Phillip Burgess Demon Wings...help needed

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makomikey
 
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Phillip Burgess Demon Wings...help needed

Post by makomikey »

Hey there, Interested in making a pair of these awesome wings and was curious if anyone had tried to make em or if there was a tutorial out there somewhere (other then the wire helmet animals) I'm pretty new to el wire and i'm not really sure how much el wire I should purchase.

cheers!

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pburgess
 
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Re: Phillip Burgess Demon Wings...help needed

Post by pburgess »

The animal masks are about as relevant as we've got in the Adafruit Learning System, in terms of wire-supported EL structures. The basic EL Wire tutorial offers some general pointers. You might turn up some other wire-supported designs on Instructables and such.

A few extra tidbits about the wings, in case it's helpful:

The wire armature was made from stuff used for tensioning chain link fences (along the top and bottom). In hindsight, probably overkill (it's a little heavy and incredibly tough to bend), but I needed to get something done in time for Maker Faire and didn't have forever to search for The One True Perfect Armature Wire for the project. On the plus side, it's held up to a lot of bumping and knocking around and traveling. The rough ends of the wire were glopped up with a lot of JB Weld.

Amount of EL wire: the wings use four 2.5 meter (8.2 feet) sections (two red, two orange) with connectors pre-attached. In order to get the size and wire lengths right, I drew one wing in Adobe Illustrator CC first. There's a well-hidden feature (Document Info->Objects) that will tell you the length of a path...so I just needed to tweak and scale the design until the longest path (the orange 'bone' outline) was about 2.5 meters long (the red outline is about a foot shorter...I clipped off the excess from the end of the EL wire and covered the tip with clear heat-shrink). I printed this out (tiled across several pages), glued it all down to a big piece of cardboard, then used that as a template for bending the armature wire.

The connector ends of the EL segments are all up near the shoulders, so I could just use a 4-way splitter and didn't need to do any tricky soldering directly to the EL wire. So, about 10 meters of EL wire altogether. I could've used two of our 12V inverters (e.g. one each for left and right wing), but instead opted for a single large 12V inverter from coolneon.com (their 'Standard Fish Driver').

Since I'd also be driving amplified audio and some other electronics in addition to the EL wire, the battery was pretty huge...originally an old-school camcorder battery, the 12V lead-acid type. Heavy, but relatively cheap and I already had a charger. Later I swapped this out for a lighter 3-cell LiPoly battery. Normally I recommend against using RC batteries in wearable projects (they have zero protection and may catch fire if punctured or short-circuited)...that's a matter of personal risk assessment and safety...I always have a "handler" who knows what to watch for; your situation might be different.

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makomikey
 
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Re: Phillip Burgess Demon Wings...help needed

Post by makomikey »

Wow!, thanks for the awesome pointers I really appreciate it. I'm hoping to do this without any cutting of the wire ...so we'll see how that goes. Thanks again!

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makomikey
 
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Re: Phillip Burgess Demon Wings...help needed

Post by makomikey »

oh! I forgot to ask what the back base is made of and how you secured the wire wings to it.
cheers

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pburgess
 
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Re: Phillip Burgess Demon Wings...help needed

Post by pburgess »

Sintra (aka foamed PVC), a type of thermoplastic, but various anythings could be used, whatever you have access to and can cut & form. The wings are held on with stubby 1/4" bolts & nuts. Everything was sprayed black afterward.

Bending & cutting that armature wire was a major chore.

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pburgess
 
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Re: Phillip Burgess Demon Wings...help needed

Post by pburgess »

Some quick crappy snapshots of the wing assembly...

Sections of the heavy-gauge wire were joined by wrapping in much thinner floral wire, then glopping on lots of JB Weld. Not proud of this.
wing1.jpg
wing1.jpg (60.88 KiB) Viewed 336 times
At the base, wire was bent into a loop so a bolt could fit through. Also, washer between wing wire and base, otherwise it'd wear through in no time. The bolt faces 'out,' pointed away from the wearer.
wing2.jpg
wing2.jpg (36.57 KiB) Viewed 336 times
Wearer side of the bolt, under a layer of craft foam. Again, washer:
wing3.jpg
wing3.jpg (41.3 KiB) Viewed 336 times

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makomikey
 
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Re: Phillip Burgess Demon Wings...help needed

Post by makomikey »

oh sweet!!!! thanks. Just got the el wire last weekend. going to get the armature wire this weekend. Pretty excited to see how this is gonna turn out. Those pics are going to be extremely helpful Phillip! Thanks again

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