Chomping Pac-Man Costume

I spent a while planning this project, but not quite long enough. I did initial sketches on paper and then did some very simple CAD work.

Unfortunately in the Pac-Man costume I forgot to plan for the extra length that the PVC joints would create, so it caused some deformation of the frame shape. If you plan to make one of these, do not use the lengths listed; you'll need to adjust them to account for the size of the PVC Joints.

The CAD Drawings are bad because I have absolutely no CAD experience. I just sort of stumbled my way through until I got what you see in the picture.

There isn't too much to say here; it is simply a matter of cutting/labeling the sections of PVC pipe and beginning assembly. One note: Make sure that you let the PVC cement dry completely before doing any kind of bend. Also, while you are building the sides you should install T-joints for the crossbars. At any area where there is no joint to assemble things I just used lots of electrical tape to hold things together.

Putting the outer frame together

I started out with very short crossbars to make sure that both sides o the frame lined up correctly and then moved on to the lager ones.

This will depend somewhat on a person's size, but to give enough room I made my crossbars 24" in length. This gave me room to work inside the suit as well as leaving it narrow enough (just barely) to fit through doors.

The third picture is me standing with the frame for size comparison.

Here I attached the harness to the frame. The harness is just an old external-frame backpack from a surplus military pack. I discarded the backpack portion (it was disgusting) and just kept the steel frame.

To attach the harness I used one piece of CPVC and one piece of 1" PVC as crossbars, and wrapped them in tons of electrical tape. It turned out that the CPVC crossbar wasn't strong enough and snapped after some use, so I had to replace it. You should just use two pieces of 1" PVC; it's much stronger.

I also cut out one of the cardboard sides, which was silly since I didn't end up using it for quite a while. I just used the frame as a template and cut the cardboard.

In retrospect I wish I had waited to install the harness until the mouth was completely finished since I didn't realize just how front-heavy the suit would be.

Building the mouth

The mouth was the bane of my existence for this project. I built two smaller pizza-slice-shaped frames that sat just inside of the main outer frame. I built a jig out of screws on my work bench to bend the CPVC in and then used a heat gun to make them hold the shape.

If I were to do it again, I would make the jig out of scrap wood and use my oven to heat the CPVC. The heat gun was inconsistent and did a sloppy job.

Once the two "jaws" were built, I installed them with steel wire and electrical tape at the back corner. This allowed them to be flexible while holding them in place.

Mouth Continued

For the movement I installed pulleys using steel wire and electrical tape, and fed the rope though them. This took the better part of a week to get working properly, so patience is a virtue.

I started out just having ropes on one side of the costume, and this worked great when the whole thing was just CPVC. Unfortunately once I got it dressed the mouth started to bind because the CPVC lacks rigidity and I ended up adding a second set of pulleys/ropes to the other side of the costume.

To make the jaws retract into the frame on their own, I tied thera-bands from the jaw to the main costume frame. These are just the latex exercise bands you can get at a place that sells exercise equipment.

Mouth Continued

The jaws did have a problem with recessing too far into the suit, so I added "stops" for them.