Daetrin

I think you look great! Hopefully fortune allows you to go to Celebration VII next year and I can buy you a beer. Great perseverance to see this through, and the results are worth it. EIB next!

Best analogy ever! Very well said, Mathias

That's pretty cool.

Buy a second one and give it a go. The reality is that some love it, some hate it. I did it on my first suit and regretted it ever since, and have kept my ab plate intact on my subsequent 3 suits. Other people swear it's the best thing they did. The best part is if you do it and hate it, you can simply buy a new ab plate, or try to glue the one you have back together. You'll never know until you try.

Well, in the end it's "what's it worth to *you*". My wife looks at my costumes and would through them all in the rubbish bins. If you gave her $50 for my Paradise limited run TE/TE2 double signature helmet from 2007, she'd be happy. A collector could pay $500. Markets can change too. At one time you'd have been happy to pay $1200 for an unassembled FX kit. This is a big reason why I created FISD - make the information more transparent so people understand what is out there. Ignorance is certainly not bliss.

Oh no, looks like rubbish. If you send it to me, I can ensure of it's proper disposition. ;-)

You'll need to sell that bucket to start their college fund I'm guessing May 23rd, 1:30am as that's my birthday and usually the mom knows about 2 months in, and it's 24OCT from your first post, so the day/time could work out well. GinoV2 all the way. What gender are your older kids? If you have 4 boys already, chances are it will be a boy, for instance. Oh, where' the fun in that? I'll predict you have a girl. You'd be like the Weasley's in Harry Potter (well, they had 6, but I'm guessing you stop at 5?).

Even if not 100%, you'll have gone further than 99% of all troopers, and you'll have something you can call your own. No one gets its perfect the first go, why put pressure on yourself? Create the best first one, learn, and iterate. Part of the fun of building props is learning and creating. Consider: Hyperfirms are not 100% "accurate" because you can't get a folding stock, or that the barrel doesn't have drilled out holes. Yet they are superbly popular because you can drop them all day long and they don't break, and they are otherwise very highly detailed. And, they are the lightest ones around.

The result of putting one's time in to learning a craft rather than video games. Wish more young folk would follow in this pursuit.

Is this true? Then, my game plan has changed... I have not applied for EIB or Centurion since I wanted to apply with a finished replica suit. With all the detailing, prop forgery style. If gaffers tape is not approved, then I think I should post my submission as it is, and only after being cleared I will really finish my armor. I wanted to take my TK to a higher standard than my TD from the beginning... Yes, this is true for every costume in the Legion, not just stormtroopers. There has ever been a Venn diagram between the 501st and prop replication, but while the overlap is very large they are not concentric circles. What you do with the costume after you get accepted is up to you, but realize that in order to keep the costume active it must comply with the CRL. The Legion does not tolerate Vaders with crappy paint jobs after all, even though that may be what the actual prop looked like.

In the end FISD has to be the home to *all* 501st TK's, whether they barely meet the CRL or go Centurion. In the end it's up to the suit owner to decide which way they want to go. Personally I am unbiased, I appreciate both the clean white TK that is as Eric mentioned, the acrylic cap TK as well as the person who is trying for a more used look. The goal of the 501st in the end is to capturing what a person sees while watching the movie, hence no gaffer's tape are allowed on approval costumes. If you watch the movie on a big screen (e.g. movie theater), what one sees is that some TK's look super clean (Death Star) some not so much (Tantive IV). I'm happy there are both.

Tim is correct. The goal of the list is that it would contain transparent information about 'conflict free' kits from reputable sellers. In other words, if you are starting out, it will provide you accurate and unbiased information, the vendors have a long history of providing quality product and honest service. And lastly, that the suits can be made 501st approvable. There are many makers of armor who are not on the list for those reasons, e.g. - The lineage cannot 100% be determined - The kits are of questionable or inconsistent quality, e.g. soft parts or spotty quality by the maker - The vendor provides poor service, e.g. never delivers, fails to deliver MTK has great service and quality kits, but criteria #1 has been elusive. As Tim said, you can buy other suits and still get in the Legion, but it's buyer beware at that point.

+1. My thought too.

It used to. Others would get EI first and then mod away.

Congrats, this indeed is a happy milestone.

+1 - thanks for sharing Paul!

If so, this looks totally boss. Who wouldn't want this armor?

Can you believe for a while I just used blue painters tape? No one can see it, so it's not a big deal. I've also simply used hot glue.

Well, looks right, flies right. The main goal is to have it look cosmetically correct. If you have really skinny legs for instance, trimming them all the way down will not look good, eh? If they fit right, you should be able to run easily, think playing laser tag. The garter system is good. On my first suit I actually had the thighs strapped to my ab plate. For some people, the downside of a garter is that it can slide down or be pulled down by the thighs. I saw one person actually make a harness really, picture a garter with two long straps that loop over the shoulders. This way the garter could only slide down a wee bit. Extreme? Possibly. Everyone's body is different, so what works for one won't always work for all. Andy's photo above is a good case in point, where he achieved a solution that looks cosmetically correct, even if it's not following a set of default measurements.

QFT...

All the same, great find on the photo

Correct, that's typically been the split for FISD vs. SpecOps. We keep the white armor based TK's...

LOL yeah, we used to call them "armor kisses" back in the day, so to say it's giving her "love" is pretty spot on.

It's gorgeous! It would be cool if you can dial it up/down from say laser pointer intensity up to max wattage. 20 watts if you ever get that high could so some nice engraving work, or cloth cutting...

LOL