LadyInWhite

Oooh I could come visit your crazy sculpts!!!!

I'll toss a beer out the plane for ya!

Friends, I'll be in NYC from July 2-4 and in Paris from July 6-8. I would hate to go all that way and not have an opportunity to meet/re-meet some of you in person over coffee or cafe or something. Let me know if you're interested, and where! Ingrid

Welcome, Chad! Glad you found your way here You could fit any of the standard armors, depending on where your 215lbs. is distributed. If you are a shoulder-hulk, you'll want a bigger style of armor to accommodate the shoulder bells. If you're like me, more girth around the middle, then side shims will help you fit into any suit. If you're leggy, most suits have plenty of wiggle room in the legs. Overall RT-Mod will work for you and it is a great suit, but you're not out of range for other armors.

Evilboy has a great fan kit ready to install. I believe he does them in batches. Check the Imperial Commissary to see if he's doing a run right now. I can get you a do-it-yourself parts kit for any configuration you desire. However, my supplier is out of standard fans. This is usually fan(s), battery holder(s), lead(s), and a switch. The 'standard' fan that you want is a 50mm squirrel cage blower fan, 12V, 20mm wide. These run great on four AAs or also, with shorter lifespan, on one 9V. There are also 50mm x 15mm and 10mm versions (which my supplier has in stock) which are usually 5V (so use AAs only) and blow a little less strongly but still get you some air. ADDA makes some good ones. We have also found 40mmx10mm but they start going up in price.

Lookin' pretty good... good luck!

Looking great Jesse! I'm glad that even though RT has plenty of room for overlap that you've chosen to do the butt joins. (Just personal preference.) Also glad you introduced yourself at SCG. There are a bunch of us TKs, some pretty new and some still in the works, up in the LA/SFV area too, a little north of you but not too far, and we have one TK that I know of who is also in Whittier... plenty of people to ask for help, etc. We had an armor party last Saturday... there will be more!

For the mesh, it looks like what i used for my frown... which is a kind of veil material. Do not iron it, but try to flatten it under some books for a few days. You also can find it in black if you prefer. If you spray it, it is so fine you might lose some of the mesh altogether.

Hmmm. I am not an expert, but I would probably call an FX house and find out where they buy their thermoplastics. I know you can find ABS sheets on the internetz from manufacturers, but whether or not they're good quality or anything... dunno. Could also ask a hobby store if they can order or find out for you.

No lack of TKs in SCG! Population has a lot to do with it, and access to good costuming resources from Hollywood (i.e. getting stuff for making molds and classes for heavy-duty propmaking). In my observation, what happens a lot is that many people start with a basic or more iconic costume like the TK, and then want to be a little 'different' and start going for those other, potentially more obscure costumes. For some, the psychology is "the more different the better." When 4 other TKs are signed up, they might reach for that "other" costume. It's also why I like my new (wip) HWT, so i look a little different than the other TKs, but I am still a TK. Though ultimately I like the fact we all look alike. It sounds like in your case others went for the comfort factor perhaps, and it's not so much about "standing out," because there aren't enough TKs to make people want to feel different. My costume list has 10+ characters on it, but my first love is and will always be the TK. And I also think TKs look best when there are more than one... more than three... lol. The more the better. Give me a hundred Stormtroopers! Just put me up front and let me wear my pauldron!

Woo! Exciting times!

Yes you can shorten the top and as Phil suggests, if you want to you can put return edge back on. I trimmed mine a little so there is return edge on the outer/hip edges and not so much in the between-legs areas. Also if extremely necessary you can trim a little out of the backs of the knees on both the lower thigh and upper calf. This is where a lot of people get the most bites and makes stair mobility difficult. But like Phil said, there is no real "maximum mobility" in these things. I can kind of do yoga in it, but some guys barely move like robots. I think there is some leeway in it being troopable but Looking Awesome. If you sacrifice too much of yourself to be 100% accurate, you'd probably not enjoy wearing it.

DAB NABBIT I hate when people don't paint their ab buttons correctly!!!!

Hi, Steve! For non-canon troops like cons, you can wear a pauldron if you want to. Because yes, apparently they are for all armored types dating back to the clone wars. We just never see that in the movies, so it's not considered canon... Sandies are really just stormies who got stationed on that sandy backward planet, but too many are wearing them... ultimately it's all just a wardrobe/costume problem and nobody standardized what they were doing in Tunisia. Inside your armor - helmet, strapping system, etc, there are again canon ways of doing this (i.e. replicating the systems used in the movies) but ultimately this is up to you. You can use foam or helmet liner or tactical padding or whatever. If you use foam, it does not have to be a star shape. You should do whatever it takes to get the helmet to fit your head exactly the way you want it to, and it may take a few trials before you figure it out. For example, with the star foam my lid was too high, forcing me to look "down" to see through the eyes. I removed this, and now use tactical foam on the sides and a little apholstry foam on the forehead mostly to prevent the welders shield from pressing my forehead. Some people manage to stack a whole helmet's worth of tactical padding in there but I have just the two pieces. If I put one in back of my head, it pushes my face into the lens. You get the idea... it's all about YOU! As for your biceps, etc., if they were originally glued with e6000 you can carefully rip them apart without too much pressure (to break anything) - the glue is stringy when pulled so i slice it with a razor or some kind of blade while gently separating it. You peel off all the extras with a thumbnail and voila! ready to start over. Use standard sized cover strips (15mm arms 20-25mm legs) on the front-facing or visible parts and if you need widening you can use larger cover strips in the back. I had to redo my thighs three times to get them just right, including tapering them a bit (girl legs are not cylindrical like guy legs). Centurion has many requirements, but most importantly is that your armor FITS YOU PROPERLY. And yes this is the right thread. Good luck!

Mike, your build is fantastic. I cut my cod too and regretted it about 8 months later, and recently attempted to shim it back together. It's glued now, but still secured with white duct tape just in case lol. Never again.

Looking good so far

Always exciting!!!

Jabba the bucket.

Happy Fathers Day to all my friends out there who are Dads of the Empire!

good stuff! practically a tutorial I always believe a project isn't yours until you bleed on it.

Well, awesome start with the trimming........... keep going!! The cover strip sizes are approximately, if I recall, 15mm for arms, and 20-25mm for shins & thighs. You look like you'll be proportioned fine, but if you need the spare room, do slightly larger strips in the back, and keep your front as close as possible to the above. It's a little harder with the arms, as there's not necessarily a front-back, so those just do proportional. Now glue glue glue!!! e6000 is your friend!

Good ol' security.

Patrick, welcome to the club.

Thanks for the tip, Jared! I had to use a teeny bit of testor's thinner on my ab buttons but only a teeny bit, as it can dissolve the ABS. Would not work in this case... at least not without scaring me. I use MacGuiar's Ultimate Compound for a shine (it's more like Novus, a compound), rather than polish, at the suggestion of someone very familiar with the products; I'm a little leery of using actual polish. There is the possibility of getting chemicals into the plastic and having it cause yellowing or something. But at least here it doesn't seem to be doing any harm I haven't tried using it to get paint off, though...