kevster

Only things I see that need to be adjusted. 1. Boots need to be lightly scuffed 2. Trim the leather strips of your holster that's showing up above the belt. Just trim them down enough so they hide behind it. 3. ( probably optional, what do y'all think?) But I think the gun would look better if you got some silver and painted the bolt in the ejection port.

I did think it was kind of weird/funny too that there had been so many centurion applications all the sudden. As Mathias said though its not really people who are upgrading their armor from EIB to centurion, they most likely came into it all with centurion armor but you need your EIB before centurion. Its exactly what I would of done after getting my EIB since I built my armor to centurion specifications from the start. I was thinking I could just apply strait for centurion but was then told I needed to put an application in for EIB. So I actually applied for centurion before EIB . I don't think that EIB will go by the wayside, but I think its really not as hard to get centurion as some people think. I was going to be happy either way just by being in the 501st but I still wanted to try for centurion. Even if I ended up not getting centurion, I still would of been happy with my suit though. The thing with centurion is more attention to the little details. So while I believe centurion is fairly easy to achieve, its if the person is able and willing to take the extra time to make it centurion. I'm sure there will always be an EIB and centurion.

Ya, as Gazmosis said, just start with snaps from the beginning. Its not that its accurate, but people who usually use velcro to hold their stuff together find that for some reason it just doesn't do as good as it should. Things will start falling off. For some reason i'm always hearing reports of the butt plate falling off . Second note, I don't think theres anyone out there who didn't hesitate cutting into their armor on their first set. The thing I learned to do is check what I was suppose to do, then just take the plunge and start cutting, but slowly! Eventually it would always turn out better than I expected. I had to do that for every single piece lol

If you use alcohol, I would still rinse it with water. I've never heard of what happened to you though, thats crazy! It just peeled right off the armor.... When I painted my armor, it was too warm outside so I did it in the spare bedroom one piece at a time and would open up the window so it was usually about 80 degrees. With it being kinda cool in your basement, if you did put it on a little thick then ya it probably didn't cure all the way sitting in your basement. Since i was only doing about one piece at a time, i wrote down when my pieces were primed and painted. I don't think any of my pieces were painted less than 4 days after priming so they had plenty of time to dry. Then it was about a week and a half after painting before i touched them after they were painted. Even with all that it still didn't come out perfect. There were very few spots where the paint had dried completely flat, so i went back and wet sanded the whole suit to make it nice and smooth. Just saying, painting is easy in a way, but still an absolutely a pain! haha I'm sure you'll do fine on the next go though.

We finally got in Luis. WOO HOO!! A big congrats to you!

WOO HOO!!! Now that photo with Tim wasn't for nothing! Thanks for all the support guys. I still plan on shaving down the return edge on the shoulder bells and changing around the straps a little bit so hopefully they will fit better. More on that soon!

Its no problem. Things were being talked about but I was waiting for something being confirmed of needing to be changed was all. Here's the shortened straps, the space between the bottom of the belt and the top of the drop boxes is slightly less than 1/2 inch now. Hopefully they won't get stuck behind my thighs too much.

Well, nothing was exactly confirmed of something that I needed to change so I don't really have anything to "update." This is a pic of my shoulder though, should it still go down? I had taken the photo but forgot to post it up. Like I had said, I put it down as low as I could thinking if it was any lower then it might not fit well because it would be on that crease. If you want me to though, I could try and put it lower.

Well, TK-9820 had started on the chest and back. Don't know if hes been able to work on it any more seeing as how he hasn't posted up anything else. He could be working on it and just hasn't been able to post up any new stuff yet though too.

Ya, i tuck my hair into my undersuit then put my neck seal on and tuck the bib of the neck seal into the undersuit. That keeps it held in pretty good. I think it works a little better too if your hair isn't in a pony tail, but i havent tried it because if your hair gets in front of your face when you're trooping then there's not much you can do about it. This happened to me last troop where some came out of my pony tail, and since it was breezy outside then it was blowing all around inside my helmet and was bugging the crap out of me. Also wouldn't feel too good if the hair got caught in the fan.

Ya, if the goo gone is leaving behind any residue then it could turn out really bad. I sanded my armor with 320 grit and then washed it with some lava soap and rinsed it off real good. At the time I sanded my armor, it looked clean but as I was wet sanding it, the droplets of water would start turning black from all the dirt and oils on the armor that i was now scraping off.

Well, it might not be the exact look, but i'm sure you could go to Ace hardware or somewhere similar and find a screw that will fit. It looks like it might be somewhere around a 1/4-20 That means the diameter of the screw shank is 1/4" in diameter and it has about 20 revolutions per inch. So to help narrow your search, try and measure the diameter of the screw. If its smaller than 1/4" then it will be a whole number. I think the next smaller size down from 1/4' is 12, then 10. Anyway, ace hardware would be a good place to go for you to find out what you need, then you might be able to get online and search for the exact style you want.

Did you touch it soon after heat bending it? If it was still warm from heating it, your finger print might of actually imprinted into the plastic itself. In which case you can only polish it out.

Have you decided how you're going to attach the shins in the back? I know you're tired of snaps but would you say the nylon snaps have worked out for you pretty well though? and hey, you might get to around to making your thighs, if you're able to do just a bit of it over the next few days it would all be done. Remind your wife of her vows, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health.... and to help you with a stormtrooper suit

I would say just glue the ammo belt to the cloth belt. Or do you want the ammo belt to be removable from the cloth belt?

I have a link to my photobucket album of my blaster at the bottom of my first post. I'll also get a get a pic of my chest soon because I think if i had put the shoulder straps any lower, then it would of been difficult to glue on because it would of then been over the crease at the sides of the chest that go up. It was another little thing I noticed on my set of armor, most people have 4 bumps of the shoulder strap over their chest plate but I only have 2 and I tried to put it as low as I could. Oh, and for some reason it looks quite long, maybe because it just stands out but the drop boxes are only 1 inch below the belt.

Ya, when I was looking at others I realized how shallow the shoulders are compared to other suits. I didn't have the straps on the bells at that time so they were flapping all around and in those shots they were pretty much all the way back. Something I could probably do is get rid of the return edge on the bottom of the shoulder bell which would also pull it in some. Also I did that for the drop boxes because of how much space I had between the ab and thighs so I tried to put them just low enough so the boxes would barely overlap ontop of the thighs instead of just hanging there against my sides. So should I still raise the drop boxes up against the belt? I think it would just look weird. I'm hoping to get some taller thighs sometime in the near future so it will look better though.

Between back/kidney most common was a seam, maybe 1/4 - 3/8 inch of space between them. Kidney/butt looks to be maybe 1/8 inch or butted up together. It looks like they had a tendency to make the strap in the back of the kidney/butt really tight which caused the butt piece to ride up ontop of the kidney. To avoid this, make the snap in the back a little loose and the snaps on the edges tighter. For the cod/ab make it as small of a seam line as you can. Just have a look at some of the screens jesse got http://whitear...opic=17033&st=0

What is mainly done is the trim is a cut a length a little longer than what is need so the compression of the extra length of the trim keeps it in place for the most part. If its still coming off or want to make sure it stays put then some people will add a very tiny bit of supper glue in a few spots to glue it in. I had a little problem with my brow trim drooping slightly in the center and used a little bit of double sided tape, its seems to be doing ok.

A close up of the thigh and calf pieces would be good.... from the looks of it though, those are some really square thighs. You might not have to, but it would probably look a lot better if you did. Put some more pictures up before you do anything though.

After you cut the nylon, you heat up the edges and it will melt it together to keep the ends from fraying. I'm not worried about the snaps pulling through the holes in the nylon either because when you get the snaps good and tight, the snap acts as a clamp on the nylon. I actually use this method too as a way to reinforce snaps on elastic straps. For the elastic straps i do, i have the snaps going through the elastic and a bit of nylon, then when i'm going to unhook my snaps, i make sure i'm grabbing the nylon when i pull it off to prevent it tearing the elastic. To me, the adhesion of the nylon to the armor is just as strong and with plastic snap plates, you get the warping that doesn't allow the snap to sit well, but with the nylon it doesn't have that problem so it sits well on any curved surface inside the armor. and darth, i mentioned a punch to you in a PM the other day on how i made holes in my nylon

You could always try and make you're own using that pepakura program or something like it. I've never used it but seen the amazing things that people can do with it.

All my nylon snaps went in just fine. I just put on a thin layer of e6000, put them in place and clamped them down. The e6000 will actually absorb into the nylon a little. I rarely had any glue squeeze out of the edges. If e6000 is messy on everything you do, you just haven't gotten use to it yet, but you will pretty quickly. I think you'll be surprised at how well the nylon will go, you'll see =)

Something in the switch might of broken, or some wires might be touching where you have the wires taped up at the molex connector.... and come to think of it, I think I know what the problem is, I believe the switch should be connected to one side of the wire. You have the switch connected to the positive and negative. It should be on either the positive OR negative ( like how you have it on just the positive in the diagram). Also the color you did the diagram, make sure you used the red and black wires on the fan, the yellow isn't power. Edit: Now that I think of it even more, it is the way you have your switch set up. A switch carries the current through to allow electrons to pass. You have a current going through the switch AND the fan, which as trooper234 said is a short.

Its good to Glue one side at a time and let it cure. I glued one side and clamped it down then the other side which resulted in my strips on the first side sliding slightly and not gluing down fully. I spread my glue kinda like you're already doing. I hold the nozzle up right on the part then squeeze out the glue. As the glue comes out i start moving the tube down the area I want to glue and pretty much scrape the glue on the piece. If its a wider area i'm trying to glue then i do the same thing but instead of moving in a strait line, i "draw" in little circles to spread the glue around with the nozzle just above the part. That way you don't have to use anything and dirty up pieces to spread it around. ( time to make everyone hungry) Think of it as if you were trying to pipe out a real thin layer of icing on cake. On the e6000 tube it will say for non porous material, roughen it up and put a thin layer on each side and wait 2-10 minutes then put together. I wouldn't wait any more than 3 minutes though. The e6000 would start to get gummy at about 5 minutes if i remember right.