2x3dent replied to your post “*thinks about next week’s strider reunion that ive waited years for*”
according to the horse calendar, it's going to be the week after next :/
im aware of that and it makes me sad
but for the sake of this shitty update post, imo “week” flows better than “less than 2 weeks” or “10 days” or “week after the next” etc.
I've gotten a few questions about how I made my trident, so here's a collection of my progress photos with a little explanation of how I did things.
I would like to add that I ended up rushing a LOT stuff at the end of the build and there are things I'm really not happy with (sanding, gap filling, paint job, etc.), so I'm not going to be including a lot of material on the finishing of the trident.
I first started out researching tridents and nautical-themed weapons to get some ideas for some motifs I wanted to use in my design. I wanted the design elements to remind people of water or the sea without having sea animal textures or designs on it. Here are a couple reference images I drew influence from.
I tried to bring all the elements I wanted together and sketched up a design.
In non-trident-head land, I did some poking around at a few local hardware stores and decided to go with a 3/4" PVC pipe for the handle. I was able to find some internal couplers that allowed me to fit two pieces of PVC pipe together. The couplers I used are marketed to join flexible vinyl tubing together, so in order to fit them into the rigid PVC pipes I had to grind most of the ridges off with a dremel tool. You can see how I assembled the hardware together into something that could break down for transport here.
To make the pink stripe that goes around the trident (which I ended up calling "the noodle"), I bought some flexible vinyl tubing and cut about 10 feet of it in half with a craft knife. I attempted to freehand it at first but ended up cutting myself and not getting very consistent results, so my dad helped me make a holding jig for the tubing that allowed me to make a more even cut. I would eventually cast some slow-curing epoxy resin in my half-tube.
The problem with tubing is that it's sold coiled up and wants to stay coiled up, and I needed it to be straight to act as a good mold. I attached binder clips to the ends and tied them to various locations in my apartment to stretch the tubing out. I also used a hair dryer to heat up areas of the tubing while giving them a gentle tug, and it seemed to help.
Next the tubing was hot glued to some cheap plastic panels I bought at the hardware store. I think they were originally marketed as drip catchers for painters or something. I blocked the ends with some monster clay and sprayed the tubing with UMR, an aerosol mold release. Next was mixing up some Envirotex Lite, an epoxy resin that reaches maximum hardness over the course of a few days. I carefully poured it into the mold and wiped up any drips with paper towels.
After 24 hours, the resin noodle was solid enough to demold but still very flexible. I peeled it out of the mold and wrapped it around my PVC pipe, securing it with rubber bands and allowing it to cure the rest of the way. (In retrospect, I wish I had demolded and gotten it on the pipe a bit sooner than 24 hours. The noodle tries to straighten itself out if it's not held down with rubber bands or another physical restraint, which made it annoying when it popped off the hot glue I used to attach it after the paint job.)
Back to trident-head land: I did some calculations on how large I wanted the trident heads to be relative to my body, then made a quick newspaper mockup that allowed me to rough out both the size and shape that I wanted. I got a piece of old foamboard, cut it to a convenient size, then taped the newspaper template on it with a layer of plastic wrap over that. I knew the foam board wasn't completely flat anymore, so I planned to remove the almost-done sculpt from it before doing the finishing touches on a completely flat surface. (That surface ended up being my desk, but the kitchen counter was also a strong candidate.)
After that it was a sculpting time. I used Monster Clay for the sculpt, which I went into some depth on the properties of and tips on working with in this post. It was basically a lot of fussing and trying to keep things symmetrical. Here are some progress shots that were taken as the sculpt was coming together.
I peeled the nearly finished sculpt off of the foamboard and did some final sculpting touches on my desk. I knew I was going to be pouring silicone molding material directly onto the whole setup, so I used some extra clay to form a barrier around the sculpt.
Silicone time! Again, I go into more details about this stuff in my ear fin post, but the cliffnotes version is that I used Moldstar 16 FAST.
Once the silicone had cured, I created a rigid backing for the mold by mixing up some plaster and globbing it on top of the silicone. (In retrospect, I wish I had added registration keys to the silicone prior to doing this.) Once it had harded, I peeled the clay barrier away, lifted up the plaster and the silicone, and peeled the sculpt out of the mold. A little trimming with some scissors and I had a nice mold for 1/2 of a trident head.
To cast the trident heads, I used Amazing Casting Resin. It starts out clear and cures to an opaque white in about 20 minutes. Each trident half cost me about a fourth of a bottle. Here are a couple things I learned while using it:
Large pools of resin will cure more quickly than thin areas. The curing reaction is exothermic (heat generating) and heat also speeds up the rate of curing, so you'll start to see white globs of cured resin form in the thickest parts of your mold first. It's pretty neat to watch.
It comes with three little 30 mL measuring cups for you to mix the resin with. You might go, "aww, how cute" and be tempted to use larger containers for mixing. It can be done, but be warned that a mixture larger than 60 mL will heat up really quickly, even to the point of possibly boiling your resin while it cures. If you mix large quantities, mix really fast and pour into your mold immediately to minimize heat production.
It is possible to not mix thoroughly enough, which will create areas that won't ever fully cure.
Fully cured resin develops a little bit of a slimy residue over it, which makes adhering new resin to old resin difficult. If you're planning on casting a solid piece in stages, try to do it as quickly as possible.
The resin cured in about 20 minutes like the package promised, but it didn't reach its full hardness for about an hour. So I'd cast half of a trident head, wait 20 minutes, demold the first half, cast the second half, and slap the first half on top after about 15 minutes. The first half was still fresh enough to adhere to the newly curing resin, and also still flexible enough that I could adjust the position of my tines to make things as symmetrical as possible.
I used a hobby knife to trim the flash off my trident heads and clean off the edges, and ended up with something like this:
To attach the trident heads to the PVC pipe, I had to hollow out the inside of the trident heads so that the pipe could rest inside. Most of this was taken care of by my mold design - I had intentionally left a semi-circular silicone plug and a half-piece of PVC pipe in the mold while I poured the resin. The silicone plug was removed after the resin had hardened, and the half-pipe was broken away from the casts with a little bit of muscle. I still had to do some touch-ups with a dremel tool to get the last little bits that were preventing the pipe from seating inside the trident head.
(One of my trident heads only has about half an inch of pipe on the inside, which makes it a little wobbly. If you've noticed my trident heads not sitting perfectly straight in photos, this is why. I've been meaning to go back and drill more out of that trident head so the pipe will go farther in.)
Last, I drilled two holes in the interior of the trident heads and ran a copper wire between them. They held fine during Katsucon without any glue, but I've been meaning to add some hot glue or something to secure them a little better. The bungee cords hook onto the wire and pull the whole thing together.
This is about where I started really rushing to get the trident done in time for Katsu, so I'm not very proud of the finishing on it. I used spray paint to color it - a red undercoat with gold on top - and a few dots of hot glue to secure the noodle to the PVC pipe. Honestly, I'd like to strip all the paint off and do it over again.
(Pro tip: if you're worried that people might jump to conclusions about you, don't spray paint "red pitchforks" in your apartment's parking lot at night.)
Here's what the joint between the two halves looked like. I'd like to go back and fill the gap there.
And here's the length of the pipe pieces relative to the bungee cords.
Aaaaand that's about it! The trident breaks down into a total of four pieces for transport, and it looks pretty decent in pictures that aren't close up.
