100gb Aluminum Breastplate

From Fusselman.org

This is one of a few pretty horrible pictures I can find of an armoring project gone awry. I was scrapping out some old Seagate Elite hard drives, and was trying to find something to do with the platters. I designed a cardboard mock-up of this armor, and it turned out alright. It'd not be much use, but was freaking awesome to look at.

Fast forward to actual assembly. I drilled and tapped each hole, so that the armor could be assembled with cut off (I didn't have any short enough) machine screws. In retrospect, aircraft rivets, or even pop rivets, would have been a preferred fastener. What I had not accounted for was running out of platters. Turns out, a scale-armor project like this takes a lot more raw materials than I had on hand. Also, the aluminum armor turned out to be a bit heavier than cardboard, and so hung funny. More time got spent on the chainmail shirt and this project fell by the wayside. I think it ended up being (finally) discarded within the last few months. I stumbled upon these purses built out of pop can tabs today, so the whole scale project might be revisited sooner than later...