*** If you enjoyed this instructable, please consider voting for me in the contests it is entered in! Thanks for reading! ***
Putting complex bends and curves in EVA Foam armor can be tricky, since the foam is very elastic and flexible. Parts don't always like to hold their shapes, and the prevalent method (from my experience reading costume forums like therpf) for shaping foam armor parts is to use a heat gun. I didn't have a heat gun, so I decided to apply something I discovered when I was making my Iron Man Mark 3: paperclips are surprisingly good at holding form and shape.
My method basically involves cutting lines into the inside of an armor piece, lining the cut with a paperclip and then sealing it back up with hot glue. The best part about this method is that you don't have to go out and buy a heat gun if you don't have one. Additionally, it is really easy to re-shape if you so desire, and the paperclips actually do strengthen and stiffen the parts.
The materials you will need:
1) Foam armor part (pepakura is the most popular method for making foam armor)
2) Paper clips (Use large ones because they are thicker and sturdier)
3) Hot Glue gun
4) Pliers (Needlenose, and optionally diagonal cutters as well)
5) X-acto knife
In this instructable, I will show a fairly simple method to form, shape and strengthen foam armor, using an Iron Man helmet made from EVA foam floor mats.
CAUTION: Be careful when placing cut paperclip bits as these are sharp and can easily penetrate skin. I have placed this warning again at the end of the Instructable, so please follow safety precautions and exercise good judgement while building!
View the original article here
When assembling a circuit it is pretty common to hook up a resistor or other component to span a distance on your board. This is true with PCB builds, but especially with perfboards. In order to get a clean, well built looking final product it is important to size the leads for these resistors so that they fit flush with the board and do not have excess lead slack. This can a tricky to do by hand and can easily lead to kinked up leads. Instead you can make one of the simple lean bending tools and make the bends perfect every time!
Get a piece of scrap perfboard, stripboard, or whatever. All that matters is that the board be drilled with the normal 0.1" spaced holes. Take a marker and put a dot on the holes you plan to use. I suggest a slope of 1/3 as I have shown here. In other words, pick the first place you want to measure a resistor, probably 4 or 5 holes, then move over three and up one. Make a mark on that spot and kept moving over 3 and up 1, marking holes, until you reach the longest bend you will ever want to make. Once you have the desired holes marked, connect them with a line.