hupspring

Last week I ordered my wife a Hyperfirm B-grade DLT-19 for her Sandtrooper and it came in yesterday! (Technically it's for her, but there's no reason I can't play with it too!) It looks awesome for a B-grade, just a couple of minor issues that aren't even noticeable. I wanted to take a cool picture of it with my armor, but I didn't have time to suit up so instead I propped it up next to the mannequin. I also tried to put it on my "blaster wall" but it might be a bit too big. Guess it'll have to sit on the ground next to the E11s. As far as updates go (still waiting to hear back on my 501st application), I started creating a bracket made out of styrene that I'm going to mount the iComm, Aker and Memorex wireless receiver to behind the ab plate. I was going to heat bend it, but I accidentally broke it at one of the bends so instead I'm just going to cut out the parts and glue them together, and maybe use ABS paste to strenthen the joints. But since I told my wife that I'd work on her armor, I've been mostly doing that the last few days. I just need to finish up adding snap plates and making the strapping. Then we need to weather her helmet.

I decided I'll do some work on my wife's armor to fit her better, and put in the snap strapping system (I bought her someone's old sandy armor last year and it had a mix of snaps and velcro). So while I'm waiting to hear back on my application, my armor is on daddyquin. The mannequin torso is about 3 inches too high so I need to fix that one of these days. But walking into the room with this standing there is pretty impressive, even without boots or gloves. I'm considering taking my thighs apart and trimming more off the back, mostly for the upper section. There is a lot of room between my leg and the upper half of the thighs. From my photo shoot, you can see the left thigh looks way too wide: I have a feeling if my application is rejected it will be because of my thighs. Although what I haven't done yet is put in padding - it might help if I added padding to the outer leg area so that the thighs don't bump together as much on the inner side, and it could help get rid of that excess gap on the inner leg. And the other day at work I noticed someone did a little drawing in the conference room and figured people here would appreciate it.

I used the hot water bath method to get the ends of my butt plate to curve in more, otherwise they flared out. You look a bit skinnier than me but I have quite a bit of room in my armor as well. It helps when the belt is on tight holding everything together too.

And the application and pictures have been submitted! This wait is going to kill me! I suppose I should start fixing my wife's armor now to keep me occupied. Although I do need to set up the electronics still! Maybe I should start on that. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Airwolf was good but Macgyver will always be my favorite! Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Today I took my armor to work since my brother-in-law was going to take my submission pictures (he's a photographer/designer). I left the armor in the Husky bin in the car but brought the helmet in to my office. There were a lot of people who wanted to wear it, most of them not knowing how to put it on or what the helmet is made of. One guy forced his head into it without turning the helmet, which caused me to not allow anyone else to wear it. But most of the day the helmet sat beside me, giving me a nice distraction to look at. Later in the day I went to the studio and had my photoshoot. After the shoot I realized my left bicep somehow got turned and my right glove wasn't stuffed under the forearm, and I think the left shoulder bell tends to wander towards the back (although that might have been a result of the turned bicep). They should be easy things to fix. It was pretty fun doing different poses - now I just need to take the close up shots of the armor and send in my pictures!

I didn't notice the trooperbay ones had a message about using E6000 sparingly. I used a decent amount...maybe that was the problem.

I wonder if his are a different material than the trooperbay hand guards. I did get a set of his hand guards, maybe I'll use those instead of the trooperbay ones.

I wonder if it needed a longer cure time or something. I left it for 24 hours before putting the gloves on. I also cleaned the backs with isopropyl alcohol and sanded them down with 100 grit sandpaper prior to putting on the glue.

So the other night I tried to glue the trooperbay latex hand guards to my nomex flight gloves using E6000 to see if it would work. It did not. The glue stuck well to the gloves, but easily peeled off the backs of the hand guards. So now I need to clean off all the E6000 residue from the gloves (which is a lot harder than I expected) and then I'll try using CA glue. I wanted to have the hand guards glued on for today since I'm taking my submission pictures later today, but I'll have to use the Anovos plastic ones. I also haven't received my soft goods from Anovos yet, so I'm using the nomex gloves for my submission pictures - hopefully that won't cause an issue. Speaking of the Anovos soft goods, I checked the FedEx Delivery Manager last week and saw the package from Anovos was getting ready to be sent. Anticipated ship date: Tue 3/15/2016; Scheduled delivery: Sat 3/19/2016. Then on Monday the Scheduled delivery date changed to Pending, which it's still stuck at. They are toying with me!

The tears and traps look pretty good! I don't think I will be able to do as well as you did with my shaky hands.

I wonder if I could just put some ice on it for a while - there's no way the helmet is going to fit in my freezer!

Yeah mine is superglued on as well which is why I'm afraid to take it off. The entire area around the bottom screw is all superglued. If I try prying it off I'm scared that the crack will split even further, possibly ruining the ear. I think I'm going to put in a ticket with Anovos and see if they'll replace the ear.

I managed to get the velcro attached to the backs of the calves and got the belt all done! With that, I'm pretty much done as far as basic approval goes (and EIB too I think). Now I just need to find some time to take submission photos! I did run into a small issue today though - as I was putting velcro in the helmet to hold the hard hat liner and helmet pads, I noticed that the crack in the lower part of the right ear got slightly larger than when I first noticed it. I tried to use a hobby knife to carve out a bit of the ear around the crack that was touching the helmet in an effort to get some ABS paste around it. I didn't want to do too much carving. If you don't remember or haven't read some of my previous posts, you might be wondering why I didn't just take the ear off and fix it. Back on page 4 I mentioned how the right ear was glued on and I didn't want to try forcing it off due to that crack being there. The crack is probably due to the ear being glued on and not trimmed properly, so if you hold the helmet on the right side, it flexes that area where the crack is. So I took out my jar of ABS paste (the paste was still usable!) mixed it up and applied some with a toothpick. I tried to get underneath and apply some on the back side, but it was hard with such a limited space to work with. I put some on the front as well and will need to sand it down when it cures. Hopefully that fix will help prevent the crack from spreading, but I may try to get another pair of ears from Anovos when they start offering parts. Or I should complain since the ear was already cracked when I got the kit. Other than that, I'm still pretty excited to be done with the main part of the build. There is still more to do (add electronics and fans, adjust strapping as needed, make sure there are no sharp corners and return edges, etc) but it looks like the nights this week after work won't be seeing me sneaking off the garage to glue bits of plastic together.

My soldering iron is all black now since I didn't know I was supposed to wipe it down after burning holes in the nylon. Luckily it's a cheap soldering iron from a computer toolkit that I got for free a long time ago. Plus I've never used it for anything else before (I have no idea how to solder ).

That's a really cool looking sewing machine! I like your double snaps - I briefly considered doing double snaps but my hatred of making snaps made me do mostly singles. The only doubles I did were on the shoulder straps.

I went self hosting long ago after free photo sharing sites kept losing photos or going down for days at a time. A few cloud storage sites have also been closing down recently. Just make sure you keep multiple backups in different places - I may be a bit paranoid, but that's only because I've lost files in the past!

I wasn't able to do anything today (was busy at a steampunk outing - there was a Hasbro E11 that was steampunk-ified and looked cool and I totally forgot to take a picture). Last night I was able to do a bit of work though. The sniper knee is finished gluing and looks pretty good. I'm glad I didn't have any issues with it as I read a few other builds where it wouldn't stay put or line up correctly. I'm guessing the hot water bath really helped out in that area. I started work on my new canvas belt, marking the spots for the holes. I got a hole punch set from Amazon and tried using the 1/8" punch for the holes, but after the first hole it wouldn't punch through the canvas and plastic any longer. I was using a rubber mallet to hit the punch with, so maybe it wasn't using enough force. I didn't think of that, and instead just used the soldering iron to burn the holes. I also decided not to pull off the button covers on the plastic belt since there are so many horror stories of the pink epoxy breaking everything. So instead I used leftover cover strips and put in pop rivets to connect the strips to the canvas belt in the spots where the rivets in the plastic belt would have gone. Then I glued those strips onto the plastic belt in the correct spots. I almost forgot to slide on the drop boxes before gluing it together...luckily I remembered in time. I also used the line 24 snaps on the belt and had to replace the male snaps I had previously put on the ab since those were the weird sized ones supplied by Anovos. I must have measured wrong and had to redo one of the female snaps on the belt - it was about half and inch too close and had to be moved. And for the record, I ruined another 5 female snaps putting those two in (although two of them I had to pull out because I put them in the wrong way, and one had to be removed when I found out it was too close). The last thing I did was touch up the helmet frown, getting a little closer to the top and bottom of the teeth. I do agree that it looks better this way instead of showing so much white at the tops and bottoms. My goal tomorrow is to connect the holster to the belt, and get the velcro on the back of the calves. I'm so close I can taste it!

Congrats on finishing! You should have your TK ID in no time! I'm maybe a week behind you and soooo eager to finish!

I'm probably going to wait for a completed version from him as well since I've never soldered anything before. But I also got on the waiting list towards the end of November, so my wait might not be as long (fingers crossed). But if all else fails, I can learn how to do the soldering. I actually watched Echo solder some of the wires together at the armor party I went to last weekend and it didn't look too hard, it just takes time. After watching him put a fan together I at least know what I would need to do, but with my track record I'm sure I would solder at least one set of wires together incorrectly.

Echo just posted in his fan threads - he's going to be offering a kit version of his fans since he doesn't have enough time right now to assemble them all.

I trimmed a little more off the side and tried out a hot water bath for the sniper knee - after putting it in the water for about 15 seconds and then placing it onto the calf, the sniper knee fit much better with almost no gap at the bottom. So I glued just the middle area for now and clamped it how I want it to sit. Tonight I'll glue the sides down and hopefully it will all work out well and I won't need to pull it off and redo anything.

I'll do a little more trimming - I was scared I was going to trim off too much on that side, but looks like I can take off a bit more.

So I'm going to put the sniper knee on the left calf, but I want to make sure the placement looks correct. Is this good for the front positioning? Or should it be exactly centered to the cover strip? And is that gap under the bottom okay? I can't get it to lay flush without having the sides flare out. I already trimmed the right side of the sniper knee (the right side when looking down at your leg) in order to fit that side. I will probably start gluing it on tonight.

I used something called Apoxie Sculpt to stick the posts into my bucket that the lenses screw into. It's been a couple weeks now and I've screwed the lenses in and out about 4-5 times over that period and there has been no issues with it, so hopefully it'll last (this is my first time using Apoxie Sculpt, so it's kind of an experiment). I initially bought it to use on my Doopydoo's blaster to fill in cracks and holes, but I had some "green stuff" to use for that. I've never used Fix-it-stick either, but from the description I read, it sounds like there's less working time with it (it says it hardens in minutes). But otherwise it seems like it will do the trick.