Overview
One of our friend who does an annual cosplay of Link from The Legend of Zelda with some kind of unique twist each year wanted to do a Riot Police Link costume; and asked for some help making a Hylian Police Department riot shield.
This was a simple build that only took a few hours and we only snapped a few photos along the way, some details are missing but the concept over all is simple.
Bill of Materials
- Some Rivets $5-$10
- Washers $5-$20
- Acrylic Sheet $20
- Steel Flat Bar $8
- 2 Inch Nylon Webbing $9
- (Yellow/Red/Black/White/Grey) Vinyl $12 Each
- Vinyl Transfer Paper $16
Total Cost: $65-$130
Depending on how much Vinyl you need the overall cost can range between $65 and $130 Dollars. The variation in the price for rivets and washers is non consequential and if you do not have any cost around $10 for one size. You can always just buy a cheap rivet gun like this that comes with some rivets and be fine. We only used 8 rivets so that gives you 2 extra. Nicer rivet guns such as this Astro have a bottle to catch the pins that come off of a rivet and are generally easier to work with.
If you already have a large amount of vinyl on hand then some of the colors may not need to be purchased. Most craft store adhesive backed vinyl is oracle 651 as linked here.
Also another cost to consider is the specialized tool of a vinyl cutter, we used a Silhouette Portrait because of its lower cost over the CAMEO. We use the portrait enough that we are considering picking up the CAMEO as well. If you intend on using it for vinyl cutting I would highly recommend the CAME over the portrait, if you are going to use it to cut up 8.5x11 sheets of paper then the portrait makes sense. Our original purpose was for pepakura, most vinyl comes in 12 inch width and can not be fed into the portrait without being cut down.
Resources
We created some custom vectors for this project, the phoenix with the triforce as a head is every where online, but not the version on the Hylian Shield from the Ocarina of Time. These are free to download and use for yourself.
We also used a font "Hylian 64" you can download it here.
- Phoenix Vector (.dxf File)
- Hylian 64 Font (.zip File)
- Triforce Vector (.dxf File)
The .dxf files can be used with Silhouette Studio or any other software you would use to cut the vinyl.
Steps
As a point for improvement on what we did I would recommend shaping the acrylic and putting the vinyl on first, then putting all of the holes into it and then riveting everything together. The order we worked through it was more of a creative process of figuring out how we wanted it to look and be functional. This is also the second attempt at the same project, we started with a much larger and thinner acrylic sheet. The sheet was .08 inches thick vs the .22 inches thick we used here.
Here is an example of the bubbles in the vinyl that had to be dealt with because we laid it over the rivets instead of putting it on first.
We started by taking some steel flat bar and cutting it to size and punching holes for rivets with the drill press. The acrylic sheet was 24 inches and the bar was 48 so we only needed one piece and it was cut in half.
We riveted the steel onto the back side of the shield with some nylon webbing to hold onto it. The steel adds rigidity and gives a good metallic backing for the rivet, on the front we used washers.
Once we where happy with the fit we started rounding off the corners.
Its now ready for the vinyl. We cut all of the pieces and then started layering them on. The files for the vinyl patters will be made available.
All of the vinyl attached.
The grey vinyl was cut by hand, we just unrolled 2 feet of it and cut it with a straight edge and a razor blade, the black was cut a bit over the 18 inches and placed on level. All other graphics where vinyl cut and applied with transfer tape.
