Armor up

Greetings. Today I’ll show you how I made this piece. It’s a harness/pauldron. A pauldron is the technical term for shoulder armor. Let’s dig in.

Let’s start with the center piece. I don’t remember what it’s called, but it’s got threads in the middle to screw in a metal pipe. I picked it up at my local hardware store and rusted it up. You may remember it from my post on how to rust things. Attached to it are some key rings and brass clips that I got on Amazon.

Next step was to attach some straps I had a faux ammo belt that seemed just right for this piece. I scuffed up the belt real good and rubbed some dirt on it. Then I cut off the end of it and attached it to the center piece with a rivet. You hammer them on and they don’t come off.

Here you can see with the buckle attached. This strap will wrap around to my back where I have a large ring that all three straps will clip on to.

Here’s a picture of the back, where you can see the 3 straps coming together.

With the harness done, it’s time to armor up. In the post-apocalypse, easily workable metal is hard to come by. One good source is license plates. I feel like maybe I should blur out the licence plate numbers for some reason but… that sounds like a lot of work. Shout out to my bud Tommy for hooking me up. First step was to cut them in half.

Since licence plates are made of aluminum, they don’t rust. Which will be great for the actual apocalypse, but it doesn’t look as cool for my costume. To make up for this I tried to beat them up real good. I took some sandpaper to them, and both ends of a hammer, I roughed them up and beat them into form. You will notice that one has a big gouge in it. I cut that bit out so that it would be able to bend enough to fit snug around my shoulder.

Then I had to attach them. I attached a piece of belt with a rivet to the harness, and then attached the metal plates to that. That way it still moves freely. The top most plate I attached directly to the harness and you can see here.