"Predator" Shoulder Cannon

Alright - good news and bad news. Bad news is that Quadcopters cannot fly very well through trees, but the good news is that the only casualty was a motor having its insulation wire scraped off. Nothing tragic, but the motor needs replacing - so with its replacement speeding its way to the UK, it's time for another project.

EL-Wire is a wonderful thing

In the past, I have attended multiple "themed" nights at various venues (Mainly Bierkeller but who cares honestly?) and the main problem I have found is putting together an outfit a week or 2 before the event is a little too short notice - so I am putting one together now while I have time and motivation to do so. Previously I have chosen to go as Isaac Clarke from Dead Space, look I even have some pictures of my previous efforts... The first picture was my first attempt, complete with EL-Wire to make it glow! The one below was my second effort, and we can agree a much more satisfying result, but still a little meh. So - time for a new outfit, but I am going for a totally different franchise this time round: Predator!

 So, with this new idea I needed to work out how I was going to approach this new outfit. Initially, it sounded like a HUGE project, even compared to a Quadcopter. So to make life easier for me, I decided to split the project and break it down into easier "Bite-size" chunks to work on. With that in mind, I managed to compress the entire project into the following components:

• Helmet
• Shoulder Cannon
• Gauntlets (Blades)
• Wrist Computer
• Armour

By tackling these individual components, I would be able to build the outfit piece-by-piece when I had spare time. So the first thing to build was....The Shoulder Cannon.

Base Shoulder Mount ready for the turret to be fitted

Throwing a design quickly together, I managed to laser cut some shapes out of 3mm MDF, and to my amazement it actually worked first-time round, so I expanded on it to give myself a flat platform to work with for the cannon. Once that was built, I managed to get a servo mount cut that allowed the servo to fit snugly in, yet not be glued down for reuse in the future. After that, I managed to salvage some foam from the old armour from last year (See the previous picture) and make it into padding for the shoulder mount. All that remains on it is to have the cannon itself built, it needs plating to be added and a strap or two to be fitted so that it doesn't fall off (Right now because all the weight is shifted to the right it tends to sit on the shoulder but feels like it wants to base jump off me to the ground). So seeing as I'm away for the next couple of weeks I figured I would leave you all some pictures of the prototype so far, and I will provide completed pictures once it is finished. So check back in a week or 2 to see the finished result.

As demonstrated by my willing "Model"