Charizard
| With the Covid pandemic winding down and it seemed safer to go to cons, I found myself with some free time in the summer of 2022. While I’m not into Anime, there was an upcoming Anime convention run by the same friends who do Tidewater Comicon and Hampton Comicon. I wanted to help out so I offered to make a Charizard. since this wouldn’t have looked right as a LEGO, I had to completely change the way I approached this project. | ||
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| I started off by finding a 3D model on Thingiverse.com. I used a 3D model viewer to rotate the model around and traced sections of the body. I tried to break up the body into parts. Each part was then broken down into “panels” that I used to make paper templates. When I got all the pieces to fit together, I flattened out the paper template and scaled it up before cutting the foam pieces. This is similar to the technique I used for making my LEGO Thanos project years ago. | ||
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| About a week before the Anime convention, my daughter was exposed to Covid through volunteer work she was doing at a local theater. At the time I found out, I was working on the wing for Charizard. With 1 week left to go I stopped working on the project because I knew based on incubation periods, there was chance I would be exposing attendees to Covid. Fortunately I did not get sick. After the initial disappointment, I decided I would try to show off Charizard at Hampton Comicon in October. A couple of weeks before the con, I finished the wings and was ready to build the PVC frame. It was at this time that I realized the wings were way too heavy and long to be supported by the frame. It was too late to redo the wings, get them sealed, painted, and finish the frame. Once again I canceled my plans and instead displayed an updated LEGO Black Panther statue at Hampton Comicon. The next convention that I put up displays was Tidewater Comicon. Plenty of time to redo the wings… Once the weather got warmer, it was time to start working again. The first week of March, I started to work on templates for another statue when we suddenly noticed a major water problem in our bathroom. I would spend the next 5 weeks in a hotel room unable to work on anything for Tidewater Comicon. I was starting to think this project was cursed. | ||
 |  | By mid-April I was allowed back into my house. It was another two weeks of unpacking, moving furniture, and trying to restore my house to normalcy. By the beginning of May, I was finally able to return to my garage. With less than 3 weeks before the convention, I had a costume to make, Charizard to finish, and the entire LEGO Mario statue to build. |
| I was able to rebuild the wings with 1/2″ diameter pipe, thinner foam, and shortened the wing length by several inches to make them lighter. Fortunately the frame was able to support the weight. Because the pipes were hidden in the body of Charizard, I was limited on where to connect the pipes and how to support the structure. | ||
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| Just hours before the convention, I was able to finish Charizard. There were some issues with how the head was mounted but enough velcro fixed it. The statue was all setup Saturday morning. By the time we returned to walk around the convention at 1pm, the wings had fallen off. It wasn’t until later I found out one of the most crucial screws was not put in place where the wing connects to the frame. This caused the wings to pop out when enough stress was put on them. Initially I wasn’t going to fix the problem because it could make the structure worse. Sunday morning I received a message about the hand falling off. I went to the convention center just before it opened to the public and was able to repair the hand and add the screw to secure the wings in place. While making repairs, I was told stories by convention staff of what attendees had done to the statue during the day. The most disturbing was trying to set a baby in the clawed hand and stepping away for a picture. The frame was not designed to support a baby. Fortunately the wings stayed up and there were no more problems on Sunday. | ||
