Hello. I'm Odin, host of Odin Makes and sharer
of the secrets of castle Foamskull. Secret powers were revealed to me when it held aloft
my magic sword and said "By the power of Foamskull." Okay, maybe not.
But I did make the sort of Eternia a couple of years ago and now that the new shows coming out on Netflix, I think it's time I do something
else. I'm gonna make Skeletor's Havoc Staff from
The Masters of the Universe.
So I want to make a staff. For the most part,
it's gonna be pretty straight forward. It's gonna be a long stick. But what goes on top
of the staff is a ram's skull. This is just Skeletor's thing. That's what he's got. Now, there's gonna be a couple different
ways I could make one of those. I'm gonna make it out of foam, that part's obvious.
I can start with Pepakura file, I could start with a 3D printing type of file and work it backwards. Evil Ted
has got some really good patterns from making ram's horns. But what I think I want to do
is for once go to the source. Now while the horns on this particular real
skull isn't the right shape. I do have horns that will be the right shape. So I'm going
to mix and match parts from some real skulls and pull the pattern and make
myself the top of Skeletor's staff.
Now this surprised me but I can remove the
horn from the skull. And to create my pattern, I'm gonna first
wrap the skull in aluminum foil. Now I'm being very careful here because I
can easily break some of the more delicate parts of the skull. Now I didn't expect this to be super detailed,
I just need a really good shape. I cover just one side with duct tape. And I try to keep the tape to only one or
two layers. I don't want to really thick layer of tape. And there are parts of the skull that are
open or that pass under themselves, which makes it really tricky to figure out exactly
how to tape it.
And then I can start to draw my seam lines.
Now these are not just where I plan to cut the pattern itself, but where I'm going to
be gluing the foam parts back together. This isn't going to work. Now this always involves a lot of guessing
and some experience, but I'm looking for obvious lines and my goal is to get pieces that can
be easily flattened out. Then I make registration lines and mark which
of the seams go back together. A to A, B to B. Like that.
I use this foil and duct tape technique a
lot. But this project is a bit more involved than expected. You ever think, oh this is gonna be great,
I'll just do this thing? And then you get into it and it's like oh I'm over my head. Well I may not be over
my head, but this is certainly the most complicated thing I've tried to draw up and I'm hoping
I can get it to work the first time. Removing the pattern without harming the skull
wasn't too difficult.
It did take some time to work it out from under the different parts
of the skull. I ended up with a lot more pieces than I had
expected. All of these little pattern parts make up just one side of the skull. Now I can do the large curled ram's horn And this is done in the exact same way but
I only need to make three pattern pieces for the horn, not 12. It's always fun to see exactly how the pattern
looks when it's laid out flat on the table. What I want to do next is actually directly
scan these into the computer and trace them with like Inkscape. Typically what I would do is I would trace
these on the cardboard and just keep using the cardboard pattern because I knew that
it was exactly the scale I wanted.
In this particular case, I'm happy with the size of the skull. I'm not going to change
the size of the skull, but the horns are too big. I'm gonna need to reduce the size of
the horns to better match the skull and that's gonna be a lot easier to do with the computer. I reduced the bighorns to 60% of the original size. Now this should be a great fit for the
staff. And I have two pages of little parts so I
can recreate the skull. I use a pattern notcher to clip out the registration
lines of all of the paper patterns. That makes them very easy to market the foam when I traced
the patterns. And I can flip all the pattern pieces over
and trace them again and that'll make a left side and the right side from one paper pattern.
I'm going to glue together the big horns first.
I fold the foam parts to start a curve in each piece and glue the seams together with
contact cement. With these curled horns, It's very important
to follow the registration lines, because I can easily change the curl and direction of
the horns. And all these tiny skull fragments, They're
intimidating. So I'm going to start with a face because
it's more important, it has fewer seams. I get the horn bass and the start of the eye
socket and before too long I have the right side of the face, which makes a left side easy
to put together.
Now the ram skull that Skeletor has is much wider than the one that
I've got. So I cut a wedge piece to fit between the haves and widen the skull between the
horns by 2". Now that I have changed the shape of the skull.
The pattern pieces for the back are not going to fit correctly. But a PVC coupler will fit and that'll make
it an easy way to attach it to the top of the staff. So I superglued the PVC coupler in place. Then I glued together most of the back of
the skull plates. But I do it in the wrong order. I just figure out a new way that they
look good, which will let me fill out the back of the
skull in a satisfying way. See it's a skull from Eternia, a not from Earth. So being
a little alien is fine. The jawbone is very simple. It's what it should
look like anyway, that's just too flat halves that joined together at the chin.
I wasn't super happy with the shapes of the
eye sockets. So I cut a short piece of PVC and shoved it in from behind and that made
the orbit round again. Which I did like. So I cut another one for
the left eye. Now I'm going to grind down the edges in a moment. So it wont look like
PVC pipe anymore. I like to rounder eyes better. I like the idea
of shoving PVC pipe inside. I think I'll superglue it just so the eye
sockets are round. Uh I'm gonna, next up, I'm going to start taking a Dremel to this and
shaping it to be, have a little more skull detail. I mean, it's skull like now, honestly,
I could probably just paint this purple and be fine, but I want to put a little
more skull detail into it. And now to start sanding, shaping, and sculpting.
First I'm gonna do the horns.
I round the edges over and eliminate the three seams. Then I start carving rings around, the horn
lines are cut at an angle so it kind of looks like the rings are growing into each other. And I make the rings larger at the base and
much smaller at the tips. And to be honest, I'm really happy that I use six millimeter
HD Foam for all of the skull because I can make some really deep cuts and it's still gonna hold
together.
As a final detail, I lightly etched tiny lines
onto each ring, just a little more texture or some grain lines to the horns. Working on the skull is just doing more of
the same. I start by cleaning up the seams and then I used an assortment of different
bits to get better definition on the cheekbones, smooth out the transition of the foam to the
PVC in the eye sockets. Now, this is the most important thing for me to do because I really
didn't like the Halloween toy look that the PVC pipe had. next. I carved that, he tells into the teeth. Goat teeth are kind of scary looking or at
least the ones on the sun bleached skull that I have here with me. They look like some real
zombie looking teeth. I kept changing the bits between large and
small stones, ones with corners and others without, it was an easier way to keep the
carving lines different.
And I spent a couple of hours or maybe an
afternoon working on the skull detail. This is the point where I love to say that this
video is sponsored by audio books because I was seriously listening to one when the cameras weren't
turned on. But this video, it's not sponsored. Okay, there's a few more little things I want
to do to this. I still need to put the sutures on, which are those squiggly lines that go
between the plates of the skull and um, I'm gonna end up sealing in the orbits and probably the nasal
cavity with some black foam. So when it comes time to paint it and I don't have to worry
about getting everything in their black. Um but yeah, that's kind of cool. It's really cool. I practice on some scrap foam to see if I
could get a good skull structure line carved My best bit that I have for.
This is the number
125 high speed cutter. But the rotation of the tool makes it really hard to keep the
squiggly lines organic. And I was ready to go ahead and carve them
in any way. So I marked my lines on my skull and started one just across the back of the
head. I haven't done this very long. I did some
tests, I did a little bit on the back of the skull and I'm pretty sure that I'm gonna be
happier if I don't put sutures in.
I think this is another one of
those cases where artistic and clean is gonna win over anatomical. So I'm gonna skip this
step and move on to the mandible. This isn't gonna work out. I'm gonna be real upset
with the way that looks. And more carving on the jawbone or the mandible. Now there's only two real goals with this
part that's to make sure the back connects to the cheekbones in a mostly realistic way and to create a set of lower teeth.
The skull
I have doesn't have front teeth and neither does skeleton staff, which is good because
that's less teeth to make. I thought I'd take me about an hour. This
took me almost two, but I added some pieces and increase the teeth
and got, I'm actually really happy with how this turned out. I don't think I'm gonna go
doing a whole lot more skulls in the future, but…
I think I'm gonna paint them all first. I'll
paint them all separate first and then I want to do this. And I think what I want to do
is I want to do this now. I think I want to glue the horns on. I use contact cement to stick the roughly
triangular horn base to the round horn nub that's on the back of the skull. Thankfully it's all foam so I can stretch
and move the parts for a better fit. Now. I can try the skull and the staff. Yeah, it's flat. I keep thinking it
needs to be pitched. But no, no, no, but straight up and down because that's, that's the way
it is. What do I want to do? I'm so ready to be done with this
skull. Um I'm gonna need to plug the holes. I gotta plug the holes. I gotta plug the orbits
and I gotta plug the sinuses. I cut circles from some two millimeter black craft foam using some cheap Amazon leather
working tools. Then I can press them or force them into the
PVC eye sockets, creating a back to the sockets.
Yeah, that'll help a lot. And I cut another oddly shaped piece for the
sinus plug. It's just wedged in there. Now I can't see into the pipe and that's all
I really needed to do to make sure I couldn't see into the pipe. I super glue all the edges in the black craft
foam and then sand them flush so they look less like stacks of foam. This is the majority of the build for this
entire build. That sounds funny, but a good portion of the staff is just a stick.
Uh,
the only other piece that I want to make is the, there's a set of rings that that happens
just below the head. There's a set of rings on the staff. I could make those out of a
piece of like an accordion plunger You have those all plastic plungers that,
that have a bit of an extra compression to them. It's a villain like a Dalek.
They need a plunger
for the main weapon, right? It works with Daleks. I'm gonna make might out of foam anyway. I had measured and printed a set of truncated
cone patterns just for these parts. Each level needs its own pattern because the
sizes keep changing. And I cut them all from four millimeter What
the Foam. And all I need to do is glue the two flat sides together. And I get a truncated cone or basically it's
just a cone with the top cut off. This is the same basic pattern that paper
cups are made from. And after a bit I have a set of eight pieces
that can make four rings on the staff. All these pieces need to glue together now,
but I can't just well, I don't want to just glue them together as they are because I'm not gonna get a good
edge. End up with this extra step. That that's not what I want. I
want these to come to a very sharp edge because that's kind of what they're supposed to be.
So what I need to do now is break out my rotary tool and sand all the edges
on the uh bottoms and the tops of almost all of these to be flat.
I sand all the wider openings flat so they
can glued to each other. Then I sand all the smaller openings to have a flat inner edge,
my rotary tools. Getting quite a workout this week. And so is the filter in my shop vac. Sanding the way I did made the openings larger.
It no longer fits the PVC pipe I'm going to use for the staff. My easy fixes. Just glue some four millimeter
HD Foam inside the edge, which not only gave me a snug fit on the pipe,
but gave me an idea on how to glue the rest of the parts together.
Oh, I skipped a step. I had also used contact
cement to glue the large diameters together to make them into disks. Then I lined all the seams up and used thinner
superglue to seal all the parts and glue them together. With all due respect to Skeletor or Beast
Man or whoever Skeletor's weapons designer is. I don't know why this particular shape, which it's a Kong toy for your dog or it's part of
one of those accordion plungers. Right. This is what's on his staff. So, Okay, that's the
shape we got. And that's all the foam parts I gotta make.
I mean, that's, that's the parts that I have to make from scratch fully from scratch. I
mean the mandible will be put on too once I get stuff painted. I can Plasti-Dip the foam parts now
and get them going on being painted. The staff, it's just more sections of the same PVC pipe
that will end up making it the height that I want to make it.
And I'm thinking more of this height and that's because both in the show and the classic toy,
the staff is shorter than Skeletor.
The current 1 to
1 prop that you can actually purchase. The current prop replica. That's, that is, you
know, that's, that's licensed, that's, that's supposedly accurate. Has the staff
at 81", which Skeletor's Staff is never that tall. It's always
around here in fact that the toy, it's very short. So I'm going to kind of go in this
area and that also means the individual pieces for the… will be shorter. The individual pieces
I need to break the staff up into.
But yeah, I'm gonna get these with a base
Plasti-Dip going. Plasti-Dip coat. And I can start making the pieces that need to
make for the sectional staff. I'm going to use a wooden painter's extension pole as a way to reconnect the separate parts
of the staff and I can use the handle from a paint roller
for the skull to connect with. I cut off a small chunk of pipe and the roller
handle. They fit inside of each other with some room to spare. So I cut the handle shorter again and stick
both pieces to duct tape to fill in the void in between the parts and
to act as a glue.
I'm going to mix up some urethane casting resin, which is a two part
50/50 mix of resin and activator. And I pour it between the handle and the pipe.
And I have a good seal of duct tape on the bottom so the pipe isn't gonna leak and the extra resin that I mixed, I poured
into a mold of some old radio knobs that I have. I don't need the knobs right now for
this project but I may as well use the mixed up resin for something. Because it's easier to mix up a little more
than you need than it is to mix up just a tiny amount in the very bottom of a paper
cup.
It takes this resin about 10 minutes to really
cure and become solid and when it does it sticks really well to most everything. I attached the plug to the end of the paint
pole and shove it into the PVC coupler glued in the skull. Take a little bit of my super thin, super glue. Put that around the edge just as a little extra precaution to hold it together. And now the skull is done. I've got the means to attach it to the rest
of the staff. I'm good. I just need to do the rest of the staff. I want to make the staff sectional. So I've
taken those painters extension poles, I talked about earlier and
I cut them all in half because they're wood, I can do that.
And what I want to do is put a little bit
of tape on each one so they barely fit inside of the PVC pipe. Then I can glue those in place and I have
a way of screwing sections of PVC pipe back together. So the two things I gotta do is
finish putting tape on these guys and I gotta cut three sections of pipe at 21", 22" somewhere in that area, 23". I'm not too worried, 81 is too tall, so I'm
not too worried about it. So I'll get that cut up. I'm gonna finish
putting tape on first, which is going to be exciting. Super exciting. I wind just enough tape onto the wooden pieces
so that they can just fit inside of the pipe. Now Blue Painter's tape is going to be fine
to use because it's just a placeholder.
I'm going to use gorilla glue in the space between
them. It will expand and fill up that space, gluing the two parts together. I made sure that each end was lower than the
cut edge of the pipe, that shouldn't leave any gaps when I screw the pipe back together and at the very bottom I leave a little bit
of wood sticking out as a foot piece that can just tap on the floor all day. The last piece I need to add the last piece
I need to make for the staff is the ball that goes at the very base.
So this the base goes
on the ground. I need to add a sphere or a ball onto the bottom of it. Um I'm not
too worried about making sure that this is exactly the right size. This is a really good
size and it's uh it's a type of plastic is that isn't going to shatter.
So I'm gonna use this DIY snow globe in order to make the ball that goes on the
bottom. So what I need to do is cut a hole so the pipe can go through the top. That all by itself is probably easier said
than done. I use the coarse sanding drum to grind out
a hole in the top of the snow globe. And I carefully drill through the inner lid
with a forstner bit. The wooden foot's gonna poke through that hole.
I put tape around the hole on the top of the
globe and I'm gonna add some paper there as well. And the PVC pipe will still go through the
hole and the wooden peg will stick in the inner lid which will let me screw the watertight
lid back on. And to make sure the cracks between the globe
and the piper as small as they can be. So what I'm gonna do it's gonna have to happen
pretty quick because expanding foam works pretty quickly. Uh I'm gonna take the snow
globe and I'm gonna fill it full of expanding foam from this end
here. And this is the is the fun thing. Uh There we go. So I get mixed up expanding foam, I'll pour
it in, come on, there it is. Pour it into the snow globe, I'll put the cap back on the
snow globe and screwed on tight, turn it over and then hold it and give it
a chance to expand. And then when it's all done, I'll come back and and cut the flat.
Cut this part off. Although I suppose I don't really need to and leave
it on there, but I'm gonna cut this part off and then um that'll be it.
I can paint it, cutting the ring off the bottom caused a bigger
scar than I expected. So I ground it down as neatly as I could and then came back with
some Alex Fast Dry. This is a flexible spackle I'm always using on the foam. Uh, I used
that to go ahead and fill in the rest and try and give it as best of a sphere shape
as I could. This is going to be the bottom and against the floor so close enough is good enough for this. While that was drying, went out and put a
base coat onto the skull. The base is a white Plasti-Dip. Black Plasti-Dip is a lot nicer
to work with, but whites what we needed to start with. Then
I used the Purple Blaze Plasti-Dip, but the blaze colors are a bit fluorescent. Way more
fluorescent than I expected. But still it's purple. Joe had picked up
some purple spray paint and so we proceeded to use that on all the PVC parts as well as
over spraying the fluorescent purple, which of course made everything
more of a uniform color.
Much more ideal for Skeletor's staff. Once all the spray paint was dry, Joe came
back in and did a dark wash over the skull and started to dry brush with Plaid FX
paints in order to bring out some of the highlights on the horns and some of the main details
on the very tips of the bones. Once everything was painted, it became time
to actually put it together. So I got three different parts. I need to
remember this end is the end that attaches to the skull and not attached this peace to the middle
section. From this seam, I'm gonna want 118 mm and
that's where the top of this goes. 118 so that's going to be around here. I'm definitely going to need to make sure
the seam is on the back side of where the head is going.
All I'm gonna do for that is super glue it
in place. I will admit that I am gluing to paint because really all you're doing is gluing to the paint and hoping that the paint underneath
it is going to grip well enough. But I don't think this is a high stress piece so it should
be fine. While that is setting up I need to attach the mandible.
Finally, at last I get
to glue the mandible on. The same thing, I'm going to glue this with superglue directly
to the paint and that's just the way it's going to be. Opps, that ran right up his tooth. As well, at least
adrift inside the skull, not down the face. Give it a minute. And then we'll do the final assembly on it. Most of materials used in this project I already
had in the shop. The skull was loaned to me by a friend.
Professor Mojave. We'll just put this together here. This is pretty fun. This is pretty cool. I
am. I'm happy with this. I like that. Yeah, I've got all the details I need. So
you know it's Skeletor's staff because it's got a skeleton for the top. Right? So you
want to make things all cohesive with you with your toy design. So you've got the skull that's important. We've
got the detail here, the top detail. That's important. And then we've got a whole bunch
of stick with The ball that goes on the end, which makes it a safe 80s toy to actually produce. We got a
nice protective ball on the bottom because I'm sure that's what that was for.
And as
far as the height goes, this is great. This is still way taller than it should be for the original cartoon or for
the original toy, but it's about six inches shorter than the official 1 to 1 scale prop
that you can get, which I feel is way too tall. Now it may not be way
too tall for some of the more recent reboots, but from what I'm used to seeing in the eighties,
it's way too long and way too tall and this feels great as a costume cosplay staff.
Um, this
is really cool. I'm super happy with how the skull turned out, by the way. Uh, so Professor Mojave, thank you so much for
loaning me a couple of the skulls from your collection so I had something to work from.
Uh, that helped so much. This is really, really, really cool and really fun.
It's not accurate at all, but it's accurate to Eternia. Right, who cares? I have made
now a couple of masters the Universe props. I've also got
He-Man's sword. So I've got the Power Sword and I've got Skeletor's Havoc Staff. Um,
if there's any other Masters Universe props that
you really are dying to see me make, I know I keep joking about Ram Men with Mechagodzilla.
But if there's any others that you're really dying to see me make, please leave a comment below. Let us, let me know
what else I'm really missing out on that I really need to be doing. I mean She-Ra's sword
is almost a given, but maybe aside from that, um, it's been a while since I made a Masters
of the Universe prop.
I know it's been almost two years since I did this prop. So it may
not happen immediately, but I'm going to read your comments. I'm gonna give it serious consideration
and I've got high hopes for the new show. So I know there's gonna be lots of different
ways that you can make Skeletor's Havoc Staff from Masters of the
Universe or even He-Man's sword. But this is how Odin Makes. In today's episode I used a lot of toxic chemicals
and some power tools and for the most part, I wore my protective gear. I wore a vapor
mask or I wore a dust mask and some eye protection, but there's
times that old habits came back and I forgot to put them on.
Now that's kind of a bad example.
You really need to remember to always wear your safety gear because it protects you in case something
horrible happens and the little things can add up. So, always remember to wear your safety
goggles. Always remember to wear a vapor mask and keep yourself safe and happy crafting. I want to thank Patrick Foster, Stephen Dodds,
and all of my Patreon supporters. My Patreon support is the number one thing that makes
this show possible. If you like the video, don't forget to subscribe.
Have an idea for something for me to make? Please leave a comment below. And if you make
any of these projects, you can send me a picture..
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