camprandall

Excellent! Take lots of pics.

I have a general comment in that the classic TK is a bit more specific about what some of the components and locations are and it might be good to try to be consistent with the language used there. If we look at this as something someone might read without having prior knowledge of the components and areas in a classic TK they may not quite understand. Here are a few examples where I expanded using similar language to the classic TK CRL. Take it or leave it. Before Each tear is solid black Proposed Each tear (area beneath the corners of eye lenses) is solid black Before A single silver colored aerator shall be present on the left side After A single Aerator/Hovi mic tip (cylinder on lower right side of the chin) is silver or painted silver.

For being fabric, that's a pretty nice ribbing!

Thanks Charles! And congrats on getting a kit! The fun awaits...

These small ones make me think about custom action figures.

I'm liking this much better! I just need to sew a tab on each to keep it from sliding, but I think having these a little more snug and attached to the underarmor will give more flexibility and my seams should hold up real nice. Sweet!

Ok, I re-glued the arms today and I suspect this will hold much better. I'm using the right cement and I have a much better glue surface. After cutting the gaskets because they were too big around, I lost my good glue tab because I was just left with the ripple edge. What I did this time was take a strip of the cut ribbed gasket and use it as the backing tab to join the seam, which gives great surface area and a real nice tight seam. We'll see how it does after it fully cures. I glued one edge first. I then glued the second edge carefully, trying to get all the ribs to sit snugly inside the other ribs. Final result.

A couple things to note with the forearms. 1) Definitely remove as much return edge on the wrists as you can because they're a bit long and dig into the wrists. 2) I would back the seam with either very thick ABS or else use JB Weld plastic weld or something to do the inside seam because it's so hard to get your hands through the holes at the end that the pressure puts a lot of torque on the bondo. It probably depends on your hand size, but mine has been tricky. 3) Make sure your seams are perfect before gluing on the greeblies. It's a major pain to fix/cleanup once those are on there. What a great resource! Thanks for all the work everyone.

Kevin, in your experience is there a major downside to using clear coat if we were to also apply it to the helmet? I know it can be harder to fix scratches than with regular paint, but I'm also having to do a lot of polishing after troops because of all the marks on the paint. It would be nice to reduce that.

I got my new rubber cement in so in the next couple days I'm going to redo the seams on the elbow gaskets and probably tighten them up while I'm at it. I really liked how the knees worked attached to the under armor so I'm thinking of doing the same thing with the elbows. It's easier to put on that way and I'm hoping it maximizes the room in the forearm as well. I'll post pics when I'm done.

That's funny Tim, because that's indeed very similar! Oh - and congratulations! Exciting to see new waves of TFAs coming!

Looking cool!

Yeah, if you check out the first posts, you can see all the gazillion pieces in their glory.

Well, I finished my first troop with the latex gaskets and here's my feedback. 1) The mobility and comfort is MUCH better! I was in the kit from 8:45 to 2 - over 5 hours - and the main discomfort I had after over 5 hours was just the weight of the fiberglass helmet. I was also able to take my helmet off several times for our panel and to get a drink of water. Heck, I even went to the bathroom twice with my snap/velcro cod piece and the better flexibility. Very cool! 2) The glue I used didn't quite hold up in all areas so I must not have used the right stuff. The seams Wyatt glued around the armpit held up great, but the inside of my biceps started coming apart a bit after a while. 3) Because these gaskets are so stretchy, they tended to work themselves out and sag a bit in a few areas so I need to make them more secure. they particularly started sliding down the shoulder a little bit, but should be easily fixable by attaching an elastic strip that goes across the top behind my shoulders. I'll start with a few of my favorite pics from trooping and then some clips that show the gaskets sliding a bit. Knees and elbows did pretty good! Shoulders started to sag a bit so this is where I just need a strap on top and tighten the chest strap to keep it tucked in nice.

I've had the same experience on other projects with Rustoleum. No amount of precaution, curing, etc prevented the random spiderwebbing. It wasn't the Ultra coverall stuff, but Rustoleum routinely crackled with the exact same type of paint.

What's the status on this? I'm very interested to see how this options works out as well. Thanks for your efforts! EDIT: Ok, I didn't realize there was just an update. Any idea on price range or timeframe for fulfilling orders?

Hey Dave! It was great to meet you too! Glad to hear you're doing one of these.

Basically the hole needs to be bigger in diameter so that it's not so tight around the leg.

The iTrooper comes with proprietary gaskets and glue and a helmet that you don't get to assemble and really shouldn't take apart without taking it to a special lab. All strapping is hidden and shrouded in mystery. I think the DroidTrooper would come with 427 pieces of various ingredients that you can configure however you want, but you'll need to spend two days unlocking the package so you can do so. The WinTrooper will just give you all the parts in the form of white squares and you'll have to figure out how you prefer to arrange them to look the way you think it should look.

I think there are a lot of good points being made here, but there is a piece missing. I think we need to separate the vendor from the product. There are a lot of arguments being made on both sides that seem to be a bit tied to opinions about the maker, which is clouding the discussion. What I think is that the suit alone - regardless of how ANOVOS or anyone tied to them wants it to be perceived - is pretty darn accurate but also not 100% identical to screen used suits. The edges aren't as sharp for sure, but that's not really in dispute because we're talking about the much more affordable vacu-formed vs injection molded. This is also true of our current clone armor that is a representation of a CGI suit, and many many other costumes that aren't made in exactly the same way as the original. The real issue is that it is a suit that is accurate in appearance, and it is available to us and we've done the work we always to do to build it well and fit it to ourselves. This seems to make it qualify for an initial CRL and approval process, as Wyatt seems to agree with. No one here is talking at all about instant approval for ANOVOS purchases - we all built these things and it took a ton of work - and no one is saying that we can't possibly get more accurate. Leaving confusing and contradictory ANOVOS rep quotes out of the conversation because again, it doesn't matter what how they want the 501st to perceive this - all we're talking about here is a bunch of 501st members who built and fit accurate armor kits that have a very close resemblance to the screen-used suits we've seen. I don't care how it affects ANOVOS at all - I just want the process to be consistent with how we approach approval and from everything that I've seen that's been laid out, we have far better reference than we've had in the past for most of our CRLs and we have better sculpts than we've had in many cases over the years. Since we have that excellent reference material, which is the primary requirement for a CRL (not a release date of the movie), let's get this initial CRL done so that the hundreds of members who have built or will be building these know what the expectations are. Let's then have separate conversations about what methods we could use to refine the accuracy further, which is admittedly very intriguing stuff.

You probably won't be able to stick it to the armor because it's not big enough around. I've got it at max size and there's still a sizeable gap all the way around and they're tight on my knees. I think they need to be made longer (to create a bigger diameter) to correct that issue.

Here is a better shot of a knee.

Glad to be of help! It's one of the saving graces of that crazy rushed chaotic build process. Being able to help others is a good silver lining because I've avoided a lot of problems myself on other suits because of people's build threads. Troopers helping troopers!

Yeah, I think it's less about making them shorter (mine are fine too) and more about a design that is contoured in a way to make it very hard to resize.

I agree. This is one of the last few headaches with this armor. There's no way to make it comfortable without rotating the forearms so that they are somewhat out of position.