot. Having someone there to talk with while doing this helps a ton.

Starting off I was very careful about not slopping any of the paint up too high on the edges of the silver rings, but towards the end I realized that no one is going to see it in a party, and if they do they're not going to care. And if they care they're not likely to be someone I want to know or associate with.

Yes, those are magic cards.

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