First a little background. My friend and I were at the Protomen concert at the Knitting Factory in New York city, and it was amazing. Probably the best concert I've ever been to. Anyway, while we were on the line to get in we found someone with something amazing:



This person modified a Transformers toy into a pretty badass buster cannon. The coolest part was that it made firing noises and lit up! After seeing this, my friend looked at me and said "We're making arm cannons." I figured he was full of crap since he usually is, but he was dead serious, so I called dibs on red, since Protoman is my jam. So my friend started looking around for some inspiration, saw craineum's blog about his son's halloween costume, and we started planning it out.

Fast forward to today, where we went to a bunch of stores to get materials and start building our arm cannons.


We wanted to do something a little simpler than craineum, since neither of us know much about electronics or soldering, and we didn't have much in the way of tools. Because of this we decided to use candy and chip containers from BJ's as our foundation, with paper to color them, tap lights as the light up core, and reflective stickers as detail work.

Here is our work partway through our builds:


We hot glued wooden dowels as handles, and I have a cut up ruler in mine to provide glue points to connect the two parts of my cannon. My friend used a chip container for his cannon, while I used a bubble gum container, so his is bigger.

Here's my friend showing off the more complete arm cannons:


The next part was to cover them in paper and apply the detail work. This was probably the hardest part for us, but it eventually worked. Here are our arm cannons:


They could have come out better, but good or bad, we have arm cannons, and I love them. If you want to see them, we'll be bringing them to Pax.

If we can put our differences aside...