I made a MANTIS BLADE from Cyberpunk 2077

[Music] welcome internet the time is now and cyberpunk 2077 is about to drop in this video i'm going to make a fully functional articulated mantis blade i'm going to walk you through the technical design the artistic design how to make it function and also of course how to make it look awesome don't worry i'm making this project and video in collaboration with kyle hill in my video you'll see me make it and in his you'll see us test it out and talk about the science i am not at all making this because i want to make an incredibly sharp blade let's get started i got this diagram with exact dimensions so i'm going to match them perfectly we want this to be the real deal if you're not sure where to start when you're making something new sometimes you just have to start i knew it was incredibly unlikely that the final mantis blade would be made out of steel mostly because steel's too heavy but i figured for my first prototype i would make it out of steel so i could test the ergonomics see how it felt and also because with mild steel i could use a mig welder zip zap zap things together and not have to worry too much about super fine and nice technique okay so things started really rough i had thought that two spring systems would be good and i was wrong [Music] it was immediately clear that the two different pivot points on the mantis blade needed to move in relation to one another so things didn't get too wonky i had experimented with different weighted springs and different parts of it because of wanting to try and figure out what the best way to mimic the mantis blade functionality and movement was there was only so much research i could do to figure out the exact different functionality and ways the mantis moved so thinking through like what does it definitely need to do it needs to you know be ergonomically coming out of the forearm and it needs to here's my mantis blade and it needs to shoot forward and puncture so that's one movement and and in that sense having two two pivot points that function the same way is great there's also like a slicing action so is that is it shooting forward and and is the slicing coming from arm movement or is it kind of shooting forward when is the slicing coming from this pivot point moving further down so that's why i wanted to experiment with it again didn't work wasn't a good idea and now we have a frank and mantis a franken mantis stein if you will all right did i want to prank kyle and present this to him very proudly as if it were my final design and product of course i did did i i did not sometimes i'm just really too nice i really like showing this part of the making process because it's so important when you're creating and inventing something new to give yourself the freedom to prototype to make things ugly to make things that are bad and to realize that you can add and subtract and cut and move things around nothing's final nothing has to be precious if you don't give yourself that room in space when you're exploring and at the beginning of a project you'll really lock yourself in and limit the type of exploration and ingenuity that you can come up with if you allow yourself to be kind of bad sometimes it's important to embarrass yourself and better yet video yourself doing it and post it on the internet i know this video is a little bit more how-to than i usually do so if i'm talking too much here is a beautiful sparks shot for all my fellow pyro lovers alright so here's what my first steel prototype taught me one it needs a four-way linkage the two pivot points must move in relationship to each other two it can't be steel it needs to be much lighter i kind of thought this was going to be the case so it's going to be aluminum fun fun fun we will go deep into aluminum later one other ergonomic thing i noticed is that it of course wants to kind of rotate to one side or the other of the forearm and you know i'm going to create straps that hold it down to the forearm but i still don't think that will be enough or they're going to have to be so tight you will damage your body so i might create some type of handle coming in to hold around the hand for now just so that it can have really smooth action so let's dive in a little bit into welding aluminum here's the truth every time you weld aluminum you have to make a sacrifice to the aluminum gods and even then sometimes they will still just laugh in your face that's just a science fact there are two leading things that make it hard to weld aluminum and there are a lot of other nuance factors but i'm going to try keep this educational but quick because let's be real we want to get to the blade and the cutting part because we want to cut people things we want to we want to cut things things we want to cut things anyway here are the two leading reasons aluminium that's also i focus i have to focus every time to say aluminum because i have a british mother and family and i some of the words are still british so they're with me aluminum cutting things aluminum cutting things okay one of the reasons aluminum is so hard to weld is because it is so thermally conductive so that means that when one part of your work piece is hot almost all of the rest of that piece is equally hot so it conducts heat incredibly well so what that means is when you're starting your weld puddle you have to hang out for a while because it's not just heating up that little spot on your material that heat is radiating and it's really heating up your full work piece so you have to hang out for a moment you establish your puddle and then you have to start welding super fast because once one part of the aluminum is melted is in a molten puddle the rest is incredibly hot and just degrees away from also becoming a molten puddle so you have to weld really fast and if you lose control or don't weld fast enough you end up blowing a huge hole in your piece and like everything goes south really fast one of the other things that makes aluminum unique and challenging to weld is because it creates a layer of aluminum oxide on the surface of the material that is incredibly hard it's actually what grinding wheels and like sandpaper is made out of aluminum oxide so that oxide is incredibly hard and has a melting point of 3700 degrees super high the aluminum itself is very soft and has a melting point of around 1200 degrees so it's much lower so how do you melt through the oxide and penetrate the oxide layer on your aluminum getting to the metal underneath without then blowing out that metal well the answer is welding in ac so an alternating current so there's a weld clean action that's happening the whole time as the current alternates about 120 times a second so incredibly fast going back and forth so it penetrates and welds and then the current alternates and comes back and cleans penetrates cleans back and forth and it makes that kind of angry buzzing b sound as you're welding the aluminum basically in summary aluminum is very sensitive let's take it to the next level yes cyberpunk lovers it is time for plasma the fourth state of matter i plasma cut out a lot of the artistic aluminum shapes for the blade it was important that the shapes look great but also keep certain requirements for the functionality of the blade it is often a balancing act between a super sleek aesthetic and ensuring that the technical design and weight distribution keeps working smoothly this was so fun and adding just this small amount of curvature to the lines really started to transform the project given the many mechanical connections i have on this mantis blade there was a lot of drilling holes luckily that's one thing aluminum is awesome for because it's super soft like butter you can see that the four-way linkage system works so much better and now i only need that one spring system at the bottom which functions to retract the blade so as you can see here another way that aluminum can be really frustrating to work with is that it gets really gummy so it'll gum up your grinding discs plasma cutting sandpaper whatever and there are some tools and tips and tricks that you can use to try and mitigate this but at the end of the day you really just have to kind of kick back do some late night dancing in your respirator and wait for your metal to cool down and now for the fun part making the blades these need to be sharp they need to be functional they need to cut through things of course a blade made out of aluminum wouldn't work it would be soft it would go all over the place it has to be steel and i can't weld steel to aluminum they're two separate materials you can't weld those together so i had to go with a bolted connection to bolt the steel blade into my aluminum frame and then i realized since i'm having a bolted connection the blade can come in and out i can design and create a couple of different styles of blade so that we could have options to play around with i like this because it's fun to play with different styles different looks different blades for cutting techniques and also i had a couple different source materials i was looking at and some of the blades varied pretty drastically as you can see here so i had one curved blade that mimicked the figurine and then i went with the kind of classic other style of blade that i saw on the diagram and that is a little bit more present in a lot of the cyberpunk videos of course for a blade just steel still isn't good enough you have to use tool steel which is sometimes called high carbon steel the higher carbon content in the steel makes the material a lot more brittle a lot harder to bend well to work with but it makes it so that when you temper the material you temper the steel through a heat treating process it becomes incredibly strong and it will hold a sharp point so i got tool steel for these blades and you can see it looks kind of the same as regular steel there's a little bit of differentiation in the type of sparks it throws but really the differences are in how it functions once the blade got to this point i knew i was in business at the beginning of this project i was like i have a week-ish plus like my five other jobs to invent and create this so i'm just going to focus on making a really slick functioning mantis blade that looks good but maybe i won't do all of the other prop parts of course at the 11th hour i was like but that's the fun part and last but certainly not least the painting and weathering of the blade truth is i can nerd out over detailed work like this forever not only is the artistic design and sculpting my favorite part but i realized i really wanted to include at least a few aspects of the mechanically exploded flesh from the arm as you can see i did just a little bit of detailing to visibly incorporate the reality that this is a mixture of human and machine referencing an origin that is both organic and robotic felt important to include to transform this blade from a cool prop and really make it into an object that carried more of a story also of course transhumanism is not only an awesome aesthetic but conceptually implies ideas that very much inspire me and that i can philosophize about pretty much ad infinitum i'll save you from this for now alright so it's time for our final moment of truth with the mantis blade as you can see pretty much all of the detailing is done and everything's together so now i'm going to just do a last little bit of sanding so that it kind of picks up on all these nice highlighted parts kind of highlights the texture of the piece and then it's time to test the springs so i went a little wild with ordering springs from mcmaster but i tried to get them all the same rough dimensions just different weighted springs so that the distance apart of this part of the design wouldn't be affected for the amount of spring action that we need so right now as you can see there's two springs in there and they just pull and connect to these two bolts so super easy we have our two blades they are incredibly sharp piece one and piece two perfect it looks so awesome some beauty shots for the first option for the blade [Music] and here are some beauty shots of the second blade design beautiful but dangerous [Music] given the fact we had no real idea how this would perform and some of the pretty crazy tests kyle has in store for this i decided to design in some options so i made a really simple locking bolt connection at the base of the mantis blade to lock it in place moment of truth [Music] it works so well i am so pleased with how this came out i'm really thrilled that is so smooth it works so incredibly well the balance is perfect and it is super light and comfortable and ergonomic i added a thin strip of foam padding some straps and i guess there was a slight venue change and then i played around with how it felt to move around and interact with the mantis blade thank you so much for watching and here is the money shot that you've been waiting for this is an example of one of the many awesome tests we did in kyle hill's video so head over there and check it out now and of course don't forget to like and subscribe see you next time

Channel: Thea Ulrich

Views: 55,692

Rating: 4.9019265 out of 5

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Id: DVyiHLR5rPk

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020