How To: Build a Rapier Machine
and Take Over the World!

Trying to figure out how I could make walls and floors that would resemble steel or steel reinforced concrete wouldn’t seem to be so hard and it didn’t at first. My initial idea would be a hardware store, but we now live in a world where Home Depot has taken over and shut down most local shops and with it, eliminated an entire sector of individuals that actually knew all there was to know about paints and hardware. We now have teenage drones that point us toward private label brands to increase gross profit…. Sorry, I digress.

Before I found out about the products that I used to create the Steel wall and floor effect achieved with the Airfield (from a retired hardware store owner) I had to make due with what I had. The Rapier Machine had to resemble the scenes of those great GI Joe cartoons, with the Commander surrounded by high tech monitors and Tele-vipers working away at their control consoles. I had imagined buying sheet metal, but I was trying to keep expenses down and that wouldn’t have solved my problem with the monitor and so while wrapping leftovers one day, the idea of using Heavy Duty aluminum foil dawned upon me. (Heavy Duty because regular Aluminum foil is very thin and will tear easily) Aluminum foil has two sides, one is very shiny while the other is dull… Perfect.

The process of cutting was not easy, since once Aluminum foil is crumpled or bent, it retains the creases or marks that the bending caused. So don’t depend on the sharp edge supplied on the box, instead have someone hold one end while you use your sharpest scissors to cut it. Using a tabletop and lining it with the dull side of Aluminum foil sheets and then taping them as tightly as possible (To keep any wrinkles or creases from forming) worked perfectly. Another great thing about aluminum foil is that you can buy it in many different sizes. In this case a Restaurant supply store provided me with 1.5-foot long rolls.

The monitor was done in a similar fashion. Folding the foil very carefully and making a box that surrounded the actually computer monitor. The monitor itself created a huge dilemma for the lighting of the set. The glass on the monitor would naturally reflect light and worse reflect the image of the photographer (Me). This forced me to use indirect lighting that was pointed at the ceiling and then reflected down onto the set. Don’t dare try and use the flash on your camera with this set or you’ll end up with a blinding reflection from all angles. If you look carefully, there are one or two scenes in Rapier where you can actually see my reflection in the monitor, although Photoshop was able to fix this problem most of the time.

Creating the images that appeared on the Rapier Machine was done easily in Photoshop. After creating the image to fit perfectly across the entire screen I used a Photoshop ‘Fill Screen’ feature to remove the tool bars and any other windows that would have been on the monitor. The best thing about this process and what made the difficult lighting and reflection problems worth it was that I could change what was on the monitor at any time within a matter of a few minutes, hence the countdown, or the scene where Cobra Commander has the Baroness up on the monitor while he’s talking to her. Changing the image with a new scene was as easy as can be.

In these shots you can actually see the tool bars and windows for Photoshop surrounding the Rapier Machine image.

The Rapier Machine itself had me stumped until a friend started talking to me about using Styrofoam to create buildings for a cityscape that he was creating. The Rapier Machine base was made from Styrofoam packing material from an Keyboard that I had bought (the music kind, not the computer kind) The shape was perfect, providing me with a platform and a small hollowed out area that I could place the control panel and what’s more the upper platform fit perfectly at the base of the computer monitor.

The Styrofoam was then primed numerous times (probably about 5 or 6) to remove any texture that occurred in its natural form. A few coats of Flat Aluminum (Model Masters) spray paint was then applied to give it its metal appearance.

Now, how to go about creating control panels and access panels to give it detail and make it more… Real looking?

Some will hate me for this, I hated myself for a week or so after I did it. I took a Mobil Commander Center and using a putty knife and gasoline (To dissolve the glue that secures the fixtures onto the MCC) I removed all of the detailed attachments from the Mobil Commander Center. Some were then sanded to fit specific places on the machine and all were painted using Model Masters paint. Add to that a cooling coil from and old Macintosh computer and the result was The Rapier Machine itself.

The Walls were made very similar to the floors. In this case covering large hard cover books with the same Heavy Duty Aluminum Foil as the floor. The books worked very well because I could easily remove them from this set and then place them in another configuration to create any of the numerous hallways seen throughout Operation Rapier.

Another huge benefit to using these books and not having walls that were fastened into place, was that one side could be removed to achieve different angles within the Rapier Machine set, as seen in the final two chapters.

Lastly, some final touches were put in place using props that I had purchased from Build-A-Rama. These small accessories gave the Rapier Machine touches of fine detail that made the close-up shots within the room work very well.



In closing, I believe this set was relatively easy to build. It was time consuming and some of the materials (i.e. The perfect piece of Styrofoam) were not very easy to come by, however the set worked better than I had thought and was worth the wait. Not only could this be used as a M.A.R.S. built Machine of Mass destruction but also it could have easily doubled as a large control room and through using the computer monitor, create any background image imaginable, to set the mood for the scene.

Violentfix would like to thank the Rapier Development team for all of their time and hard work.

Click to view the Rapier Machine in action