How to build retractable Wolverine claws
I don’t imagine that building Wolverine look-alike claws is all that hard, in fact many costumes have cheap plastic ones. But this guy managed to build real-looking claws that actually retract:
Nate used Photoshop to enlarge an image of Wolverine’s claws from the X-Men movie that he had downloaded. This allowed him to print out the image until it fit exactly onto the 1″ x 1/8″ Aluminum Flat Bar that he had purchased for creating the claws. Once the basic shape was on paper, Nate traced around it onto a piece of wood that he had cut to 1″ x 13″, which was the calculated maximum length of the claws. This length was determined to be the longest length that could fit on the back of Nate’s forearm. Once the wood had been traced, Nate gathered up his aluminum and headed to his Grandfather’s barn, where he cut the wood out on a band saw, sanded it on a vertical standing belt sander, and used it to trace out the aluminum claws. The aluminum claws were then cut out VERY CAREFULLY on the band saw and sanded lightly on the belt sander. The next step was to put each claw under the wire brush wheel to give them a “brushed aluminum” finish, which Nate determined would look closest to “adamantium”, which Wolverine’s claws are actually made out of.
Now he should go try to rob a bank or something as Wolverine. That’d be awesome.
Not sure if anyone else had this problem or if I’m just missing something, but the link to http://www.muc.muohio.edu/~natedogg/main.htm won’t come up…Page Cannot Be Displayed in both Firefox and IE. Would be cool to see the more exact steps he took, but a very well written article!
yeah the site has been removed. How do the claws come out? Are they spring powered with a switch, or does he just have to pull them out? Because spring-powered claws would be SO awesome (although maybe kind of dangerous).