Daft Punk Glove Plates

The glove plates were a nice break from the monotonous filling and sanding of the helmets. I started these by borrowing a technique from a great prop maker by the name of Volpin and created a vector image template for the glove plates. 

I labelled each finger so that I could number each piece without getting muddled up so T for thumbs, I for index etc. I cut out each of the little plate templates and kept em nice and safe in a plastic wallet so they wouldn't go walk about like most things I need seem to do :

All I had to do was trace out the pieces onto some styrene and cut them out with my Dremel and a quick hand sand with some 240 grit.

To get the curve I needed I temporarily tacked the glove plates to a piece of PVC pipe I cut in half to use as a form. They were heated up using a heat gun and when soft enough I pressed the plates to the pipe to give them the same contour and then left them to cool.

I made one full set of finger plates because they are the same on both hands and then made both hand plates by heating and curving the plates bit by bit and kept testing the fit on my hand.

To make the hollow plates into solid bucks for the Vacu-former I filled the hand plates with cheapo wall filler that I had laying around.

The finger plates were glued to more pieces of PVC pipe and all the pieces were then ready for forming.

The first pull:

Being hollow, the glove pieces had no surface area to allow me to glue them to a pair of gloves, the next step I took was to fill in the empty space under each piece, which at first sounds extremely time consuming but was a quick fix, using yet another piece of pipe I pushed a blob of filler into the back side of the pieces and slid the pipe through to push the filler into the pieces and to keep the curvature underneath.

For the hand plates I first cut out the knuckle indents so that the piece fit comfortably on my hand, I then put on a rubber glove slapped a lump of filler into the plate and pushed it down on the top of my hand to get the exact shape I needed 

The rest of the plates were cut out and sanded to shape using a dremel with a sanding drum attachment.

All finished and ready for paint !

Each piece was given 6 thin layers of paint and left to dry 24 hours before being attached to a pair of black opera gloves. The plates were atttached using a rubber cement that I think is meant for car windows so they wont be budging any time soon! The adhesive was black so although I was careful attaching the plates, any slight excess of adhesive blended into the gloves.