themaninthesuitcase

Looks like I might be the first cleared UKG Anovos trooper. There was a 2nd person given a pre-approval green light 4 mins after me. Just a case of who gets through the admin first!

All that was the same stuff the UKG armourer pointed out, that and I need to pull my arms down more. I've picked 4 with my preference being the date I got married and second choice is my birthday but I don't want to jinx it by writing them down here!

Pre-clearance went straight through. A few minor advisories I'll address but nothing major. Just put in for my 501st ID and UKG clearance.

Took my pre-approval images this evening, twice as I forgot to attach the holster... Front: Back: Left: Left, arm up: Right: Right, arm up: Bucket off: Action: Bonus arty image for FISD only:

Catasrophic failure that near your head is very very bad.

Yup. All UKG have a shoulder sticker on the left side. It's the garrison logo. Every time I pack it up.

My soft good came on Friday and they seem to be a decent fit so with any luck I'll have my blaster done this weekend and I'll be able to get a full set of images ready for approval during the week some time. Also today I stopped in at a troop in Watford to meet some future Garrison brethren. Once they found out I was going for approval, well this happened... I hope I wasn't too awkward, meeting people for the first time with buckets on was less than ideal when you're not overly good at new people in the first place. I would have liked to hang about and have a proper chat but I also know they weren't there to chat with me, those troopers had a job to do. I also spoke briefly to another person who I assume was there as a handler, who looked a lot like Mark Hamill with his current beard. Again sorry if I was a bit awkward but I didn't want to intrude on other peoples fun, there is a better time for introductions. I also noticed that the armour had a wet look shine to them. This didn't look like it was the gloss from the plastic alone so I assume this was from a glaze of some kind? Should I polish my armour now or wait and see how it goes? It's going to get dinged up over time anyway so I will have to polish at some point regardless.

It was for faster holster removal vs the screws. Also this is plenty strong, the load is pulling down and to remove the snap you need to lever. The snaps are very high quality and require a decent amount for force to un snap.

I did that one last rivet last night. This completes my armour!

Pretty much done now! How close you say? Why listen closely and I shall recount the tale. The new RWA wife industries belt came of Friday. This is a 4 layer canvas belt as per the originals. It's also beige, but this will be resolved later in our story. First job was to punch all the holes. I started by finding the centre of the belt and marking it on some 2" painters tape. I then aligned up the plastic and marked out the two end holes as well. The ab snaps are centred under the 1st "bump" on each end. This means the snap won't rub on the plastic. The holes where punched out with my multi punch thingy. Unlike the elastics the canvas punched super cleanly and easily. According to reference the belt should centre on the button plate not the actual centre. So with this in mind I taped the belt with the centre hole below the button plate and marked out the points for the snaps on some painters tape. This took a couple attempts as the tape didn't stick to the belt well at all. I also think I ended up a little too off centre but not so much that I am worried. Drill, snaps, boom. done. The ab snaps where a pain as my tools are designed to be in a holder. In the end I used a lump of wood for the under side and carefully held the round over tool and hammered that. At this point I addressed the boring boring beige. This was a simple case of 2 coats of shoe and canvas whitener. It's not pure snow white but I don't like the look of those belts on other troopers I've seen. This is a nice medium I feel. At this point I cracked out the rivet gun. 10mm Rivet > washer > belt > plastic > washer. This was a simple job and wasn't as scary as I'd expected. The drop boxes were next. For this I used a ruler! No eyeballing things this time. 3" for the belt, 1" to the hole and about 9mm for the plastic that extends past the belt. Double this add a bit and cut, then punch a hole at the measured distance. Before riveting I test fitted the elastic and found it wouldn't quite go over far enough. To remedy this I added a small notch to the elastic on the back to go round the rivet. I've not done the front as for some reason this didn't seem needed. I guess the gap for the snap is enough room for it to move into. I also started adding the rivets and snaps for the belt as shown but with a washer rather than a cup: Having done one I really like the method as it makes it really fast to attach or remove the belt vs chicago screws. I'm yet to do the 2nd as I wanted to double check a measurement. It's 5" for the hole centres on the Anovos holster but if I ever want to replace this with a less stiff one I want the measurements to work on that too. Caps where glued on that evening. I found the rivets were a bit too tall to fit under the caps to glue well. Looking at the rivets I could see the top was excess I could file off, which I did so. This let the caps glue on cleanly and with a small dab of E-6000 in the middle, not a mountain of pink epoxy.... The snaps on the holster where a bit more work. The leather they used is SUPER thick, about 4mm thick if I had to guess. This means the snaps wouldn't protrude through enough to crimp. To fix this I used a dremel. With a sanding drum (use a new one, the old one I was using took ages. Swapped to a new one took seconds) I thinned down the leather until I could get the needed clearance for the snap to crimp. The blue tape is a guide to stop be going too far down where you'd see it below the belt. Theres not a huge amount crimped but the load isn't working on it in that direction so I am happy it will hold okay. I also trimmed off the 2nd hole from the straps as they are for heros not stunts. Armour DONE (less 1 rivet....) I'll do a full suit up once the soft goods arrive this week. I've been using some cotton tights until now which do work fine (and may be nice for winter troops) but the cotton looks odd with the modern base layer top I've got.

I find it really weird how my parts are now a headline feature in a build You did a cracking job on them though, I just hope my own come out half as well.

The belt has been made so hopefully I'll have some updates soon once that arrives. Today I added a chin strap to my bucket. I used some 3/4" black for this. Lengths where just guesstimated by holing thing to my head with the bucket on. It's basically 2 lengths with the ends folded over and sewed. I then punched a hole at one end of each with the smallest punch I have and a prym snap to join them. The strap is held in by the ear screws. The come through the bucket through the elastic then through the visor. Finally there's a washer and a nut. The screws are 30mm and so a bit long. I can get the bucket on with these just fine but at some point I'll probably trim them down to 25mm ish. I can do the snap up under my chin reasonably easily or if needed do it up first then put the bucket on and pull it down under my chin.

Nice to see my parts in such a detailed build. I don't thing the black is white inside more when it gets stressed it goes white. Like when you bend black plastic it tends to go white. Because these parts are lots of tiny grains laser'd together there's lots to go white. Edit: the flexible stuff sands pretty well. I was working on mine this evening.

That's the enamel thinners, not the acrylic one.

Id say they are too small and would possibly pull through. I used M4 pan head screws on my TD. I used Humbrol thinners for the frown, tube stripes and traps/tears. Isopropyl alcohol on the vocoder and then more thinners to clean up.

I have some parts I designed to fit a Doopy Doo E-11 and the T-Jay parts kit. The links are currently in my sig. I also have a link to some parts on thing iverse. I used one of them in my build and was happy with it. I don't own a printer and have been using shapeways europe and having it shipped to the UK. Not cheap or overly fast but good quality. I think a sticky post would probably be a good idea as it keeps it all in 1 easy to navigate place. Ideally with some moderation to keep it on track and only allow a post in a certain format (description, licencing info, link) and stop it filling up with thank you posts that would make navigating hard.

I drilled out the rivets to remove them from the belt. I then used a snap blade knife and a jewelers saw to remove the covers. This worked almost flawlessly on the ends but the centre one was to hard to get right so I ended up cutting into the belt by mistake. I ended up just cutting out around the rivet as Kredal described then patching and filling the damage. See the last page of my build for how I did it. If did it on purpose and you're neater than I was you wouldn't need to do the filling step.

i used thinners, white spirit and isopropyl alcohol in the end. One at a ton not a mix. Some paint responded better to different solvents.

No danger with the Humbrol Enamel thinners. My bucket was swimming in it at points trying to get all the factory paint off!

I'll agree that heat would probably be the secret. When drilling out the remaining rivet from the cover after a bit the washer and rivet would just break away from the bond. I put this down to the heat generated. There's some pictures in my build thread and one you can clearly see where the washer just lifted out.

This evenings broadcast is brought to you by Bulleit Bourbon and Coke. The work started by once again removing the excess ABS paste with some 180 grit. This left a nice big mess of scratches as you'd expect. So to resolve this it was time to work through the grits. 180 -> 240 -> 320 -> 320 wet -> 600 wet -> 1200 wet. This gave a nice smooth surface to polish up. The same car polishing compound I used on the bucket was used here and did a pretty decent job. Once polished out I could see a few small scratches still. There will be a couple of reasons for this: 1; changing grits too soon 2; only being able to use the paper in 1 direction due to the space limits. Whilst there are still marks you're going to have to look for them and anyone that close to my gentleman area is going to get moved along with the butt of an E-11.... You'll also notice theres a whole mass of air bubbles and saw marks still. These will be under the cap and so I'm not going to kill my self to fix them. In conclusion, close enough for Imperial work. I also used the 600 and up on the covers. This cleaned up the worst of the scuffs, only a couple of marks really remained, and again you'll need to be looking for them. My rivets arrived on Monday to attach the elastic to the drop boxes. I also got the longer ones needed to attach the belt to the plastics. I've gone off the idea of Chicago screws and will use the tried and tested rivets and washers. The drop boxes are nicely stuck together with superglue so I won't be able to fit a washer as you'd normally want to. So to check it wouldn't fall apart on me I tested the rivets in some scrap. Using a 4mm washer gives a nice and solid fixing and no hint of any damage to the plastic. Without the washer there's a small amount of damage noticeable but nothing major and it seems like it will be plenty strong enough given the near zero stress on them. I'll run a 2nd test with a doubled over bit of the elastic to check if I want to use the 8mm or the 10mm long rivets as this will be a 1 shot deal to get right.

So there was this weird bright thing in the sky today so I decided to do some work outside. I started by clamping the first of the button covers into a workmate. I went with this as it's what I have and the clamp things have a V groove to hold things in place meaning I didn't need much pressure at all. The first job was to smooth off the rivet which is a bit mangled from the previous drilling. I used a sanding drum to flatten off the mess. This created a fair bit of heat. In fact I burnt a finger checking for heat. Fortunately no plastic was melted but I started using some wet kitchen towel to cool it after that. Having a fancy flexy thing made this far easier. The multitool mount was clamped to the workbench to ensure it wouldn't fall off. After sanding the rivet smooth it was drilled out. After a while the bond to the epoxy broke and allowed me to remove the washer whole. Using a ball burr from the chinese burr set I ground out as much of the remaining epoxy as I could. I set the speed fairly low at first and wound it up a little once I got the hang of the tool on the epoxy. I erred on the side of caution, I only need enough space to cover the rivet and I didn't want to grind out any ABS and cause a weakness/hole. Once I was done I noticed the were some small scratches on the front of 2 of the covers. Clearly I should have applied tape to protect these, normally I would have done but apparently I forgot this time. Fortunately it will buff out. I finished off for the evening sanding off the excess paste applied to the belt. The centre had sagged a bit as it set bit this will be hidden so isn't a big deal. What I also noticed was I'd not filled the whole length of the saw marks. Once the excess was sanded level I used a 10A scalpel to just clean out the rough edge of these saw cuts and give a decent area to fill. This time I used a tooth pick to be a bit more controlled when applying the paste. I also applied some paste to the saw damaged areas on the rivet covers. Once all this is set I'll sand off the excess again. For the front of the belt I'll start with 180 to level then move on to 320, 600 and if needed 1200 wet and dry to get a decent finish before applying some compound.

Things didn't exactly go to plan to night. Guess this is one of the pitfalls of the Anovos kit as I'm far from the first to face this problem. The blades for the saw came last week so after a break for the weekend today I got back to work removing the middle cover. Using the same technique to saw the epoxy away. Sadly it didn't quite go as well as hoped. Due the design of the belt it's hard to get the saw exactly level. This meant I ended up sawing through the main belt rather then keeping level along the join. The above shows the damage and my first cuts to remove the damaged area. I decided cutting the rest out was the safest option to minimise damage to the belt. Once removed the result was quite frankly, horrific. But fixable. So Carpe Jugulum and all that I got on with it. I started by routing through the bag of scraps and found a nice flat bit a little larger than a credit card. This was cut down to about 1x2" and then the corners were rounded off to about a 5mm diameter. One side was rough sanded to give a key, as was the back of the belt. I then used neat acetone, painted on with a cotton bud, to melt a small layer on the back of the new part. This acts like an adhesive and will be pretty strong as it will melt the two layers together. It also drys fast which is handy. With the new glued in part acting as the main fix the rest is mostly cosmetic at this point. The damage extended a little beyond where the cap will cover it. Before going further I used some blue tape to protect around the damaged area to prevent any further damage. The hole was then roughly filled with the ABS paste I made from the scrap cut from the amour. This is the same stuff I used to fix the cracks earlier in the build. It's been sat for a couple of weeks so more acetone was added to thin it out a bit where it was starting to thicken. I'll leave this overnight to go off and then sand off the excess tomorrow. It will probably need some low spots filling as with any filling procedure. Once the filling process is complete I'll re-drill the hole for the rivet*. I also now have a set of China's finest [sic] burrs. These can be yours for about £3 if your patient for a few weeks or £11 if you want them now. I paid £11, obviously. These will be used along with assorted standard dremel tools to remove enough of that horrid evil pink epoxy glue and the remaining rivet from the caps.

Im not kman but: Aligned is fine according to my reference.

I'd vote those are close enough.