Kingdom Hearts - Axel Fire Wheels Tutorial

This is what I'm making:



Axel's Fire Wheels from Kingdom Hearts 2. Here's what I used to make them:



Some 1/2" PVC pipe, a pair of 1/2" cross pipe couplings, and a PVC pipe cutter. (All of these are available at most big-name hardware stores. You could probably use a regular saw or band saw to cut the PVC pipe, but I find a hand-held pipe cutter more convenient and apartment-friendly.)

You will also need a TON of .020 styrene. Lots of it, since it makes up the bulk of the structure of the prop. You'll also need some scrap pieces/sheets of 6mm craft foam that you can cut into small strips.

(Remember kids, if you want to buy styrene directly from me, see the paragraph above....)

Lay out a sheet of styrene that's at least 4' x 4' Next, take a 10" (or slightly larger) plate and place it in the middle of the sheet. Trace a circle around it.



Next, draw another circle about 1" outside the edge of the first circle. Then take a CD and lay it down at one of the edges of the double-circle. Trace around the CD.



Lift the CD and then draw another circle around the inside of that circle. Repeat until you have 4 equidistant double circles sitting around the edge of the main circle.

As always, I have provided a picture which will give you some idea of what the heck I'm talking about...



Next, take a plate that's about 6" (or slightly larger) in diameter and place it on the styrene somewhere around the edge. Trace around it and then cut out the circle.



Draw a circle 1" inside from the edge. Cut into the circle and then around the new line you've created. Now you've made a ring. Bend a ridge into the ring as shown:



You'll notice that the ring, once bent, is slightly smaller and has an overlapping edge.

To help support the ridge, you cut a small 1/4" wide strip from a sheet of 6mm craft foam and hotglue it to the inside of the ring like this:



That done, you put hotglue around the edges of the ring and glue it down to the design you drew in the sheet of plastic:



Make sure the edges are fully glued and are neat. (Scrape off any excess with your fingernail if you have to.) Make 4 ridges rings in total and hotglue them to the sheet:



Now things get complicated. Take your 10-11" plate, lay it down on some plastic somewhere and trace it out. Cut out the plastic circle and then trace a circle 1" in from the outside. Cut round that circle until you have a large-sized plastic ring. Bend a ridge in it (so you're basically making a bigger version of the 4 rings you've just made and glued down.) You'll use this ring to create the larger ring that connects the 4 smaller raised rings together.



As you can see from that picture, you place the large ring in between the smaller rings and trace out the connecting pieces. It may take some trial and error until you come up with the proper shape. You may also have to make more than 1 large ridged ring to come up with enough bent plastic to go around the whole circle. Hotglue small strips of 6mm craft foam underneath the ridges pieces to give them support and then hotglue the pieces into place.

Anyway, when all that is said and done, you should have this:



You're attempting to create a raised design using curved and bent pieces of plastic, some of which intersect one another. It's a complicated process, so you may want to practice bending and gluing a few shapes to get the hang of it.

After creating a set of intersecting raised rings on the sheet of plastic, it's now time to make the spikes. First thing to do is draw out the shape of the spike in the plastic.



Cut out a small diamond of plastic and bend it in half. Hotglue it to the bottom of one of the rings. Next, cut out a shape which resembles the bottom half of the spike and bend it. Reinforce it by gluing a triangle of foam to the interior and then hotglue it to the plastic sheet like so:



Next, cut out the top part of the spike, bend it, hotglue some 3mm craft foam to the interior of it and then glue it to the rest of the spike. (Sorry, I didn't do a good job of taking reference pictures at this point. This next picture shows me cutting the newly makde spike shape free of the plastic sheet:



Here's a top view of the spikes being cut out:



All of the raised parts must be cut free of the plastic sheet at this point...



This is what you have when you turn it over. You've just created one half of the prop. Now you've got create the OTHER half of the prop. This you do be repeating all of the previous steps (only instead of gluing the raised areas onto a sheet, you glue them onto the flat side of the fire wheel.)



One handy tip: When making the 4 small rings, hotglue the outside edges of the rings together first, then the inside.

Now all you need to make is the crossbar...



This will take a lot of creative figuring out as you try to estimate how long an amount of PVC tubing you'll need to make all four arms of the crossbar. I recommend making them slightly longer than you think you'll need, putting the PVC pipes into the cross-piece, then holding it in front of the fire wheel to determine how much more you have to shave down from each pipe.

You'll have to cut into the styrene rings at the point where the pipes meet the plastic. Byt the time you've fit and embedded the crossbar, it should look something like this:



Now that won't do so you'll have to re-cover the part of the rings where pipe cuts into the plastic to hide the joint and stabilize the wheel. (I can't seem to find a picture of that part of the process. If you look at the picture above you can see where I have already covered the joint on the right-hand side of the wheel. That's the look you're shooting for here.)

Here's what the wheel should look like when construction is finished...



Unfortunately, the job wasn't finished for me as the person I was making the wheels for thought the spikes were a little too wide, so I carved away 1/4" on either side and recovered them with another layer of styrene. Here's the revised version:



Now painting this prop generates a special problem: In roughly half the reference pictures I can find of Axel, his Fire Wheels are white. In the other half, they look silvery. Unfotunately, I couldn't compromise and make them silvery-white because when you mix white and silver enamel, you get a light, dull grey, which just wouldn't do. So I opted for silver in this version. (Most cosplayers are split down the middle when it comes to white vs. silver for Axel's wheels. I like silver because its shiny and..well...this is the kind of prop which looks like it should be all dangerous and shiny...)

Here is the final painted picture of the Axel Fire Wheels which you can look at by clicking here. (It's a bit of a big file, which is why I don't have it splayed across the main page...)

Some additional Notes on the Fire Wheels:

At a later date, I made this version of the Fire Wheels: (Click the picture to see the item in more detail:)




Construction was similar, but with this version I coated all of the surfaces with glossy PVC vinyl fabric. It was part of a new experiment I did to see how easy it would be to coat a complex prop like this with vinyl. The good news is, other than the cross bar at the center, I didn't have to apply paint to this prop. (Painting something like this can be a real pain -- getting all of the corners and borders straight-- so an alternative method of coating was definitely worth looking into.)

The bad news was--it took me about three times as long to coat the prop in vinyl as it did to paint it. (That, and I couldn't get away with just vacuumforming the components if I wanted to either--I would have to apply the vinyl to each individual piece that makes up the surface of the prop. ) Each fire wheel took me about 40 hours to do. Ouch. There was and is no way that's ever going to be cost-effective so I'm definitely not going to try that in the future...