The next project that my wife has decided that I will undertake is to make the fully functional (but not actually sharp) scissorhand gauntlets for her Edwina Scissorhands cosplay. I’ve done a little bit of sketching and drawing, but today I built a couple prototypes.
My first prototype didn’t survive long enough to get its picture taken, but it served its purpose very well by teaching me a little bit about things like scissors and how they articulate. Based on my experience with that, I was able to whip up a new prototype that seemed to actually work quite well.
The prototypes were made from cardboard with bread ties as the hinge pins. The second prototype utilized a push rod with an articulation point. The first prototype seemed to indicate that it would be required, but upon some testing it was obvious that the additional hinge was simply going to be a place for things to go wrong. Regardless, here it is, mounted on a length of cardboard and Velcro-strapped to my arm:
I took out the articulated push rod and replaced it with a straight bit, then mounted the apparatus up my sleeve to simulate a hand more closely:
This seemed to actually work pretty well, and seems to fit the overall design for the costume, according to The Boss. I envision this existing at the end of a long sleeve, loose enough and long enough to be able to get the hand all the way to the end, with the scissors being somewhat close to where the hand would normally be.
Roughly speaking, I’m trying to build towards this:
Once I have the mechanism down, I’ll start trying to replicate the look of the individual shears. And as I review this post, I see that I need to re-adjust how the shears mount since they appear to be at a right angle to the wrist such that when the arms are held straight out, the shears point down.