Nihilius

Haha, Thanks Mathias. I had some E6000 on the sides of the knee ammo belt but it apparently came loose at some point. Snaps between the belt and ab plate is going to be a must. The belt seemed to be working great till I holstered the blaster, then it just wanted to sag.

Just submitted my pics for 501st approval! I did a quick little photo shoot yesterday and despite the minimal trimming around the joints I have pretty good range of motion. I mean I can sit and kneel without any real difficulty. Other than the shoulder pads that keep wanting to rotate back and the slightly oversized butt plate I'm all ears for any suggestions!

Slowly but surely I'm getting this armor done. However, due to laziness I went ahead and hit the vocoder with gloss black (I didn't want to do a hobby store run for a single paint pot). I think it looks pretty good! I just won't be buffing it any time soon. I also fabbed up a couple TD clips out of a strip of 1" x 1/16" aluminum. They are attached to the PVC tube with no.10 flat head wood screws. If they ever pull out or anything I'll just drill out the PVC a little more and use machine screws w/nuts.

Dang... Hmmmmmm... Anyone know any enamel paint strippers that won't damage resin mic tips?

Hmmmmm, I was pretty sure that the ANH vocoder and hovis were gloss black and I already painted the mic tips. I think I'll stick with that so they match (though I definitely prefer satin black as a general rule). Maybe on the next build!

The stuff I have is like a 2 part putty that you knead together. It came in a stick of white putty wrapped in a grey/silverish putty. I think it heats up a bit when mixed but not enough to melt the abs, and I'm hoping it's workable enough to give it a little style along with function.

Thanks for the heads up Steve. Mike from my garrison hooked me up with a some two part plastic jb-weld type stuff that I'm going to use to back the mic tip area of the helmet. I was even debating trying to sculpt it to look like the backside of a breather filter or something techno-y. Man... I've been having too much fun with this. I want to start building another kit and haven't even finished this one yet!

Thanks guys! I did end up riveting the snaps to the belt and was able to spend a few minutes painting the helmet. Just need to install the mic tips, paint some stripes, paint the vocoder then the outside of the helmet should be ready to rock!

Woohoo! I found a local leather guy that hooked me up with some 4-5oz black dyed through leather and some 6-7oz veg tanned for straps. I ended up with enough for 2 holsters and gave it a go tonight. If you ignore the wavy stitching I think it turned out more than acceptable! My biggest issue was that I had to run the sewing machine full throttle to pierce the leather but it was a real trooper and got the job done. After that, since the sewing machine was already out I decided to do another belt since I didn't like the first. This one is 4 layers of white canvas (duck cloth, whatever) with a single strip of 3" white elastic in the middle. I quickly realized after this that my snap pliers can't reach the center of the plastic belt. We'll see... I would still like to be able to disassemble the belt without drilling out rivets. I think I'm very close to submitting for 501st approval!

Haha, the tube stripes weren't too bad. I'm more nervous about painting the tears and temples. Free-handing those straight lines is definitely not something I'm looking forward to. Okay, I am really looking forward to it but it's still going to be nerve racking since I don't want to use templates. Last night I used a sewing machine for third time ever. The first was in middle school, the second was a poor attempt at a TK belt and round three turned out this little zippered neck seal. At work we set up the tube cutter for the first time in about a year so I figured I'd take advantage and cut a set of DLT-19 and E-11 barrels on the off chance that I decide to build a more substantial blaster. I didn't have any aluminum tubing on hand so they're just made from 1.5" ERW. I'm getting pretty close to submitting for 501st approval. I still need to paint the helmet detail and ab buttons, build a thermal detonator, assemble the belt, stick on one final thigh cover strip and get my hands on a holster (Tandy would only sell me huge pieces of leather so it wasn't cost effective to make it myself ).

I had no problem heating and narrowing the torso and kidney and I will probably bring them in a bit more. The butt plate was going smooth until I hit the warping temp of the plastic. Right now I'm trying to use doubled elastic and nylon web strapping to pull the butt plate to match the kidney though I've found that starts to limit my movement (sitting). Once all is said and done I'll probably heat it again after it's completely trimmed and just be really careful with the heat gun.

It's been a while since the last update but I've made some progress despite being out of town. Most of the build will be in a later post but I finally started detailing the helmet and was so stoked that I had to post a couple pics. I picked up some Meguiars Ultimate Compound and went to work on the helmet. After it was all polished up and cleaned I went about masking the tube stripes. I referenced a couple pics on starwarshelmets and layed down some 3M painters tape for the tops/bottoms of the stripes to keep them nice and even. Once I was happy with the position carefully pressed the edge down with the shaft of the paint brush to prevent paint bleed. I found that I had about 3" of space to work with and marked the tape every 1/4" for a total of 13 stripes. Starting with the front I began painting the stripes. The front few stripes I leaned forward and progressively made them more upright as they approached the ears. My brush was a little to thin to do the stripes in one strok and it took two coats to get complete coverage which is why the stripes aren't an even width. I did strokes both top to bottom and bottom to top to get the paint flush with the painters tape and give the stripes a crisp edge. My painting skills aren't nearly as clean and even as they used to be but I like how they came out. I hope they're in about the right position. I believe in "Ready... Fire... Aim..." as much as "Measure twice, cut once". To be continued...

You're right Travis, the bells do need some trimming. Once everything is together I'm going to have a dremel day and take all of the return edges down to where they need to be.

Thanks Eldrik! Your build looks awesome. I'm amazed how quickly everything came together for you seeing as how it's your first build. I've been keeping an eye on your E-11 build Solcar and it looks great! Can't wait to see it painted.

Thanks Nick! That's a bummer about the kitchen. I've only had one boil over and thankfully 5 gallons of beer lasts me a while, especially with options! I got the itch to get my armor hanging off my body and made some good progress. The torso is about 80% strapped. I need to connect the bells to the shoulder elastic add a happy strap between the cod and butt and finish the but to kidney and it should be just about good! I'm going to leave the side velcro for a little while and see if I can make the suit fit better before adding the split rivets and snap. Sidenote: The Hyperfirm E-11 I picked up is a killer piece of hardware. That's all for this week! I also want to thank everyone here at the FISD. There's so much good information available that I haven't had a reason to start any question threads! I think that's hurting my post count...