Post Apocalypse clothing

[JemPowered]

I assembled an old leather jacket. I am planning to distress it to look like it has bullet holes and heat damage from a laser or plasma handgun.

Anyone have experience doing something like this ?

[Dave]

I assembled an old leather jacket. I am planning to distress it to look like it has bullet holes and heat damage from a laser or plasma handgun.

Anyone have experience doing something like this ?

Just a suggestion, but... if you know anybody who has a membership at a local shooting range, you might be able to sweet-talk him/her into providing some real bullet holes in it.

Failing that... set it on a log, get the biggest-diameter nail you can find, grind off the pointed tip, and then hammer it through the leather. After removing the nail, drizzle the hole with some sort of staining liquid to give the appearance of a bloodstain around the hole (unless your cosplay character is invulnerable, or has Monica's trick of poiting bullets away just before they touch her skin).

A propane torch with a narrow-flame head might be able to provide some scorching. Doing a convincing LASER burn might be tricky, as you'd want the burns to have a sharp-edged appearance (at the "edge of the beam") but not show any signs of physical pressure as you might get by dragging a red-hot poker across the leather. You might simulate a burn-through LASER slash by cutting the leather with a very sharp blade, and then scorching the cut edges with red-hot metal.

[Hansontoons]

Check out Dmitri Zaitsev/Nuclear Snail Studios for ideas and how-to's. He's a post-apo LARP person with YouTube videos on how to create and distress clothing. I cannot recall him with bullet holes or laser scarring on his items, but worth a look. He's also on Facebook.

[TazManiac]

Following the Apocalypses I don't think there will be much in the way of clothing. Just go in your Birthday Suit...

[Dave]

Initially, it's bare skins.

Once the weather gets colder, it's bear skins.

As to the Birthday Suit: there were a bunch of them in stock for a while, but they turned out to be shoddily made and none of them actually sold.

[TazManiac]

*slow-golf-clap*

[DinkyInky]

Yes, Dave's idea. Best way for authenticity.

[GlytchMeister]

Or... Y'know... Find a local mad scientist/engineer who can use maybe parts from backyard telescopes and big binoculars and cameras to focus the laser beams from several blue writing lasers in computer disc writer/readers into a single beam powerful enough to put a hole in a thing in a real damn hurry.

They might even let you keep it... for home defense.

[DinkyInky]

Or... Y'know... Find a local mad scientist/engineer who can use maybe parts from backyard telescopes and big binoculars and cameras to focus the laser beams from several blue writing lasers in computer disc writer/readers into a single beam powerful enough to put a hole in a thing in a real damn hurry.

They might even let you keep it... for home defense.

No Glytch, they don't need a death ray to punch bulletholes in a jacket. Come along now, it's time to go back into the Lab where the building is rated for megatons of BOOM!

[GlytchMeister]

Or... Y'know... Find a local mad scientist/engineer who can use maybe parts from backyard telescopes and big binoculars and cameras to focus the laser beams from several blue writing lasers in computer disc writer/readers into a single beam powerful enough to put a hole in a thing in a real damn hurry.

They might even let you keep it... for home defense.

No Glytch, they don't need a death ray to punch bulletholes in a jacket. Come along now, it's time to go back into the Lab where the building is rated for megatons of BOOM!

Butbutbut I could totally make this woooorrrrk! It's be so awesome and, and, and it would have other uses too! Not just a leather hole-punch! *whines*

[DinkyInky]

Or... Y'know... Find a local mad scientist/engineer who can use maybe parts from backyard telescopes and big binoculars and cameras to focus the laser beams from several blue writing lasers in computer disc writer/readers into a single beam powerful enough to put a hole in a thing in a real damn hurry.

They might even let you keep it... for home defense.

No Glytch, they don't need a death ray to punch bulletholes in a jacket. Come along now, it's time to go back into the Lab where the building is rated for megatons of BOOM!

Butbutbut I could totally make this woooorrrrk! It's be so awesome and, and, and it would have other uses too! Not just a leather hole-punch! *whines*

Now Glytch, remember when you tried to make Al a Teasmade for Clara with a Vimana Cell and parts from a junkyard Army Jeep?

[Dave]

Now Glytch, remember when you tried to make Al a Teasmade for Clara with a Vimana Cell and parts from a junkyard Army Jeep?

That was the incident when he wanted to cut down on the time required to heat the water, used too much thiotimoline in the alloy, and the blast wave traveled backwards in time and knocked down a whole bunch of trees in Siberia, decades before Glytch pushed the "on" button, right?

Gotta watch those Sparks like a hawk... sometimes they lack a sense of proportion. Kinda like the researcher in one of the Venus Equilateral stories. He needed a high-voltage source for his particle accelerator, so he just invented a liquid insulator with a dielectric constant of about a million, made a glass-jar-and-plates capacitor filled with it, charged it up to 1000 volts, and then opened the stopcock and let the liquid drain out. Presto... a billion volts across the plates. His boss Channing darned near had a stroke when he saw it...

[GlytchMeister]

...this is an amazing missed opportunity...

[DinkyInky]

...this is an amazing missed opportunity...

I'm sure you'll make up for it...God help us!

[GlytchMeister]

...hmm. The makeshift air raid / tornado impeller siren I made never got any use...

[DinkyInky]

...hmm. The makeshift air raid / tornado impeller siren I made never got any use...

See? I just knew you'd figure it out...

[Dave]

...hmm. The makeshift air raid / tornado impeller siren I made never got any use...

See? I just knew you'd figure it out...

A pity. Some months back, when the Aliso Canyon storage facility near Los Angeles blew a leak from one of its wells, they ended up venting about a hundred kilotons of methane into the atmosphere before they plugged it. Totally lost, uselessly.

You could at least have used your impeller siren as a burn-off device. Imagine, a 50-foot column of flaming flatulence, wailing like a banshee at about 150 deciBels, for weeks.

You would definitely have made a name for yourself, Glytch! Of course, it would be the sort of name which is ritually cursed every Michaelmas for centuries, and used to scare naughty children, but hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?

[GlytchMeister]

Fuck, that's a lot of methane, and that shit is a powerful greenhouse gas... did it get burnt or was it released without burning?

Anyway... unfortunately, it was make of wood. So it probably wouldn't last long in a methane leak fire.

Hmmm.

[DinkyInky]

Fuck, that's a lot of methane, and that shit is a powerful greenhouse gas... did it get burnt or was it released without burning?

Anyway... unfortunately, it was make of wood. So it probably wouldn't last long in a methane leak fire.

Hmmm.

*hears gears turning, light bulb begins to glow, DING!*

[Dave]

Fuck, that's a lot of methane, and that shit is a powerful greenhouse gas... did it get burnt or was it released without burning?

Without burning. Yeah, this was a huge greenhouse gas incident... worse in that respect than the big Gulf oil blowout. One of the scarier things about it, is that the leak was discovered pretty much by accident, even though it was leaking about a ton per minute.