bpoodoo

Asking for lid pics is like asking to see someone's baby pics - how could anyone refuse such a request! Here's a few of pics of the preassembled and finished helmet that came with the original full armor kit which I modified. I haven't worked on the separate helmet kit I later bought and received last month. Out of the box and my first mods (trim eyes, lift brow, remove teeth paint and repaint 4 per side with brush): Later, add brush painting of 5th tooth for each side (current state):

JawaJoe, I bought the full Original TK armor (including medium soft goods), all sitting in the same big brown ANOVOS box it shipped in. After waiting a year to get it, it's been sitting on my living room floor in the original untrimmed state. I bought it at the low prerelease price mostly because I wanted the helmet that was included. I'd already bought preassembled used AP armor from someone about my size, and it makes more sense for me to clean it up and modify it to fit me. So long story short, I could sell you my original pre-order armor the medium soft goods and everything that came with it, just without the finished helmet, for a good price. And of course it's in-hand and ready to ship. (I may be violating terms of this site by offering it for sale in this thread; I may need to put this in the For Sale thread instead). bpoodoo

Excellent work JawaJoe. Looks perfect to my eye. You painted that 5th tooth the same way I did. The ANOVOS mold is different at that location (more depressed) compared to screen-used helmets.

OK good - that works too. A chin strap I find works great to keep the helmet in place relative to your head (no bobble) even without padding. A chin strap would also tend to rotate the helmet upwards and away from the chest somewhat. Im not affiliated with trooperbay, but I have bought a couple of these before which work for me well and are easy to install. https://trooperbay.com/costuming-accessories/elastic-helmet-straps-with-snaps

Here's my go-to ear trimming I use when I can't quite visualize where to trim and to get a decent first cut quickly. A compass works great if you can replace all the sharp bits with plastic. Attach the helmet with screws. Set the offset between pencil lead and the spacer according to how much to trim. Trace around ALL of the ear keeping that constant offset, ensuring the spacer is touching the helmet at the same ear trace point where you estimate the trimmed ear will lay. This technique I find is accurate to within 1-2 mm, manual sanding afterwards to fine tune the fit.

How about a chin strap? It could help or make it worse, not sure. A chin strap attached to the ear screws would pull your head towards the back top of the helmet. Simulate this by pressing on the back top of the helmet see if that might make the fit better.

If it were a Rogue One helmet I'd say yes you'd want to have no gap between the ear and the helmet. But for OT helmets, having a gap is screen accurate. So to me it looks fine as-is. Compare yours to this screen capture from ANH; it's very similar. And yes the plastic is very thin at the base of the helmet at the front of the tubes. Cracks forming there are quite common with the finished ANOVOS TK helmets also. Overtightening the ear screws might add stress to that area. You might want to reinforce that seam and the surrounding area inside the helmet on both sides. Just be sure whatever you use is safe for ABS plastic and test it first on any scrap trimmings you have.

I should have said you still need to paint the frown and the ear bars and the vocoder even if you use the supplied decals.

Same here, just got mine two years after pre-order this month too. Complementing yours, here's my mini-review. The Anovos original trilogy OT Stormtrooper kit looks good and is a complete kit and even includes the newly updated mic tips. I don't see this available-for-sale anymore on the Anovos website, so if you got one this was probably a good buy. It looks like the two helmet pieces are pulls from the initial Anovos molds, not their updated 2017 version, but I'm not sure. Gone is the awkward hardhat-style head strap. Instead the kit includes foam pads wrapped in black cloth you install inside the top and sides of the helmet . This is a good update. It includes A New Hope Style decals, though more screen accurate for ANH would be to paint them and not use any decals. You still need to paint the frown in either case. In addition to the usual rectangular flexible green plastic for the lenses to be installed across the eyes from ear to ear, it also includes molded Hero style lenses (though they are smoke gray in color not green). The Hero version would have 3 rank bar bumps on the ears not four. Only the 2 ears (pretrimmed) with 4 rank bars are included. Very little trimming appears to be necessary perhaps just in the front corners of the cap and back , the eyes, and the teeth. FYI, Page 10 of the V1 instructions I downloaded from Anovos could lead someone astray as the placement of the drill holes on the wearer's left side show them too far forward (one is shown located on the back corner of the tear). I "corrected" this in the following photo:

Old post I know, but some new reference photos of screen-used helmets of both ANH Hero and ESB Stunt helmets are available in the book "Star wars, les objets du mythe (French)" by Patrice Girod and Arnaud Grunberg. Mr. Grunberg owns an extensive collection of props from the Star Wars saga photographed for the book. In it, the slightly bluish color of the traps and tears in the ESB decals is clearly evident. It differs from the "ANH gray" paint color on the ANH Hero. The ear rank bar of the ESB helmet is ANH gray and differs from the bluish color of the ESB tear/trap decal color. So, it's not the lighting using by Kershner in ESB that gives rise to the different hue of those decals. It's a different color. Photographs were uploaded from the book to another forum, but the authors asked they be taken down, so unfortunately I can't post the pictures here.

The main reason I wouldnt use Facebook for storing pictures is... because it's Facebook (social spyware). I use flickr now instead of photobucket. 1Tb of free storage (yes, Terabyte with a T). Can share individual images with html img tags with different size options for the same photo. Fast bulk and auto uploads. Good browser and app support. Only ? is what Verizon will do with flickr if and when they do buy Yahoo.

3-piece construction does appear to be the same as the MRCE / eFx PCR, given the seam locations. And like on those you can't easily change the brow height. I mean overall I'd say it's a clean design but not to me an artistic design. It does not evoke the look of the original Liz Moore sculpture, the graceful curvatures and transitions of the piece as a whole composition. Closer in overall shape to Luke's Hero helmet than a Stunt to my eye. But like others have said, the iconic Stormtrooper is burned into my brain so I'm irreversibly biased! Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk

A number of people share the same initial impression of R1. Percentage wise the R1 trailer is getting 6% thumbs down compared to the TFA trailer which got around 3% thumbs down. A statistic I'm sure Disney monitors. Of course that leaves a lot of people who do like what they see. I think the lines and shape of this armor did place a lot of importance on freedom of motion for performing stunts (or simply running) which you see a lot of in the trailer. The armor is segmented and cut so that wherever the body bends it will not constrain that motion. Which also means we see a lot of the black undersuit especially in action shots. And the sagging black diaper look of the FO trooper is back. No doubt they wanted to avoid the wardrobe malfunctions seen in some of the ANH blooper reels like the one where they're entering the detention cell block. Stormtrooper parts flying everywhere!

And the first foundry originally made khaki colored gooberfish ponds made of HDPE.

Regarding the missing holster, the FO stormtroopers didn't have a holster either. Their blasters were attached to a molding incorporated into the right thigh, as shown on my Battle Buddy here on casual Wednesday:

I think you hit the nail on the head. Nostalgia, tradition, legacy... things you cannot change without ruffling some feathers. R1 is set in the timeline of the original trilogy, and we expect to see the same costumes for the same characters. But that's not what we see here. Changing things up just because you can doesn't mean you should (i.e Special Edition versus original theatrical release). But I'll reserve judgement on whether these changes to the details are warranted; it all depends on the story. The Vader community might not be so understanding though if that costume changes substantially. Now some of this is just the reality of how the original stormtrooper costumes were produced: suboptimal materials, low budget, rushed, pieced together by an overworked (but Academy Award winning) costuming department... done well enough to get the shot on film. But that produced the nuance and character and variety of stormtrooper looks ingrained in our memory. With a big budget and the ability to make new costumes with more precision and consistency, like the FO stormtroopers, we may see these as too uniform, too identical. But of course that's exactly the way stormtroopers should look, but it's not the way it was. I like the freedom of trimming my ear a little differently, painting my frown a little differently, to make it unique, and still adhere to the CRL. But these stormtroopers, I don't know, I think it may be that they're going to all have to look the same. And it takes away some of my ability to personalize it and express some creativity in how I create my own costume.

I'd agree the 501st stormtroopers making an appearance at a hospital or a charitable event would be proudly sporting better fitting and better looking armor than what's shown in this promo picture. The Detachment Founder set high standards for costuming accuracy after all!

The promotional ANH Hero stormtooper shots were of Luke's costume. At least the helmet was. But The Chronicles promo shots of the ANH Vader costume after completion of filming did include a repaint of the ANH helmet ( it was really rough by the end of filming).

Great job Merusk! Took a while to load and kept crashing Firefox on Android, but eventually I was able to save the image. 3.0Mb not too bad. No holster... hmmm. Slides onto the massive cover strips? Maybe they will make use of the D-Ring as a method of attachment? Dangling from the oversized crotch piece perhaps? Who knows lol. Aww trooper18938 we're just having fun getting a head start on the rivet counts, even if they are subject to change. This may only be one variant. Those marketing folks are clever. Why buy one new costume when you can get two at twice the price? I have no problem with it being designed a bit for ease of mass production. At least there will be no excuse for not making them screen-accurate.

Why change the tube stripes For this trooper in water? Because they are gills.

Nice detail image of the helmet. Wow lots of changes. And here's a few more. The ear rank bars are more recessed, and more to the point, they aren't rank bars anymore! They are totally redesigned, looking more like a "comms" component. The tube stripes aren't curved. They are straight! Ah well, no need to double check which way to paint them or apply the decals (pointing to the back of the helmet). The one change I do like is how the vocoder (also probably not a vocoder anymore) has its tubes extending out from the helmet. Looks more like an apparatus for conditioning and providing breathable air. The mesh for the mic tips is slightly higher density. Are they mics, speakers, or air/water intakes, the mesh providing a first layer of filtering? Where, oh where has my OT trooper gone, where oh where could he be? Oh there he is. In a big brown box on my living room floor still waiting to be built. Perhaps not all these changes were made simply to facilitate making the costumes. Some thought went into these design details that may correspond with the unique capabilities of these stormtroopers.

What? No ear gaps? These helmets might be one piece. Frown may not have cut-out teeth. Could just be black paint. And they all look the same. Hmmmph. I guess Ben was right. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise.

Looking good. At this point would also be a good to have an idea of where you will want the ears to go. I often pick a movie helmet with similar assembly positioning and use that as a reference. How far back, how far up, how much rotation. Main reasons for doing it now is to be sure the holes you drill will be hidden by the ear, and if using rivets first, to be sure they don't overlap where the ear screws will likely go. You will want to be sure the ear is positioned low enough to curve all the way around to the bottom of the tube to cover up any discontinuity where the front and back halves of the helmet meet there. Hope that made sense.

Yep that'll work! I did have one helmet that started to split upwards from that point without it, so it's good you added it.

Well yeah it's just the undersuit showing on the shoulder after half his arm fell off. But it is black lol. Helmet not fitting too great either. Maybe this is the same guy who almost lost his helmet escorting Han Solo into cell with the others. He was using his right arm in that scene so maybe the strap from shoulder bell to shoulder strap detached and nobody noticed.