Leaderboard

Hello everyone! I've long been wanting to join the 501st and soldier for the Empire. Finally decided now is the time to start putting my armor together! Looking forward to learning a ton and meeting everyone!

Yes. From the rear it's recommended you trim the inner elbow side giving you more flexibility. If you still require more room - From the front it's ok to trim up to the first indent but leaving a little of the original edge.

Thanks for the warm welcome everyone! Definitely going to take some time to get my bearings and figure out what direction I want to go.

Greetings Alex! Welcome to the wonderful world of TKs! Greg is pointing you in the right direction with the "Getting Started" section, and you'll have days of reading from there. If you haven't already decided on a particular armor maker, you'll want to check out this vetted armor vendor list for sure. And I suppose before you'll also need to decided on a particular TK variant; are you leaning towards one in particular at this time? Once you've had your BBB (big brown box arrival) Day start up a build thread, post lots of photos, and ask lots of questions, and Troopers will be here to assist! You can even start your build thread prior to receiving your armor if you want to discuss other components such as soft parts. Either way, we all look forward to helping you on your journey!

Today marks the 10th day after BBB Day and I'm happy where things are at. I am very pleased with the eyes. The teeth are close, but still not quite where I want them per the reference photos. Shouldn't be much more than 30 more minutes of work to get them done. And, I did get the front cover strips finished on the forearms so those have been gluing overnight.

Hello and welcome to the forum

Great. I was thinking of going slightly over half way from edge to the indent.

Greetings, Welcome to FISD Alex, hope you will find what you are looking for here. It will take some time to read through all the build tips, so much the forum has to offer.

Welcome to FISD Alex. You will get all the help you need here.

Welcome to the FISD, Alex. If you have not done so already, check out the "getting started" section. Full of great info. Enjoy the ride!

Welcome aboard, Alex. There’s some amazing people on this forum and lots of help available. Any questions you have, don’t hesitate to ask. :-) Best wishes Dan/CableGuy

I forgot to answer your first question...I traced out the cut lines and used standard tin snips to cut well below the line then made many small grinds and files along the way. One of the biggest helps was to make a small cut-out for where the helmet joins the faceplate, that really helped it comply.

Thanks, Steven. Ha, yeah. trim, look, measure repeat 500 times. It's not really completely done. Another trooper, Paul, had the idea to bolt the face and helmet together, get everything fitted and done then rivet all together, which is what I plan to do and, especially with the ears, make the final..."surgical" adjustments. Much was done with small files ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07YCC28NF/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ) that I bought at Amazon for $25...really perfect for this kit. Also, I took my Dremel and put it in a vice and used it like a mounted grinding wheel to make smaller, more controlled adjustments. I gotta tell you I was pretty nervous about it, still am a bit but not as much as before. I poured over all the ear tutorials. Panatrooper has a build that was helpful...even though it was 10 years ago it's still appropriate . Good luck with your build and I've learned there's plenty of experience armor builders out that are more than willing to help. This is my first build but if I can help at all just let me know.

Exceptional work, Tino. The overall look is excellent, but the way it looks aged really gets my attention. Sehr, sehr gut!! :-)

Long time coming this one, glad you are at the pointy end of this journey now. You look fantastic!

What an awesome build Justin.

I notice when using the dremel doing trimming.

So I got an email back saying they only run the warehouse 2 days a week wow. That’s crazy ! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Final helmet update: The imperial cog is my favorite emblem and I thought it would look nice on the side of the blast shield. A sticker might have been the easiest way, but it needed to be heavily worn off. That required more work… Okay, here we go... A plaque was required, as this helmet will be in my RS collection and there it would look odd without it. The layout is close to the original RS plaques and I weathered it to match the style of this bucket. This project was planned for winter 2020/2021 and now comes to an end. Building something outside the CRL restrictions was indeed real fun. Would I do it again? Yes! It was more difficult than a normal helmet (oh wonder) but worth the effort. Maybe I would use a little brighter kind of green (like TS-5, TS-28 or even TS-78). And I would add an aiming device on the right eye. It still hurts to not have it. Anyway, it was a fun journey and I really enjoyed to run a build thread again. Many thanks to everyone here for reading and commenting. Actually I wanted this post to end with a 360 degrees video of the helmet with all lights on. Sounds easy, but after 13 takes I still ended up with issues on lighting, auto-focus and a wobbly rotation. So instead, I now close it with the final list of modifications and a few pictures: 1 - Blast Shield 2 - Black Interior 3 - Two-tone paint job 4 - Antenna and radio 5 - Utility belt 6 - Universal supply box 7 - Bacta canister (illuminated) 8 - Helmet flashlights 9 - Breathing tube 10 - Kill marks 11 - Aurebesh letterings 12 - Imperial cog on blast shield 13 - Skull face 14 - Weathering and paint chips 15 - ‘flesh wound with guts‘ 16 - Greeblies 17 - Blaster marks 18 - Helmet stand with customized display plaque Have a nice weekend Troopers and Cadets.