Kredal

I think the single snap plus belt will be enough to hold it together, but I have extra snap plates if I need to add a couple more. (: This morning I cut down the plastic shoulder straps to the bare minimum around the rungs, and glued (super glue!!) little strips of ABS inside the first three rungs on the front to give more surface area to attach to the chest plate. I'll be making that attachment tonight or tomorrow probably. We're back in the workweek, so the build will slow down again. Cause that's how it works! The next major step will be attaching the shoulder bells to the shoulder straps, that'll take another person to get the measurements right, and then from there I'll be able to see how long to make the strap from the bell to the bicep, and if I need to cut anything from the bottom of the bell. (bell bottom, get it?) Then test-fitting thighs, possibly cutting from the top edge, and adding double snap plates to the front of those, then making really long straps to go up to a black duty belt I picked up at the surplus store... And then pictures for basic approval! Get that ball rolling! It sounds like it's currently a pretty quick process, better get it done before everyone gets their Anovos kits. (: I also picked up kevlar helmet pads to put inside the bucket... so I need to do that still. No biggie there, it'll just keep my head from swinging around... That's more of a "nice to have" though, and won't affect my "certification" levels. SOOOO CLOSE!

Shoulder straps! I used two snap plates side by side on the front shoulders. I know the left shoulder "should" be permanently attached, but I'm not ready for that much commitment just yet. Let's take this slow, ok? Anyway, I laid them out side by side on the bench, made marks on them so I knew which two went together, and which edges were facing, measured the distance between the centers, and used the now-familiar soldering iron to stab through the elastic straps. Oh! Back up! I had one shoulder taped at 2.5 inches, and one taped at 3 inches, so I decided to go for 2.5 inches on both sides. I think that'll work right. So I said "2 inches on the front, 2 inches on the back (glued down) and 2.5 inches in the middle. Good enough." I set the front snaps in 15mm from the end, like I've been doing with all my other elastic straps, and made a line 2 inches in on the elastic, and used that to position the front snaps on the armor, and glued them down. You can almost see the V in pencil I put on the snap plates. Once they had set for about 6 hours with the strap still attached, I was confident enough to remove the strap, and reposition the clamps. Hopefully this move doesn't bite me later with a loose snap plate. I covered the back 1/3 of the strap (up to the 2 inch line) with blue tape, and liberally applied E6000 to the face of it, and stuck it in place on the back shoulders, and used 3 clamps per side to hold them down. Overkill? No idea, I've never glued fabric before. So that's sitting until tomorrow. In the meantime, one of the butt snaps came undone. Like, the backing of the male part slipped free of the snap body. I'm all out of male snaps too, so that'll take another visit to Michaels. One of the screws from the body strapping system came undone too. So, my second repair will be unscrewing each one individually, and applying lock-tite. That'll be a fun night. Here's a random picture of the Sugru blobs over the split rivets. Not much to look at, but why are you looking inside my suit anyways? And here's a milestone I wasn't expecting to hit! I killed a bottle of E-6000! Luckily, I have more (and only 4 more snap plates to glue, inside the thighs, FSM willing.)

The hard green lenses are for Hero. There should have been a cardboard tube with green plastic film. That's what it comes with for Stunt. Trooperbay might have thicker plastic for sale. That's really weird that the ears pushed the top down. Did you have all three screws in on both sides before doing the ears? You really need all three in to keep the faceplate locked in a specific position you want. The three dimples on either side are for using BEFORE the ears. Only if one of those three screws interferes with an ear screw should you take it out for final assembly.

My wife helped me out with some shoulder strap fitting today (using blue tape where the shoulder straps should go, so I get an approximate measurement. Also finished the cod snaps and rivet while I had her available ( to hold up the armor while I banged on it with a hammer.) I'm wearing my "sexy pants" but a normal shirt for this... Shouldn't be too much of a difference, when you take in to account the full bib style neck seal. I REALLY like how the chest lines up with the ab on the side in this view. I can tell that the butt plate return edge is going to have to go, for any level of comfort there. The chest rides high on the ab here, but I think that has more to do with the strapping than anything else. Once I load it down with the Aker and iComm, it should come down a little bit. If not, I can replace the elastic loops in the front with shorter ones. (I knew it was too easy!) Side snap is in place, and there's a matching snap plate on the back, but it's still gluing, so I haven't made the strap to go between them yet. That's why the side is closed with tape. There's no strap, tape or otherwise, on the shoulder here, so the front and back plates are falling away. Can't go off this view for any sort of fitment questions. I just noticed, my helmet is watching me try on the armor. (: Not pictured, I also made straps to join the forearms to the biceps, as well as installed snap plates inside the shoulder bells and the outside of the biceps. I'll get straps made for those tomorrow before work, maybe! Now that I have the nominal distance between the back and front at the shoulders, I can make the straps and snaps for them, and work on the plastic cover straps which I still haven't touched yet. Oh, I covered the insides of all of the split rivets with globs of black Sugru to keep the rivets from biting into my undersuit or my skin. Wife's idea, but I'm happy about it! That cod rivet is too close to various things to mess around with! (:

If you're using E6000 glue, you can attack the edge between the cover strip and the plate with a sharpish scrap piece of ABS until the glue starts balling up, then you can grab it and pull it off... It's really satisfying when you get a long strip up at once. (:

I went to a little comic con today, saw a couple 501st members, no TKs though... but it got me remotivated to build armor, so I went for the biggest section yet: internal strapping! Using Mr. No Stripes' awesome kit: I started with the butt to kidney connection, and moved my way up. I had to keep repeating "strap, then screw" to remind myself to put the strap on the bracket before screwing in the second side. I only missed once. The center bracket is (duh) centered, and the outside ones, I went two inches in on the narrowest piece of the join (back and chest, basically), and just drew the line down to the other one, and made that my first hole. Supposedly, you're supposed to use that 2-inch mark as your center for the side brackets, but since this is fat-person-armor, they would be way off to the sides if I did that, so I adjusted for my body type. I used this video to learn the approximate locations, as well as how to line up the chest and ab plates: https://youtu.be/5jW6s9Izqsk Once I had all the holes drilled, I started assembly. Working on the back, I put all the straps in the butt plate, and screwed in one screw for each bracket on the kidney plate. From there, it was pretty easy to run the second half of each bracket through the strap and screw it down. I thought it would be very challenging, but the elastic is pretty stretchy, so it was no real big deal. It turned out that 5 of the screws that came in the kit didn't fit on the nuts... they were just cut wrong or something, so I made a run to Ace Hardware to look for replacements. I couldn't find the right size screws in pan head, so I bought 6 phillips screws... I used them for the ab plate, since that set will never be seen by anyone other than me. Don't tell anyone, they're not authentic! Shhh! Protip: Put the straps in the chest brackets, then run them through the ab plate. Since the ab sits inside the chest, it's easy to get to everything you need to. If you do the ab first, then try to attach the chest, you're gonna have a bad time. Once that was done, it was time to put it all together! I measured 10mm for the top and bottom of the ab plate (above where it turns into the cod), and took the halfway point between those two points for the third connection. Measured down 10mm, and I had my drill points. Transfered those points over to the kidney plate, and we're golden. Drilled holes big enough for the split rivets, and made 50mm long sections of 1" elastic. I drilled a couple big holes in a piece of wood 25mm apart, then used that as a template to poke through the straps with a soldering iron to make holes for the rivets. After making sure a split rivet would fit through them all, I came back inside... It was 90+ in the garage, and the soldering iron and heat gun didn't help matters. I also used a long piece of scrap ABS cut in half to make an internal support for the clamshell part. So it went split rivet -> body plate -> elastic -> ABS scrap -> washer. The internal ABS is just another protection for the elastic strap. I'm not sure if it's needed, but I saw someone else do it. I covered the heads of the rivets with tape, taped down everything internally, and had my wife hold up the armor so I could get in there with a screwdriver and hammer, and not worry about bending the armor. OK, enough typing, here's some pictures. It's really starting to look like a thing! I need to put on the shoulder straps, right side strap and snap, cod-to-butt strap and snaps, and that will be done. Then it's a matter of strapping up the limbs, and I'm ready to go!

Quick day today: Got the left thigh together and gluing the inner strips to the other half of the leg. Tonight I'll take it off clamps long enough to add the outer strips, then reclamp it all together. Added new snaps. I did have to move them in towards the center a little bit (maybe 1/4 inch change all told.) It's half-covering the bottom buttons on the ab. Right? I also pried off and cleaned the outside rivet covers, and moved them as far as they would go to the outside edges, while still covering the rivets. I'm NOT moving those.

Flipping the belt would put the snaps WAAAY too low. They're only 15mm from the top edge of the cloth belt, so upside down, the belt would cover most of the button plates. (: Really, adding new male snaps isn't that difficult, now that I know what I'm doing. Also, the new ones won't be impacted by the bottom edge of the ab plate where it returns to make the cod plate. That was the only super tricky part about the current ones. Anyways, it's too late now, since I went ahead and put on the holster. DO NOT USE FOUR FASTENERS UNLESS YOU'RE MAKING A HERO TK. CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED. Now that that's out of the way: I used this template: and just fudged the distance between the top of the holster and the bottom of the belt to allow room for the top two Chicago screws through the holster's leather. I drilled holes through the leather and the belt, cleaned up the extra cloth mess as much as possible, and screwed in the back side of the C-screws. Now I really can't do anything until tomorrow. Thigh is drying so I can't assemble it, ab button plate is drying, so I can't do the new snaps or start strapping the core pieces. It's also really hot in the garage, so I suppose I can take a break. Been out there most of the day doing this much. Got a TON accomplished today! Yay!

Thanks for the advice again, Chris! Luckily, I can do that without too much trouble. However, I realized that the belt would be going over a lot more surface area when it goes over the button plates, and that might (will!) impact where the snaps go. So that means I had to glue on the button plates, which I really didn't want to do until about the very end, to keep them from getting scuffed up too much. I might cover the buttons with painters tape while I'm doing all the strapping to protect them. Anyways, glued on the buttons. I'll install new snaps tomorrow after these are firmly in place, to see what needs to change as far as positioning goes.

I drilled holes and mounted them with the snap backings. I had to find a hard raised surface to hold the backing steady while I hammered. Tricksy! I think if I were to do it again, I would just rivet it in place like making snap plates.

OK, tackled the belt this morning. I thought "hey, it's a belt, how hard can it be? Turns out: this hard. There are a LOT of moving pieces here, a lot of different attachment points, and a lot to think about as far as order of operations. The plastic belt comes in at just under 4 inches tall, so I didn't cut anything from the top or bottom, or it would end up too skinny. I drilled 1/8 inch holes on top of the dimples that are molded in, and cut 1/2 inch off the corners at a 45 degree angle. I found the center of the cloth belt, marked it all, drilled out the same 1/8 inch hole, and did the same to the end holes. Done and done. Not so bad so far. I made cuts of 1" elastic for the drop boxes about 8 inches long, used my heat gun to melt the ends, and then figured out how low the holes would have to be in it to fit over the cloth belt to have minimal gap between the plastic belt and the top of the outside of the drop box. Guesstimate made, I used my soldering iron to poke holes through the elastic. Ended up smelling like fresh-from-the-dryer underwear, which is weird, but not completely unexpected. I drilled a 1/8 inch hole through the back piece, about an inch down (there's a mark on the back piece, but it seems way too high for me, so I moved it. Take that! Then I lined up everything, and used a normal pop rivet, with a washer inside, to attach the loop of elastic to the back of the drop box. The fronts didn't fit on by themselves, so I sanded the edges of the back boxes until they would fit. Didn't use any glue, they're held on by plenty of pressure. Repeated for the other side, and here you go! The next thing I did was attach snaps to the belt and to the ab plate. I figured out where the farthest-out ammo boxes were on the belt, and made a pencil line in the middle of those on the cloth belt. That would be the horizontal center for the snaps on the belt. I laid the belt on the ab plate where it needs to go (1/2 inch below the ab button plate cut-out thingy), and held it in place with magnets. I made marks on the ab plate where those vertical lines ended up, and figured out how low I could put the male parts of the snaps on the ab plate and still have the back snap piece fit into the plastic. Turns out, about 15mm below the top edge of the belt. Easy enough. Measured 15mm down on the belt, drilled holes, put female snaps. Put the male snaps where I decided they would go, and snapped it together. There was a tiny amount of leeway in the front of the belt, but when it's all put together, it should be stretched tight enough, so no worries there. At this point, I realized that the drop box elastic would go right through where the outside rivets holding the plastic belt onto the cloth belt would be. So I figured out EXACTLY where, and drilled a couple more holes with my soldering iron (making sure to mark L and R drop boxes, as the holes weren't centered in the elastic) From there, assembly could start. Riveted the center holes together, using a washer in the back. Then I slid on one of the drop boxes, riveted through the plastic belt, drop box elastic (front), cloth belt, drop box elastic (back) and a washer. Barely had enough room on the rivet to fit everything on, so held it all with one hand while squeezing the rivet gun with the other... Whew! (washer not shown below, but make sure you use one!) After that, I snapped it onto the ab plate, and tried it on for the first time! I glued on the rivet covers, and they're clamped down now. I still need to put on the holster, but that can wait until tomorrow. It's 1:30 now, and I haven't eaten anything yet today!

Great note, thanks! Fixed. Yay E-6000! (:

My first day of building anything in over a week! Yay! Got a lot done, but not a lot of pictures. Boo! Ammo pack is on the right leg. I used the paint stick method of bending it with my heat gun, that worked really well (almost too well, a couple of the bends went a bit too far, but it's pretty solidly attached to the leg, so no biggy. The speed rivets gave me some trouble. I've never used them before, and don't exactly have the right tool for the job, so I improvised. I used a big pair of pliers that could fit around everything, covered the outside edge of the rivet with a couple layers of tape, and another layer on the jaw of the pliers, but it wasn't enough to keep the pliers from marring the rivet. Hopefully a layer or three of white enamel paint will be enough to make it look not terrible. I used Tony's measurements on the outside edge, 10mm on the ammo pack, and 6mm on the thigh, and then wrapped around to the inside, pulled as tight as I could, and marked where to drill on the inside thigh. Squeezed on the rivet on that side, and a little E6000 over the knee, and that's done. Next I started on the other thigh. Did the usual measuring on the front, cutting down, trying it on while squeezing the back, taping that closed at an angle, trimming the back, yadda yadda, and got the inside strips glued in. Then I did up the thermal detonator. I drilled a small hole in the middle of the tube where the cover plate would go, in order to give air a place to escape when I put on the end caps.. otherwise it would be full of pressure (not much, but enough to keep the E6000 from behaving, probably. Anyway, the hole gets covered, so no problem. I test-fit the cover plate and the clips I got from Evilboy... turns out they wouldn't fit together nicely, so I trimmed a little bit from the back of the cover plate (closest to the round element, that won't be very visible), sanded the bottom of the plate, applied glue liberally, and plopped it down, centered between the end caps. Taped it up really tightly, and worked on the clips. I had some phillips head wood screws laying around, so I used them. I might get flat heads later, but these will work. I drilled pilot holes through the cylinder, one at a time, as I screwed in the screws. Really close to the end caps, of course. Here's some pictures of the "finished" product. Needs tape removed and painted screw heads, but anyway. Oh, and the whole thing is within spitting distance of 6.5 inches long out of the box, so I didn't mess with that at all.

Pictures! Front: Top: Bottom: Side: Front with measuring tape for scale:

I will try to get a picture of the AM2 chest that I got at the beginning of June, which should be the new mold. I haven't touched it yet as far as cutting or shaping, so it's just like it showed up. Will be a couple hours.

I just grabbed this picture from a random Centurion request thread: The top of the picture is the butt plate, with the really long piece between the legs shortened and rounded out a little, and the bottom piece is the cod, with the snap/rivet about 3/4 of an inch away from the end of the curve. So that's what I plan to do. (:

Welcome to the AM 2 club! I'm really happy with the kit, I'm sure you will be too!

Hey Jonathan, when you pull the trigger, remember your Garrison Tyranus pals when you have your own coupon code to give away. (: *hint, hint*

This weekend and the rest of this week is threatening to be crazy busy, which means very little time for armor-building. And looking at what I have left to do, it's making me crazy thinking how close I am, but still need lots of dedicated time at the bench, that I'm not getting! - Do left thigh (cut, fit, glue) - Cut and attach ammo pack to right thigh - Trim butt plate (bottom pokey bit), back, and chest return edges (at the top and top sides) - Cut squares out of kidney plate - Strap together all of the body plates with clips and elastic bands, and make clamshell opening - Make straps to go between all the snap plates everywhere - Do the shoulder straps, sew in snaps for arm assemblies - Glue on ab button plates - Make the belt assembly with plastic belt and drop boxes - Make thermal detonator assembly - Fit and adjust as needed - Sand edges, Novus outside everywhere - Take all the pictures! Rough estimate looks like 10-20 hours of work, spread out as I wait for glue to dry and stuff... AHHHH

Bring a scrap of abs to the hardware store and look for plastic sale signs that come close to the same shade and thickness. Just make sure it's not printed on both sides.

As Brandon said, outside strips are plenty... I put inside strips to cover up the cuts between pieces that are more likely to dig into skin, as well as provide a little bit more structural support. For the forearms, line up the wrist ends, and trim the elbow ends to line up the inside and outside. I attach them, add on cover strips, then run a Dremel across the joint to get the two sides smooth across the gap. Think of what part of a piece of armor an outside spectator is likely to see the most of. Generally, it's the top end of anything below chest height, and the bottom end of anything higher. (Forearms are a special case because you're pointing them out, when holding a blaster or just waving)... Anyway, once you pick out which end will be seen the most, that's the end that you should make look the best, given the choice.

When they mentioned 3d printing out of resin, I think they're using SLA, which is a light-activated resin, which is more expensive, but capable of much higher-resolution prints than a normal 3d ABS or PLA printer... Here's the leading personal printer... not big enough for helmets, but you get the idea: ------------------

I second the call for AM2! Great armor for bigger folks like us at a great price!

Alright, I've got the bug now. Anyone have a 10% off coupon for a shadowtrooper? With the extra flash on the armor, I'm more confident that I can make it work for me... also, with ABS, I know I can make paste (even black paste!) to do any shimming I need to do. Please PM me if you've got a code to use, and I'll pay it forward to the next person who asks! Thanks!

Got the first thigh cover strips gluing. I stuck with 25 and 30mm since that's what's on my shin armor. It'll look good, I promise. (: I also cut the end off the cod plate, and started the curve. There's an indent in the rounded part at the bottom, I'm not really sure if that's the cut line or just an artifact of the mold, so I cut well beyond that. It's not cleaned up at all, so it's still rough. I just wanted to make sure I could fit in it and the kidney plate without needing to shim. Survey says: Yes! I taped up one side to act like the elastic clamshell, and put on the kidney and ab/cod combo, and the other side comes almost exactly to the right place. With an elastic snap and a belt on that side, it'll fit wonderfully with no trimming or shimming. Horray again for AM2! (no pictures of that test fitting, sorry. Maybe later) I painted up the ab buttons too. Put down the templates, did a coat of nail polish, then pulled up the CRL and painted according to the diagram. (Oh, I trimmed the plates yesterday. Cut down to just the edge of the pyramid they come on, and then lined it up with the button plate spots on the ab armor to get final cuts... cut there, then sanded the edges smooth.)