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Hi, Good to see a new build starting. believe it or not I'm approximately the same height and not much heavier than yourself. 5'6 high and 60kg. When i started my build earlier this year, I thought starting with the Ab and chest piece was the obvious thing to do, but they are actually the easiest parts to work on as they didn't need trimming at all other than the excess around the edges. I started with biceps as they are mostly hidden underneath the shoulder bells. That way you can get some practice with spacing the girth around your arms and legs. Aim for approx a fingers width all around between the inside of the armour to your arm. I then moved onto the shoulders, forearms and thighs, shins practising the same principle of a finger room all around the armour. I actually left the abs and chest as they came because when I tried it all on together it all seemed to gel perfectly. One tip that i can say that makes a massive difference. Always have your under suit on for any sizing as the under suit sucks your body in and helps to get the nice snug fit your looking for.

After researching and obsessing over other bin builds here (mostly of the 50 gallon variety and specifically @OddViking327 insane bin build thread) I thought I'd contribute my own. I started out with this little guy. The Husky 25 gallon. I'm a small car enthusiast and make my living by producing parts for small cars, so a 50 gallon was just not in the cards. This 25 gallon doesn't really fit most of my cars, but it fits ONE and my TK does fit inside it with careful packing. This is the newest (2021) Husky 25 gallon. It has integrated lid handles and a barely-there logo. That logo is easily dremeled flat in a few minutes. I didn't wanna go as all-out as OddViking with lights and switches, but I do want the bin to be in-universe. And to me that means white. All white. The two-tone black and white bins look cool, but they're just not quite the look I wanted. So just a few things got masked off before painting. I also cut out some of the inner lid support. Not all of it... yet. I want to see how it does with some of it opened up. This gives a bit of extra room for the chest plate to live and not be smooshed. There's also not too much in the way of lost rigidity with half the support gone. And then the painting. I think this is two cans in. I used just over four cans of paint for this little bin. Four cans. Two primer and two gloss white. I used an Ace Hardware house brand for the primer and a Rustolium "also bonds to white" gloss paint. I didn't use Krylon fuzion because I really didn't want the paint to bond TOO well to the plastic. It's cold here now, so I rolled the bin out to the driveway to spray. Then inside for the 20-30 minute cure and then outside for another can. Four coats total with a small spritz of the fifth can for final touch up. And there it is. All white and shiny!!! It won't be like that for long. Inside it's a huge TK picnic box. This black and white flannel was just too good not to use. I used spray adhesive on the walls to hold the fabric in place and hot glued the top and bottom edges in place. The fabric can be removed (and repaired) if needed, but it's really really in there. On the bottom is a flat pillow of toolbox liner. A 16" wide roll fit the bin perfectly. It's not a lot of padding, but it seemed preferable to no padding in the bottom. And that pillow just sits in there, so it can be easily removed and washed. Then I fired up the laser cutter and made a couple vents. Totally TOTALLY plagiarizing OddViking here. After seeing them in his builds I couldn't not do a few vents for myself. I also printed up a nice number plaque to fit in the middle recess. Because why not? I have all these toys to make car parts with. I needed something for the lid. So I went a little nuts and gave my TK the deluxe model of plaque for his bin. And there's the bin all built up. This is how I imagined a fresh and shiny brand new TK armor bin might look. Those handle recesses are just perfect for these vents. They're E-6000'd in place and some Jawa hood liner is blanking things out. I cut off some screw heads with bolt cutters and glued them in place as well. No need for any screws to touch my shiny armor... Yeah. I'm pretty proud of that. "Serving the Empire with Unquestioned Loyalty"

Hi! I got my AP armor a few months ago and have just been scared on where to start. But, it's doing no good sitting in the box, so I may as well try to put this thing together. I've found great comfort and information in Cricket's WIP threads and spent an hour this morning reading through it again. I'm 5'6 / 126 lbs. I got the armor pre-trimmed but realize I will need to do some (okay, a lot) of additional work. Someone suggested on here that beginning with the torso can make it easier to appropriately size the arms/legs and that's my current plan of attack - the torso also scares me the most, so getting that out of the way will (hopefully)? make it easier to get moving. Here's the initial try-on of the front - trying to gauge for height and if that needs any trimming... I know I need the sides to taper a bit more, but what about the height? I feel like I could trim either the top of the ab or the cod piece... or both? I'm quite scared of trying to recreate that return edge on the ab piece, but I will do it if I have to.

Welcome welcome! Good to see new white armor on smaller troopers! I'll add in another suggestion for fitting: tape all of your ab/chest/butt/kidney/back plate pieces together with blue tape, attaching them all on the insides at the returns (don't tape on the outside, inside simulates best how it actually fits with strapping). Then put it on. Take pics of front, back, both sides. You'll suddenly have a very good idea of how the 'actual size' fits and feels. When you put just the front ab and chest together, the fit can be a little deceptive unless you have the back parts attached as well.

Also helps minimize armor bite and cuts. Be good to your skin ☺️

Then I started weathering it... in front of the tree. I sent the roomba out on a special mission shortly after. The paint chipped off very very nicely. 4 layers of not-quite-cured paint is a fan of chipping. And that's what I wanted. I want the used and abused look. I want it to look like it's been across the galaxy by the time I'm done with it. I used a bastard file for most of this. I wasn't shy. I let my daughter at it too. We got some good damage on there. I really wanted to give the bin a couple blaster marks and I wanted them to be at an angle sort of like my TK was running away at the time. So I propped the bin up at about the right height and went to work. Blaster marks applied. I used the sanding drum on my dremel for this. While trimming and cleaning the inside of the bin lid, I learned how nicely the dremel melts this plastic. At high speed it melts beautifully. I actually blasted a hole straight through in this spot... by accident. But it DOES look good! And then I brought out the airbrush and gave it the business. Plain black to start and transparent smoke around the edges. I'm stupidly proud of my painting. I feel like the angle is right and the blast pattern is pretty nice.

Thanks for the compliment Adam and Joseph. I'm really please how well the ear placement turned out, especially when I look back, I was really nervous about the placement and hoping it would be correctly aligned. I'm also a perfectionist who is adamant about getting the detail exact. As for the snaps, I heard about other troopers that had an issue with single snaps popping out during an event. After reading about that, I decided to go with the double snap system as a fail safe. Thanks again guys.

Hello everyone from Ukraine! We decided to take a couple of photos, I hope it's not bad.

That explains it, so it‘s a technical issue. Like I said it would be weird to make information „members only“ that includes tutorials to become a member. I might start a build thread in a few days. Sadly my build is gonna be paused for the next week because I have to go on a business trip over christmas. But I am already eager to continue my TK

Poor me? Heck no, these are awesome! Trying to think of some of my own or little additions to spice these up was a ton of fun!

I've finally reached the whole reason I started this bin build, well... aside from actually needing one. Stickers. I got this idea to do an in-universe bin with vintage travel stickers and everything took off from there. Similar to what you see in the Star Tours queue with the bags and robot, but maybe a bit more... more. All aurebesh. All vintage. There's some vintage travel-style Star Wars stickers on the internet, but none really did it for me. There's one etsy shop with some nice stuff, but they're asking $6 per inkjet printed sticker. As a print shop owner, that's insane pricing. So I spent my spare time over the last week and a half collecting up vintage sticker artwork examples and reimagining them in the Star Wars universe. Poor @Scimitar has been getting these texted in a constant stream as I finished them. Doing these stickers really sparked my imagination for my TK's back story. All the places he went and didn't get blown up. There's a great thread on here for various TK back stories. I've wanted to contribute but couldn't really find the spark of inspiration. This project did it for me. Anyways, I've made around 20 different designs for my bin. OCD can be a wonderful thing if properly wielded. Starting from top left... Zeltros Ritz, Hotel Theed Naboo, Imperial Palace Coruscant, Imperial Navy, Star Tours (this was a fun one for me), Welcome to Fabulous Canto Bight, Blastech Industries (borrowed directly from wookipedia), Cladtech Armor, Sorgan Adventure Fishing, and my own REVlimiter heart logo in aurebesh. Sorgan started out as an Idaho fishing sticker or something like that. Note the AT-ST and krill. This idea was all Eric's. Air Mandalore, Fortress Vader, Aldaraan Royal Hotel, Redwood National Park Endor (note the tiny speeder bike), Dune Sea Tatooine, Nevarro Red Lava Rafting. Champala Hotel, FISD, Hoth, Aloha Scarif, and Holiday Towers Hotel in Cloud City. I think each of these had 5 revisions. The Champala one was a vintage French beach sticker with an orange lady on it. I carefully replaced her with this blue one and stole the sunglasses. Hoth is an Australian sticker. Greetings from Icerider Stables. And then the bin got stickered and weathered. Top/front. I sized a few of the stickers for specific spots. Others were carefully laid out by my daughter. Front. I love this set so much. Handle side Cladtech Armor Alderaan got blown up. I added a bit more blaster char to get the sticker integrated into that scorch mark. Back end Hinge side EIB and Centurion numbers. This build has been SO much fun. Maybe I went a bit overboard on weathering, but the bin just begs for it. Everything I do to it just makes it look better. I've just gotta print hubcaps and then it'll be a finished bin.

Fantastic!!! That's the happy stormtrooper smile.

Phew! That's a relief. I was staring at it so much I couldn't tell anymore. I will leave that alone for now and focus on width This is great advice and very helpful!! Thank you so much!! And thank you for the warm welcome, all! Pleasantly surprised to see so many initial responses. Will post updates and questions shortly, I hope!

On the topic of double snaps, I'd highly suggest you implement them in your shoulder bell tops. Both sides of that strap - the part that connects to the shoulder bridge elastic and especially the snap plate glued into the shoulder bell top. There's a lot of stress and force there and mine (which are indeed double snapped) have managed to break free during a troop. I've found myself thinking about a third snap in that strap! And from one perfectionist to another - your vocoder is incredible. I struggled painting mine, and while I'm happy with it, yours looks far superior.

I would be happy to consider that as two separate builds even though you can only be awarded EI once for the same costume. It was two different kits, so we did follow the process correctly on the second. That is a win for you Justin.

Congratulations Dwight on your EIB status. Don't be put off by any of the suggested adjustments to reach Centurion level. I think most of us have had to make the same adjustments, but the satisfaction you get when it passes is a great feeling. Well done .

Nice work, looks great

Here are a couple of other great shorter trooper threads for reference https://www.whitearmor.net/forum/topic/38842-fragarocks-rs-stunt-build-not-to-scale/ https://www.whitearmor.net/forum/topic/42868-sha-shas-wtf-anh-stunt-build-complete/

Mission accomplished. Now on to measuring for final assembly! My FiL was totally stunned, and we chatted about the 501st Legion and Stormtrooper kits throughout the movies for about an hour afterwards. He's 100% thrilled. More to come! Sent from my Pixel 5 using Tapatalk

From the looks of things it doesen’t seem you need to trim for hight. Good to hear you have found Christine’s thread already, I will ”ping her” for you @Cricket

Amen to that! Come 2022 we actually might have a First order battle group worthy of the name here on the forum

SUPER nice job on this build, Chris! Lots of great attention to detail, and I am glad to see that you went with the double snap system.. you won't be sorry you took the extra time to do that. One comment on the ear placement, though: WOW! You absolutely NAILED it.. B-E-A UTIFUL!

Looking forward to seeing the BS upgrade, good luck

With just the abs and lid to go, I plumped for a BS lid

Hello and welcome aboard, if you are not aware Shadow Troopers home is Spec Ops although we are similar in construction and parts. A great resource thread is here Can't go past Tony's build thread, a great overall build Good luck with the research and your build