hupspring

That's an interesting idea too. I'm making a list of ideas to try out when I start working on my helmet's interior. Just need to finish the rest of my armor first!

The ones I got are "Brass Machine Screw, Plain Finish, Flat Head, Slotted Drive, 3/4" Length, #4-40 Threads". I don't know what the correct length is supposed to be, but 3/4" looks like it will work. I also got brass #4-40 nuts and washers as well since I don't have any.

I may try to get one of those cheap rear view mirror cameras and play around with one, but I do like that Cool Glass idea. Too bad it costs so much! I wonder if I could make some kind of periscope and avoid electronics altogether.

Here's a random question that I came up with while wearing my helmet around the house. I wanted to see if anything was at my feet and was trying to look through the frown holes, but it was hard to see anything. There wasn't a way to look down besides bending over at the waist and tilting my head down pretty far. But below the frown area, there's a decent amount of space and I was wondering if anyone has tried to mount a small monitor of some type in there? I was thinking it could be hooked up to a small camera that could be mounted somewhere in the chin area pointing down in front of the trooper. So if you need to see what's directly in front of you by your feet (stairs, small children, dogs, etc.) you could just glance down at the monitor. I'm not the best at implementing ideas like this without references, so has anyone out there tried something like this before? Or see any negative side effects to doing it?

I didn't get much done tonight but I did manage to get another outer cover strip glued. This time to the rear of the right thigh. I had to use a bungee cord to help keep the thigh rounded which helped the cover strip glue evenly to both sides of the thigh. The bungee cord is just adding a small amount of pressure - I would have put a couple of books on top, but I couldn't get them to stay in place. And since I'm done gluing the snap plates to the inside of the armor, I cut a few lengths of nylon for the butt/kidney connection. I used the stove top to singe the edges and probably this weekend I will break out the soldering iron to burn in some holes for the snaps. This week will probably be gluing the front cover strips on the thighs, and maybe painting the ab buttons.

Definitely go with E6000 if you're not experienced with this kind of thing. I've already had to tear apart a few pieces and wouldn't have been able to do that without really messing up the armor if I didn't use E6000.

My 3 year old is also obsessed with those videos! He's happy enough with regular plastic easter eggs that I put random toys into, then he'll open them all up and pretend to be surprised.

I was going to start gluing the outer cover strips on the thighs today and was able to put the rear one on the left thigh, but the rear right one wouldn't sit flush. It wanted to sit on either the inner or outer half, which meant half of the cover strip would be sticking up a little. I ended up pulling off one of the thigh halves from the inner cover strip and re-gluing it. I think when I glued it previously, it wasn't seated properly causing the issue. Hopefully re-gluing it will fix that. I'll find out tomorrow. The bicep hooks turned out pretty nice and I'm happy with them. I still need to decide if I'm going to leave the tops of the biceps how they are or trim them so it's more flush. I've seen pictures of the biceps both ways, so I'm guessing it's personal preference. I was going to save the helmet modifications until the very end, but I've been jumping all over the place and decided to disassemble it today. I'm going to use the four ear screws for the thermal detonator as suggested by gazmosis in his helmet rebuild post, so I had to find the correct ear screws. I ended up buying a pack of 100 screws from Amazon...I think they are the correct ones! Since a lot of the visible screw and rivet heads on the armor are painted, I put them on a piece of styrofoam, labelled where they are going and what color they need to be, and painted the heads. I used the white gloss and black gloss Humbrol paints that I got from trooperbay. This is just one coat of paint, I will probably put another coat on tomorrow. When I took everything out of my helmet, I tried to remove both ears. One was easy to take out, but the other (the right ear) was glued in at the bottom and there is a small crack in the ear. I don't know if they added the glue because of the crack, or if the crack happened after the ear was already glued in. I don't want to try prying the ear up since the crack might get worse or even snap off the bottom portion of the ear. Which is unfortunate because I wanted to try reducing that ear gap a little bit. I know gaps are fine, but that gap looks too big to me. I may work on the helmet this week, and I definitely want to get the outer cover strips done on the thighs. But I'll likely do some more jumping around and surprise myself by working on something completely different.

My support pieces for the split rivets between the ab and kidney are glued in now, so I drilled out the supports. Once the rest of the snap plates are done drying on the kidney I'll get to work on measuring the strips and getting them riveted in! I might use some of the elastic supplied with the Anovos kit. After getting the remaining snap plates clamped on, I decided to make some bicep hooks to hold the strap on the shoulder. After reading various methods to make the bends, I decided to use the gas stove top to heat the pieces - I based this method on Navajo Bro's thread where he used a lighter for 3 seconds. I marked the spots on each strip where the bends were going, put the piece over the flame of the stove for 2-3 seconds, then used a metal ruler to bend the piece on the first line 90 degrees. I did the same for the rest of the bends, but going the correct direction and angle (more or less). They came out pretty well minus a couple spots where I put the strip too far into the flame so the sides melted a bit (fixed with sandpaper). I glued them onto the biceps and I'll see if they work tomorrow after they dry. I didn't actually use the size that others suggest - it seems like 20mm+ is suggested, but I had two strips ready at about 15mm so I used those. My bends aren't the best (especially the first one I did), but they get the job done. Also accomplished today: I glued the snap plates onto the tops of the thighs from the Thigh Garter System I recently picked up, which is pretty awesome I might add. After doing all this snap plate gluing, I really want to put this armor on! It'll look so much better without all that blue tape holding things together!

Good idea with bending the inner cover strip on the thigh, I wish I thought of that! The lip ridge of my thighs have a slight gap and I'm thinking of just sticking a small piece of ABS in that spot on the inside.

Yeah I'm just going to work on everything else and then revisit the shins when I'm close to finishing. I don't even want to think about them right now

Not much to update as I'm still gluing on snap plates. I ended up ordering a few more clamps, and I also got a package from Trooperbay today with the Humbrol paints and flexible hand guards. I'm going to attach the hand guards to the rubber gloves from Anovos whenever they arrive, but I also bought some Nomex gloves that I'll probably use for trooping. I trimmed the plastic hand guards more since the trim line still made them pretty thick. I also used the supplied velcro and loop for the hand that came with the kit. In the future I may get another set of flexible hand guards and glue them to the Nomex gloves. I might cut more on the plastic hand guards too - they still seem a little thick, especially compared to the flexible ones. Back to the torso parts, I decided for the connection between the ab/kidney that I'm going to use a piece of plastic under the split rivets for support. I measured and cut out a piece from the no parking sign then sanded it down to avoid sharp edges. Then I glued it into place - one on the ab side and one on the kidney side. After the glue sets I'll use the existing holes that I already drilled in the ab and kidney to drill out the support pieces. I had to go all magnets on these since the clamps were busy holding down snap plates. So far the butt and back have their snap plates glued on. The middle one on the back kind of got moved a bit and somehow I didn't notice until after I took off the clamps. I just re-positioned the middle snap plate on the kidney to line up with it. I still need to get the outer cover strips on the thighs and then the ammo pack on the right thigh. And since I got the correct paint colors now, I want to get the ab button plates painted then get those glued onto the ab. And build the thermal detonator. And fix the belt. And figure out the calves. And work on the helmet. So much to do still!

So I heard about the mismatch issue with Anovos' instructions on the calves. I checked mine, and I have the same issue others are reporting. The left calf stays closed and the bottom overlaps about a quarter inch. If I take the blue tape off the right calf, it will open up and have a 2 inch gap. My problem is that when I was trimming the calves, I didn't trim evenly on the left, especially the left inside piece (which is actually supposed to be the right outer now). So I'm not sure how big the right calf will be if I do the switch - it will most likely be smaller than it is now. I'm going to put the calves on the back burner for now and move on with everything else while I think about what I'm going to do. With the calves on hold for now, I just need to glue the cover strips onto the thighs to be done with the legs. But before doing that, since I'm eager to start on the strapping, I made all of my snap plates (using nylon pieces from Redforce) and arranged them on the torso to see how I want them laid out. Once I decided where they would go, I set out to glue some of them down. I used all of my clamps and quite a few magnets but was only able to get seven snap plates gluing at once. I could do a few more using just magnets, but I like how the clamps hold the nylon down better. I think I'm going to use nylon straps for the torso since everything fits pretty well if not slightly too large. And for the wrist to bicep connection I might scavenge some of the elastic from the ones supplied in the kit and use the snaps with those.

I ended up trimming the button plate to match the tapering of the spot where it will go. Looks a lot better.

I'm going to need to take a closer look at mine tonight. Good thing someone noticed this issue!

Nice idea using a velcro strip for mounting stuff, it looks really clean. I'm saving the helmet for last to see how others do theirs so I can steal ideas.

Question on my ab button plate: since the spot where the ab button plate goes tapers (it gets wider towards the bottom) should I taper the button plate as well? Right now my button plate has about a quarter inch of trim all around, but when placed on the ab, it doesn't line up well. You can see how much extra space there is at the bottom (left and right sides), and the top is right at the edge. Should I trim more? Also, has anyone else noticed random spots of colors in their armor? I just noticed a few spots of blue and red on my ab piece. If you look at the picture below I marked two of the most noticeable spots, but there are a few other blue spots as well. I already peeled off the plastic sheet and rubbed at the spots with a wet paper towel which did nothing. Most of these spots will be hidden anyways (that blue one will be under the belt and the red one is behind the four button plate) and the ones that aren't are fairly small, but I was wondering if this is on anyone else's Anovos armor.

Although the drying time sucks, I'm so glad I'm using E6000! I'm prone to making mistakes, so no CA glue for me!

Well I was able to measure and cut a new inner cover strip for the front of the second calf and get that glued on. I'm glad I was able to catch that and not waste a day of gluing the wrong thing!

Hah right after I posted my update I looked at the last picture and noticed that the inner cover strip on the thigh that was gluing is on the rear...which shouldn't have an inner cover strip. Thinking back, when I put that cover strip on I had to cut it shorter and thought that was weird but didn't think any more of it. The reason I had to cut it short was because it was sized for the front of the other calf! So I ran to the garage and pulled off that strip. I need measure and cut a new one and glue that in. Maybe I'll be able to do that after dinner.

I was able to make it to an armor party yesterday and met some cool people. I also got some good advice and feel much more confident in what I need to do. My wife and I will probably be going to the next armor party in a couple of weeks as well. Aside from the arms and legs, I wanted to start doing some torso work. Some of the advice I got yesterday was concerning torso fitment (similar to Germain's advice above), and I've started with the ab/kidney connection. I used ukswrath's tutorial for measurements and drilled the holes. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to add an additional piece of ABS for support, and if I'm going to use nylon webbing or elastic to connect the two sides. I may wait for ukswrath to get to that part before I do it. I also trimmed the ab button plates, removing the return edges. I didn't realize that the spot for the larger plate on the ab is tapered - it's about 5mm wider on the bottom than the top. I left 1/4" trim all around the larger plate, so I will probably need to taper it to match the spot where it is glued to. Or should I bring in the trim to maybe 1/8" or a little larger? And of course it's not a real update without some actual gluing! I finished one thigh with inner cover strips, and glued one side of the two halves together on the other thigh. I also have a calf with both inner cover strips in place. I figure at my current pace I should be done with the legs maybe around this time next week give or take a couple days (not counting the backs of the calves). I was also able to start gluing the black elastic band that goes over the biceps onto the shoulder bells. One side on each shoulder so far. I think I will start hammering the snaps into the nylon snap plates when I have a few minutes to spare each night just to get something more done.

Here are some updates for the past couple of nights - more measuring and gluing! I measured and cut inner cover strips for the calves and the outer cover strips for the thighs. I also glued the front of one of the thighs together using the inner cover strip. When gluing it together, I put the end clamps on then all of the magnets, then I realized that the two halves weren't closing properly. I should have put on painter's tape before putting on the magnets to hold the two halves together which is what I've done on other pieces. But I was able to put tape on afterwards and it still worked out well (it just looks messier). The cover strips are all done on the forearms now, so I want to connect the forearms to biceps to shoulder bells. I set them up on my duct tape mannequin to see how it's looking. I'm going to try to make it to an armor party tomorrow to ask some fitment questions, but I also want to see if anyone here has some advice. If you look at the side, the shoulder, bicep and forearm match up. But if you look at the front, the cover strips on the bicep and forearm don't match up. Is this okay? It's like this on the other arm as well (but not as bad). And I don't know if you an tell from this picture, but the cover strip on the forearm shifted slightly to one side after I put the clamps on. I didn't notice this until the next day after it had dried. It's off by 1 or 2 millimeters, but should I pull it off and re-center it? Also, how low can the chest and back plate be (ie. how far away from the neck)? If I have them as they are in the pictures, then the kidney will be a few inches away from the back plate in order to line up properly with the ab plate. And putting the chest any higher will start putting a gap between it and the ab plate.

Congratulations!

I think one of the first items I sanded with that plastic covering on, the plastic started fraying and being annoying so after that I peeled it up from any edges I sanded. It might have just been a weird section that happened the first time, but I figured it would happen again. Having the plastic peeled up does get really annoying though, especially when you are measuring or removing painter's tape after a fitting!

Thanks for the advice Cristian. I've been debating on the return edge but I think I will remove it on the bicep so it's more comfortable.