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The last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a little project for my friend Matt, aka Comic Book Guy. For Halloween this year he is going as a 40s/50s era Captain America. In order to make it work, he needed to have a shield.

Thats where I stepped in. We talked about how we could make the shield, we considered wood, but it would have been far too complex to make, and make well. Plus, it probably wouldn’t stand up to a night of drunken revelry. Instead, the medium chosen was styrofoam and fiberglass. I had done fiberglassing once before, with my Dad, on a motorcycle fairing…so I figured a shield shouldn’t be too tough, right?

So I started off with a virtual trip to Fibreglast, a supplier of fiberglassing materials. I picked up a 5 yard bolt of 7oz fiberglass fabric, a quart of Epoxy Resin, and a small jar of hardener. For those not familiar with fiberglassing its pretty simple process. You start with a form or mold, in my case styrofoam and shape it how you want it. Then you mix up the Epoxy Resin and Hardener, lay on a layer of the fabric, and ‘wet’ it with the mixture. Then let it cure. Voila, a fiberglassed object.

Of course, while the process is simple, the techniques can be troublesome to master effectively. But lets get to the pictures.

Before I did anything I created a smaller version of the shield, the white one you see here. I really wanted to make sure that I could sculpt the shield the way I wanted to before I started on the full size version.

I really used simple tools to do this. You’ll notice I haver the styrofoam clamped down with wood blocks (so I didn’t have clamp shaped dents in my final mold) and used a could of different shaped wood rasps and a sanding block. Those three tools there did all of my rough shaping.

When I was about at this point I decided I wanted to fiberglass the model to see what pitfalls I was getting myself into. It turns out this edge is just too thick and I needed to taper the edge completely. Which I did do.

Unfortunately I was stupid and didn’t take any pictures while I was actually fiberglassing, but it went like this. First I would mix up my resin and hardening agent…I chose a hardener with a 20 minute pot-life. That means that from the time that it is all mixed together I’ve got about 20 minutes to work with it.

I would start by applying a thin layer of the mixture directly to the styrofoam and then lay the cloth over the top. Then I’d pour some of the mixture on the top of the fabric and spread it into the fabric with a plastic scraper. Once the entire top was ‘wet’ with the resin mixture I let it sit for about a day to harden up.

When I did the back side I had some additional hurdles to overcome. Namely, how the hell am I going to attach the handles? My first thought was to sink the bolts into the styrofoam and lay the fabric over the top. Then push the fabric around the bolts and fiberglass it up. That didn’t end up working too well…so I had to bust out the Dremel and cut away the areas of fiberglass that the bolts were in. Then I made slits in the fiberglass and tried again. This worked ok, but not perfect.

That is one spot in the process I think I could do much better with next time. Anyway, I got the handles attached and gave it to Matt on Saturday. He’s since bought some plaster-of-paris (not sure if I said that right) and is going to smooth it over the shield and sand it smooth and paint it up. Once he has some pictures of that I’ll post them as well.

As it is, here are a few shots of the finished shield at this point.

For the full photo gallery check out the Picasa gallery.