Thread by @DaveKeto

1/ Massive costume thread...

Spoiler alert: A software engineer I am... I costume engineer, I am not. 😳

I secretly started working on getting the costume together Friday morning as I figured if there were a 1% chance it could happen, I should at least be prepared...

2/ It started with the assumption I could just go to a costume shop, find something spherical, then just redecorate it to be a lipoprotein. Easy, right?

Nope, nothing spherical. The closest they had was a fat suit-ish thing that is airtight so it can blow up from an internal fan

3/ But that fan was mainly for just inflating the thing, it doesn't recirculate air, of course. Needless to say, this was a non-starter...

4/ In describing the concept, he said I should consider making it out of foam. He recommended a place on the other side of town that I went to, but they were too busy to cut anything custom. So I managed to get some cheap foam in both strips and sheets.

5/ I set out trying to wrap it in a way that would at least resemble a sphere using special foam glue. Cutting the foam precisely without special equipment is extremely difficult. But even for as light weight as it was, I could tell it would be too heavy and insulated.

6/ My wife and I went to get our bibs, and while there, I had a new idea. Maybe I could use swimming pool noodles and make them into a series of rings that make up a sphere (each slightly offset from each other)...

7/ I grabbed a bunch at a Dick's Sports and started working on it, but I realized soon that in attaching the ends, it forces it into an irregular shape. And as each is a little different in how they bend, the offsets weren't matching very well.

8/ I considered using spacers, thus allowing for less total rings and potentially more precision, but there was still the problem of scaffolding. I needed something that would fit it just right, but getting someone to sew that in short time would've been very difficult...

9/ I dropped off that idea and decided to just head back to the costume shop and grab their M&M costume. I figured I could repaint it, then add the phospholipid bumps to the outside. And since it was more of a flat disc, I could say I'm a nascent hdl (still counts!)

10/ That took a big trip to Joannes Fabric along with getting fabric paint and low temp hot glue, which the staff figured would work with the half-sphere styrofoam bumps I'd have for the PLs.

11/ I did the painting, the gluing, and let dry. But I quickly realized that paint wasn't going to hold. They were still not attached strongly enough, even with the hot glue.

12/ I had a new idea on something I spotted in a Walmart earlier -- a lawn ornament of a snowman. I could take his bottom portion (which was spherical), cut it loose, then just make wire mesh to keep it extended out.

13/ This took me to Home Depot to see if I could get a hold of something that I could reasonably construct it with. "You know how those Southern Belles's have that wire mesh to extend their dress?" I talked to several of the service there until getting to an expert on wire...

14/ "What you're talking about is doable," he started, cocking his eyebrow, "and I know just the gauge you could use that might fit the bill. But you're talking about a week-long project at the minimum. Don't think you'll fashion this thing overnight."

15/ But by this point, overnight is all I had.

I decided I needed to scale back my ambitions. What are the most distinctive aspects of a lipoprotein? Easy - (1) its phospholipid heads, and (2) its apolipoprotein(s).

So I decided to just figure out how I could wear each of those

16/ Why not just see if I could wear something with balls attached to it?

I set out to find the lightest plastic balls of a moderate size and settled on these. The problem is that I needed to attach them in a way they could be taken off and back on again (more on that in a sec)

17/ I figured out I could just use velcro. By this point last night I was exhausted and crashed, but then work back up again at 3am. I headed to a 24h Walmart and got the balls, velcro, a sweatshirt, and a rope that might serve as the apolipoprotein.

18/ Back home I methodically arranged them in a honeycomb on the front of the sweatshirt with velcro on each object specifically placed. I then did a test and found that indeed the balls held firm while bouncing around a lot. Success.... kinda...

19/ I couldn't escape the thought that even the slightest chance one of these balls came loose would be a real risk in a track full of runners. This a thought I had throughout, and part of why I chose velcro....

20/ But for the heck of it, I made one more trip to Walmart to try one more iteration, because... why not at this point?

It was another sweatshirt, but this time gluing much smaller balls (golf practice balls) directly to the sweatshirt with that special glue...

21/ They seemed to hold firm, but the fact they were even smaller than the other balls made me even more nervous about using them. I don't want any chance of one of these things dropping during the race, full stop. Nope, back to the iteration before.

22/ So this is the plan as of right now. I'm going in the costume I haven't yet shown in this thread (but by now you can guess), where I'll be wearing the balls at the very beginning of the race, then at the very end of the race near the finish line...

23/ For almost all the race in the middle, I'm taking the balls off and putting it into one of those plastic bag backpacks so I can carry it throughout. I need to do this for the safety of others, of course.

24/ To be perfectly honest, I genuinely didn't think when set up that challenge on the poster that we'd really raise $13,000+ in such a short time and indeed, almost half of it was in the last few days! The surge from the video really boosted our numbers especially...

25/ All that said, I want to open up this challenge again, but the next time around, I'll be ready with something before I post it. As I said at the beginning -- I'm clearly not a good costume engineer... next time I'll get expert help for something extraordinary! :)