hupspring

Initially I was shooting for centurion out of the gate, and I think I'm still doing pretty well but I really want to get into the 501st as well, even if it's just basic approval at first. I think painting the outside of the helmet will be the hardest part for me, so that may not happen for a while. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I was going to try making a little 'pocket' out of scrap ABS to glue onto the inside of the chest, but that is a much better idea!

This is going to be a much briefer update than I originally planned - I typed out a much longer update but accidentally hit the back button on my mouse and lost everything I typed. You could say I was a bit upset. Soooo, on to the abbreviated updated. I had today off from work, so I was able to get a lot more done. I plastidipped the helmet, doing three coats with about 30-45 minutes between coats. First coat: not very pretty with a lot of brush strokes. Third coat: looking much better. If the plastidip doesn't feel thick enough after it cures, I may do another coat or two. Between coats I did some small things like gluing the forearm to bicep elastics. I used the Anovos supplied 2" black elastic and removed the velcro with a seam ripper. I then tried my hand at giving parts of the armor a hot water bath. I boiled some water in a large skillet and put one side of the butt plate in for about 10-15 seconds. Then I pulled it out and held the side, giving it a curve so that it doesn't flare out. I did the same with the other side. The butt plate now sits better on me, not sticking out the sides. I also did the hot water bath on the back piece, specifically the shoulder connections. As they were, they curved in too much, not allowing me to wear the back piece farther down on my back to avoid having a 2" gap between the back and kidney. So I did both shoulder connections in the boiling water for about 20 seconds each and tried to straighten them out. I ended up doing this about 4-5 times for each side and it kind of worked (they aren't as curved as when I started) but I noticed that stress lines were starting to show, and one actually cracked on the left side. I ended up gluing a small piece of ABS behind the crack, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do now. I might finally make some ABS paste to make sure the crack doesn't get worse. The ab buttons have been painted for a while now and I was able to glue those onto the ab. I had trouble getting the large plate to stay still as it wanted to shift all over the place when I put the magnets on. It took about 5 minutes of moving the magnets and pushing the plate around to get it in the correct spot (more or less). Then I finished up on the strapping on the back to kidney. But I totally forgot that I was going to use elastic and instead used nylon. I also had to make more female snaps which I hate doing. Lastly I made the snap plates for the shoulder bridges but instead of single buttons, I decided to go for double snaps. Which meant I had to make 8 more female snaps (did I mention I hate making these!). I destroyed at least 4 posts for the female snaps while making these. For some reason I can't hammer these in straight, probably because of the rounded button. Overall a lot of work done for me today. I had a checklist of items to do today, and I covered all but one of them (gluing the fronts of the calves together). There is another armor party on Sunday that my wife and I will be going to so I can work on the calves or belt while there - I think those are the last two major items that I have to do.

On my thigh ammo pack I have it more or less straight so that there is some space between the bottom of the cover strip and the ammo pack. But I've also seen pictures of the ammo pack angled up slightly so there is no gap between it and the cover strip. Not sure if there is a right or wrong way in this case. I'm going to follow your lead on the back plate with the water bath - I'm 6'0" and have a small gap between the back and kidney, and the tops of the back are not comfortable as they are now.

I didn't have time to do much today (so no plastidipping yet), but I managed to drill holes on the inner side of the helmet between the ear screws for the mics on ukswrath's hearing assist system. I used a 3/8" forstner bit and hand drilled the holes (yes you read that right - I held the bit in my hand and kept turning it) since one of the ears is glued in (see my previous post about that issue) and I didn't have a small enough drill to fit in the bucket. It went a lot quicker than I expected and the mic tips fit snugly into the holes. Now I need to tape the helmet up in preparation for the plastidip.

I ended up using the split rivets (Kalani's point about them being easier to remove helped with that decision) and put the ammo pack pretty much where it was on the images above, but I tried pulling it a little tighter to avoid the gap. I might fill that other gap under the cover strip with ABS paste later, but for now I'll leave it as is. Before doing that, I did a bunch of random things. I painted the ab buttons, made four double snap plates for the shoulder straps, made the straps for the shoulders (chest to back) and the shoulder strap to shoulder (my wife did all the sewing!), glued a small piece of ABS into the first plastic shoulder strap bump to aid in gluing when I glue them onto the chest, and started working on the thermal detonator (I cut off a quarter inch from the tube, sanded both ends down, and glued on the face plate). I didn't actually get anything finished but I got a lot done. And I was so busy doing it all that I forgot to take any pictures. The only picture I got was of the helmet - I used some paint thinner and removed the paint from the frown. I also sanded the inside of the bucket and cleaned up the eyes and teeth a little. I didn't want to go crazy and take too much off, so it's a subtle difference. Tomorrow I want to start painting the interior with plastidip For now I'm only going to paint the frown - in the future I'll try tackling the tears/traps/tube stripes. After painting the ab buttons, I know I'm definitely going to need templates since my hands are so shaky. Oh yeah, I finally broke down and tore my shins apart - they were being held together by an inner cover strip. It definitely looks better with the parts switched but I haven't taped them together yet to check them out fully. I'm hoping I didn't cut too much on one side and that they both still fit.

I was about to put on the right thigh's ammo pack, but I wanted to get some opinions/confirmation first - does this look correct for placement? It's being held on by clamps at the moment as I didn't want to drill any holes until I was sure the placement is good. Also a few more questions: Should I fill that gap under the cover strip with ABS paste? I found some double cap rivets that my wife had - are these better to use than the split rivets? Is one better than the other for the ammo pack? Is that gap between the ammo pack and the thigh okay? The gap is easier to see on the first picture above.

Good plan for now - I'll leave what I've already done with the webbing (butt/kidney/ab connections) and do the rest with elastic. Then I can replace the nylon with elastic later if it's too stiff.

I've been debating back and forth and keep see recommendations for both. I was going to use elastic and at the last second went with nylon mostly because I figured the armor has a quite a bit of room on me (I'm pretty skinny) so it wouldn't need to be stretching. Is this faulty logic? I have plenty of elastic, so I can switch it out if the elastic would work better (I already have some elastic strips cut since I was going to use it first).

I already had several nylon pieces cut for the torso strapping, so I decided to spend a bit of tonight with the soldering iron to burn holes in them for the snaps. The first ones I did were for the ab/kidney split rivets. My measurements on the bottom one were a little off so the bottom isn't as snug as I want, but the belt should help in that area. This was my first time setting split rivets. I started on the bottom set and put the armor on a towel so it wouldn't get scratched up on the garage floor. After hammering the split rivet in and picking the armor up off the floor, the towel came with it. Apparently a small piece of the towel got stuck between the rivet head and the armor, leaving a tiny bit when I pulled the towel away. I'll have to clean that up. If you've been following my build, you may have noticed that the first picture above is missing the two pieces of support that I added for the split rivets. I had to pull them out because after putting the nylon and washers on top of them, the split rivets barely had any length left to fold over. Maybe a thinner piece of plastic would have worked, but I didn't have any on hand so I just went without it. It shouldn't be a big deal since I've seen a lot of other builds not doing that. After that I finished up soldering holes in the remaining nylon that I cut up and proceeded to hammer in the female snaps. The first two snaps were a total loss. I must have been hitting at an angle because the post barely held onto the snap part, and both came apart with a little pressure. After that I did my best to hold the setting tool as perpendicular as I could and tried to make sure the hammer wasn't coming in at an angle. That seemed to work much better for a good amount of snaps until another one got an angled hit. The male snaps are much easier to set in my opinion (I didn't mess up any of those!). I was able to get the butt, kidney and ab all connected. I can actually just step into this and pull it up which is a lot easier to do than closing the two halves around me and getting the two snaps in on the right side. I also drilled the hole in the cod for the rivet that goes there. Now I need to get to work on the back and chest. I think I will do the shoulder straps before connecting the back and chest though.

Good to hear! Now I can get that ammo pack on this weekend! Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

It's been a pretty slow week for me, but I was able to finish gluing on both cover strips on the right thigh, and I have the second cover strip clamped on the left thigh. So tomorrow I'll be done with the thighs except putting on the ammo pack on the right thigh. Question on the ammo pack - will using the rivets supplied with the Anovos kit be Centurion approved for the thigh ammo pack? That's what I was going to use, but I read they might be too big. Anyways, since I had one of the ears off the helmet, I decided to clean it up a little by sanding the sides so they weren't so jaggedy. I tried to do the same with the ear that is glued to the helmet but was only able to sand down a little from the top. It looks a little better than it did so I guess that's something. The screws I bought work great - 3/4" is long enough to get through the pieces of ABS and not be too long once the washer and nut are on.

Congrats! I hope to follow in your footsteps one of these days!

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!