themaninthesuitcase

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.

So today work began on the belt upgrade. Step 1: Ordered a new belt from RWA. Before starting the belt looks all pretty and all but it's basically rubbish. 2 layers of super thin canvas couldn't support a fly never mind a blaster in the solid holster supplied, even with the 4 screws used to hold it on. First job was to get the plastics off the belt. I did this using a drill larger that the rivet in the drill on a slow speed. My drill has 2 speeds so I selected the slow one. Using the too large drill means you'll drill out the centre before the out side due to the profile of the drill. Then you can remove the washer and canvas This was done for all three of the rivets and the plastic was removed from the belt and the drop boxes were now free to be removed. A handy IKEA coat hook was used to support the belt so that the boxes were not crushed when drilling as it happened to be the right size and was to hand. Next I needed to move the rivet button caps from the other side. In all their wisdom Anvovos used some nasty pink epoxy for this which really doesn't want to come off. I began by protecting the surrounding plastic with some blue masking tape. For the first button I used a fully extended snap blade utility knife to slowly cut and pry at the epoxy until it have up and the cover popped off. I started the same way for the 2nd but there was a section toward the centre of the belt that was too well glued and prying to hard would have ripped the plastic. To cut this with the utility knife wasn't going to happen. Luckily I have a very fine saw called a jewellers saw. Think coping saw but even smaller. The stirring stick is there to lift the cover away and reduce damage to it. After a bit of careful sawing the second cover popped off also. You can see there was a small amount of damage to the rear but nothing too big. I doubt you'll see this when re-attached but it will be oriented to hide this was best I can when re-glued. The same technique was used on the middle cover. One side came off pretty easily as it seemed to not have much glue there. The other side was trickier. The cover was positioned close to the bump so getting the saw in was tricky. Once in I started sawing but obviously messed up the angle as the blade snapped. These saws are barely long enough with only about 1cm of extra length to saw in so the snap rendered it useless for this job. I've ordered some more but they won't be here until Thursday, all 36 of them. To make sure I didn't loose the covers I did remove I've stored them in the belt. This photo is evidence of this so I won't turn the house upside down looking for them. Some 2" tape is making sure they don't come out. Once the blades arrive I'll remove the 3rd cover ready for the new belt. I've not decided how to attach the plastic to the belt yet. Rivets are traditional, but Chicago screws seem like a safer option given the nightmare it's been so far. The covers will be re-attached with E-6000 which will be far less permanent. I also need to remove the remaining rivet and epoxy. Seems like the only real option is some burrs and a demel, maybe a sanding drum or a grinding stone. What ever is used I need to be careful to keep the heat down to prevent melting. I'm going to see what I can get in town otherwise it's another order to Amazon. I finished the evening by removing the elastics from the drop boxes to allow for proper positioning and accurate attachment. I was hoping to pull out the elastics but they are super glued in and curve into the interior of the box. The 2nd best option seems to be to cut the elastic. I pulled the elastic as taught as I could then used a scalpel to cut as far down into the gap as I could. This means there's no elastic poking out and I can hide all this behind the new elastic. I don't have much good reference for attachment other than this: This looks to show that 1" was used rather than 3/4" that Anovos used, which is nice as I have loads left from the shins. And it looks like they are attached about 1/3rd down in the centre. What is not shown is how they are attached. There's a small bit of brown which looks to suggest contact cement but there's also a small fray at the crease about 3/4" down from the edge which may be where a rivet was/is. Though that said the holster rivets say this is a hero belt so maybe none of this is relevant. I believe the standard is a rivet these days. If so what size do I want? I am guessing I would need a washer too, ideally on the inside face to but that won't happen here as I can't get them apart. How far down should these be attached? I'll do a couple of test runs on scrap before I do it live.

I'd fit the pads first, I suspect you'll want the bucket held secure.

For completeness this is what the DIN spec M3.5 look like once in a finished Anovos bucket: Finished bucket! by Christopher Pearson, on Flickr Also this bucket has had a complete hand re-paint.

After last nights "not a tantrum" this morning I ended up routing through our bins in a state of paranoia. Obviously this was stupid and once my wife got involved this evening the Hovi tips showed up. Inside the armour bin, neatly tucked inside the chest......idiot. Note the nice thick zip lock bag chosen to keep them safe. Formerly home to my Namisu Nova Fountain pen. A bargain of a pen that one. So now on with the 2 day progress update. First I finished of the main armour by making the last elastics I needed which were to join the shoulder bell to the bicep. These were done pretty fast. Apparently I've gotten pretty adept on the sewing machine and punch pliers now. This gave me 1 fully completed set of armour ready for it's first proper fitting. Hurray! I've not done a full suit up yet as I wanted the bucket to be done first. When I was fitting the elastics I noted I bought my left elbow when bending it. I trimmed ~2mm from the forearm return which seems to fixed it. I also trimmed about the same from the shoulder bells to reduce the flex needed to get them on the bicep. Once that was done I started getting the bucket together. After adding the ears started to work on fixing in the visor. The supplied visor is nice and wide and goes over the ear screw area. With this being the case I decided to use these to hold it in. I initially tried to measure the centre of the visor but found it quite off from the curve cut into it. So from here on accurate measurements where mostly abandoned for positioning and eyeballing it all took over. I only used my vernier to measure the centre distance for the holes. After a bit of positioning and checking I was done. There is a small gap to the face which should help with some ventilation into the bucket. Looks good though. This was also the point I discovered I'd misplaced the hovi tips so spent the rest of the evening turning the house upside down. This evening, once the wife found the tips, I carried on building the bucket back up. I started by adding the S trim. When this came off there was a small (say 2mm) gap at the join. For whatever reason I had about the same in excess. This suits me just fine as it forces the trim back in and means no glue is needed to hold it in. You also can't see the glue left that was holding it on before which is certainly a bonus. I also added some padding. I ordered some helmet pads from China a while ago which all fit with velcro. Of course this isn't an ideal fit despite the adjustable nature of them. They are all 3/4" thick and I need a thicker one at the front and a thiner one at the rear. So after some minor surgery where I cut one pad in half and glued it to another to make an pad about 1 1/4" thick and one about 1/2". I used some of the velcro tape from the Anovos kit to add the loop to the back of the cut pad. This gives me a pretty decent fit and I can move my head with out much wobble. I can also swap out the thin pad for a regular one to get a more snug fit if needed. I also have the start of a chin strap which I will finish another day. Currently it goes bucket - washer - nut - visor - washer - nut. I think I'll probably remove the nut between the bucket and the visor and put the chin strap there instead. This will mean the strap elastic can't stretch over the nut and come off. And I'll sign off for the night with my finished bucket: Next job: Belt

well done.

Was hoping to post a picture of my almost complete bucket last night but the Hovi tips are in "a safe place". This safe place isn't the bin (yay for having some heavy duty gloves) so hopefully they will show up soon.

Just pulled off the masking template whilst the girls had lunch. Pretty happy with the result. The gloss did it's job for the most part. There's 1 place where I did a lousy job burnishing down the template, the rest are all where the template creased. There's only so much you can do when that happens so pretty happy with how small the bleeds are. I've cleaned up most the tape reside now with some masking tape, just dabbing the sticky side pulls away the glue that's stuck. For the bleeds I'll use a tooth pick dipped in thinners to clean up.

Accomplished a fair bit today in the time I had but a lot of it was "rinse and repeat" type stuff. Started the day with coat 3 on the bucket stripes. This gave them a nice good colour, but still room for one more. Another 6 hour clock. Next I glued the second end of the elastic I had to remove from the shoulder bell to fix the crack. Whilst I was there I glued the elastic to join to the shoulder strap. Looking at the reference these almost touch the shoulder strap. I've left about 5mm from the shoulder strap to the bell to match this. Whilst the glue was out I glued on the large ab button plate. Next up was a job I've been dreading - the shin closures. There seems to be little reference on this other than some badly angled images. I added the end holes 25mm in and the middle hole split the difference. The distance in was around 6mm to give some meat to the bit that's left. I used the same 5/32 drill I used for the snaps as testing showed this seemed to be a good size. This was all marked up on some masking tape, a pilot drill was added using a ~1mm drill in a pin vice. The main hole was done with a power drill VERY carefully. I also glued in the elastics, aligning them with the holes. I left a small a gap to let the stretch of the elastic to work. I also only glued about half their length for the same reason. Enough to hold them but not so much they can't stretch. Last night I used some E-6000 to "tack" the brow trim in place. Just a few spots on the inside, one at each end and one in the middle. This was worthless. The second I removed the clamps it came away. I guess the glue didn't want to stick to the rubber trim. So instead I used some UHU. This stuff seems to have done the job, and sets far faster, as in 30 minutes fast. It's similar in many ways that it dries to a rubbery texture and is only semi permanent. It should be removable from the bucket if ever needed. Because I have them, and it can't hurt to have a spare, I made up the hand guards. The gloves are heavy duty marigolds, pretty tough might get some for the house too! Last job before I packed up for dinner was the shoulder elastics. I wasted a bunch of time setting up the sewing machine and trying to machine sew them. I gave up pretty fast and just hand tied them with a reef knot. Yes those marks are all on the protective sheet. This evening once the kids were in bed I did a 4th coat on the bucket stripes. I found it incredibly difficult to tell which ones I'd done vs not done. I guess this shows that I didn't really need to do this coat but I'd started so I finished it. Tomorrow I will try get the last of the elastics finished, to join the bicep to shoulder bell. With that done the main armour is done as far as I can think. I'll also get the templates removed and see what hides underneath. I suspect I'll have a small amount of clean up to do, but once that's done I can start putting everything back together.

Its a build day bonanza. Yes I am running out of ways to keep these updates interesting, why do you ask? I started off the day buffing the tubes on the bucket face. The new compound is a bit better but not massively so. That done I applied the templates I was sent. One side went on no issues at all. The second was far harder due to the more pronounced compound curve. After a bit of fiddling I got a reasonable fit, a couple of wrinkles but nothing drastic. I'd have preferred the bottom template in the image had decided to curve the other way but I think any further attempts to adjust it's position would have killed it. I used the #35 clear gloss varnish to paint over the template. The idea of doing this is to seal the template and prevent bleeds. Any bleeds will be clear and so not visible. For the 2 small creases I will push the template down again to help seal it every time I paint. Any bleed here can be fixed after the fact. The gloss takes 6 hours to cure so I set it aside for now. I dug out the belt I made earlier in the project, mainly as I forgot to photograph it but I'll also need it later. Next up was to crack out the sewing machine and remake the shin elastics. The 1st batch of elastic I'd gotten was far too hard to hand sew so I bought some more at the market in St Albans. I then proceeded to sew the hooks on to all 6 of them. This was as exciting as it sounds so I also got on with the shoulder straps. I started by getting my wife to help work out how long they needed to be. I held the armour in place whilst she marked the elastic where it got to the rear plate. I then just had to measure to the snap and finish off the straps. You can also see I sewed on the other part of the 15mm popper for the shoulder bells. That was also thrilling. The popper is centered in the gap, the offset is due to the fact that the snaps on the front are lower down that on the rear. I also cracked on with remaining elastics. I have a couple more to do but this is the bulk done now. At this point I glued in the snaps to join the fore arms and biceps and whilst the glue was out glued on the small button plate. I'll do the bigger one later. This gave the first chance to try on the armour with out holding it all together. Fit is pretty good and more comfortable than expected. I'm able to move reasonably well, nothing is overly tight. I did get my first armour bite as well, the thigh to cod . Obligatory walking up and down for 10 minutes followed. This fitting revealed a few issues. I only had 1 elastic on the "open" side. I was hoping that the belt would close the bottom but testing with the rubbish Anovos belt seemed to show this wasn't going to work. I need to file the top of the rear of the right thigh. It pokes into my bum The butt plate was splaying out and not hugging me as well as I'd like. The reason for this was the snaps where to far in to pull the armour inline with the kidney which is fine. I was also concerned before the fitting the chest plate was going to dig into my neck but this turned out to not be the case. Very glad I waiting to try it on first before addressing this. At this point it was time to break for dinner. After dinner was done I cracked out the #14 and did the first coat of blue on the tube stripes. The paint is pretty thin and rather then lump it on I've elected to do 3-4 coats as needed. I've since done a 2nd and the colour is looking far better but at least 1 more will be needed. Next I made some elastics for the forearm to biceps. I had added snaps earlier today so I was able to measure against these to make the elastics. The snaps will be helpful and allow me to break down the arms when needed for packing. I finished off the day by addressing some of the above issues and adding some missing snap plates. I pulled off the snap plates from each end of the lower kidney and re-glued them at the extreme ends. I re-used the snaps despite not being able to remove all the glue. The old glue seemed to melt into the new so hopefully the bond will be good. If not it's no great loss and I'll make new ones. I also added a new snap at the bottom of the opening side to the kidney and ab as per the Billgram. This should close up the body nicely. I added the snaps I need to join the shoulder bell to the bicep. Once the shoulder bell to shoulder strap elastics are glued in I'll measure for how long these will need to be. Last job of the evening was gluing on the shoulder plates. This makes the armour look really close to done and is a nice moment. Got a few chores to do tomorrow so no all day builds. Hopeful I'll be able to finish off the blue paint with 2 more coats and also get shoulder bell top elastics glued in. I could use snaps here but the hassle of sewing means it's a pain to adjust them however I do it. Ideally I'd like to get the holes for the shin elastics drilled tomorrow too and make a start gluing in the elastics.

I did. That's why I didn't do much this evening. That and tired.