Help! Exo-Costume makers looking for Ideas

[TwoPlusLuc]

Hi all! A few buddies and I are getting into cosplay and making steampunk mechanisms and costumes. We would like to make exoskeleton costumes with technical depth and detail, and with functional parts (think mechanisms, moving parts, even movement support), mostly in the -punk styles (steampunk mostly, but dieselpunk, cyberpunk, etc. work too!) and we need some help to get started.

If you would commission something from us or if you have any ideas, what would you ask/tell us? The more extravagant and difficult, the better! We might reach out to you if we see something interesting, and we really want to start working and practising, so if an idea sounds cool enough we might try making it for free for you! It'll help us get the ball rolling to practise our craft.

For reference, here's someone else wearing the pretty part of one of our working hydraulically actuated exoskeletons:

(I hope the image works correctly...)

P.S. Feel free to rant about what you feel is 'true' steam(/cyber-/diesel-)punk. We don't want to glue some gears on and call it a day, we want to do it right.

[von Corax]

There was an article in the last issue of Make about adding smoke effect to a Hellrider costume using a vape pen and an air pump. Does that spark any ideas?

[RJBowman]

If you want real world examples of exoskeleton tech, the earliest ever built was the General Electric Hardiman, a transistor-era suit from 1965:

The control system had problems; it tended to go into oscillations when moving, and no one was ever able to walk in it.

You might also find inspiration in antique prosthetic arms.