Stratcat96
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Posts posted by Stratcat96
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Nice job documenting everything Cameron! You sure look to be having a lot of fun!
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You don't technically need to glue the strip on yet. As long as you've trimmed the butt joint to the right size on both halves in the front, you can tape it together and do your overlap sizing in the rear.
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Good job Cameron! You really worked your butt off to make this happen. You'll have no problem getting approved. See you in the trenches!
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This is a screen-used reference photo courtesy of ukswrath
Ukswrath said regarding the thigh ammo pack "The front of the ammo belt will not be centered with the cover which is normal." This is considering that it is mounted equidistant on both sides in the rear. There are Centurion approved TKs with the pack both ways. Take that as one will, but this is the basis of the advice given to Cameron about that pack alignment.
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I wouldn't worry about that thigh belt pulling like that at all, quite normal. I must confess that my own OCD caused me to redo it until it was just about flush. Looks good my manUpdate on progress February 26:
Tonight, we did what I hope is the final glueups / riveting for basic approval!
We started by fixing the inner belt with parachute clips to make the height of the thighs fully adjustable if needed. We then lined up the sniper knee plate on the shin and glued it up as well. We rounded out the evening by gluing on the final cover strip on the outside rear of the left thigh, trimming the right thigh ammo belt, and riveting it in place. I had some very patient but precise help from Stratcat (He has gone above and beyond in helping me with this.) on placing the belt. I'm satisfied with the result, but left the rivets unpainted out of both running out of steam and not being completely sure if they were placed correctly.
If everyone's happy with all these improvements, and the rest of the armor holds up, I submit for basic approval tomorrow!
Pics updated at http://imgur.com/a/vnNxfwith highlights below:
Knee plate! I know I need a side view, but I'll leave that to tomorrow when the clamps aren't in the way quite as much.
What I hope is my last cover strip!
Right thigh! Used Stratcat's advice and Ukswrath instructions to set the thigh pieces with some minor bending / adjustment with a heat gun.
On the right side of the photo, I'm concerned about how much of the belt is poking away from the thigh piece. If I were to remove that side's rivet and pull it in / bend it in, I'd have to trim a little bit more off of that end, which worries me slightly. Input appreciated!
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Might be the shadow or the angle, but your thigh pieces sort of look a little short. You mention that they are wide, which I can see too. Do you have any better pics of your thighs on, possibly with the shins too? For width, they should follow the natural taper of your legs, with about a finger's width left btw your leg. You have to be careful bc too wide they'll look like board shorts, not pieces of armor.Update on progress February 20:
Tonight, my dad and I test fit the torso and thigh pieces together. We discovered that they work moderately well, but the thighs could use some work to be skinnier overall, likely a post-approval change. The belt is still awaiting the properly sized rivets. The shins both received their rear velcro pieces. If anyone has any suggestions on how to reinforce this seam, please share. My dad had an idea on taking a piece of wide webbing and covering the inner cover strip down the front seam of the shins. My idea was to make several cross sections inside the shin over the inner cover strip to act as reinforcements instead.
If anyone has any additional input, please let me know! I love all the tips / advice!
Pics updated at http://imgur.com/a/vnNxfwith highlights below:
Test fit. We set the thighs webbing length and added rivets to ensure their proper height after we took this photo.
Rear torso. Don't know if it's more evident, but the thighs are about an inch or two wide, but work moderately well height wise.
I can manage stairs as it stands in these just fine, but I'd like to double check with the shins in a few days.
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Yes the "flat areas" of the butt joints are on the front. Those joints in the front are trimmed to accommodate the strip size. The rear uses the same size strip but does not have to be trimmed in a particular way to accommodate it. You take off as much or as little as you need to size. As ukswrath says, those sizes are for accuracy, but if a trooper needs to use something bigger to accommodate shimming or something like that bc he needs more space, you can use something bigger but it just needs to be uniform. So if you need to use a larger size strip, do it on the front and back
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Hi there! Generally the flattened area of your butt joint should be trimmed on each side to roughly equal one half the width of the strip that area requires. For example your forearms use a 15mm strip. The flat area on each side would be trimmed to be 7.5mm. That way the strip completely covers the total flat area when the pieces are joined. Sizing then is done in the rear
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Hey Rob, aligning it with the lowest edge of the plate does not guarantee a straight belt. Switching belts you do run some risk of not getting it perfectly straight, the good news it doesn't have to be, just close. Without removing the cloth belt and being able to use your current Ab buttons as a template the installation can be a little tricky. I wouldn't worry to much though, take your time and measure as many times as needed. The key note here is to remember the ammo belt portion is to ride just below or slightly covering the lowest center button. If you take a look at some screen shots these belts are all over the place when it comes to alignment horizontally.
Hope this helps
Great Tony, thanks so much!
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Tony I'm finally replacing my floppy Anovos belt with a kittel belt after one of the holster rivets ripped right out. I tried taking the covers off the front and successfully got one off without too much damage but the others just weren't coming off. I ended up using 12mm poppers with snap plates at the rivet points to attach the plastic after giving up the fight with all the pink glue which worked out great. Now that I'm ready to mount the female snaps to the belt for the ab connection, I have a question about alignment. From your pictures it looks like you align the belt along the button plate, making sure the overlap doesn't cover the buttons. Assuming my overlap measurement is the same, does aligning it with the base of that plate ensure that the belt is straight across the ab and not crooked?
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That's good to hear that it held up well. It is floppy, I somehow thought it would be a little stiffer. I strategically velcroed mine in along the back so now it is secure, and using the depressing the switches doesn't shift or jiggle the fans. Securing it (to me) is the only way to go, but with it back against the curvature of the helmet the fans aren't able to *quite* sit as low as I'd have liked.
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Kalani, I saw that you bought a Bracket fan system from Ukswrath. Have you put it in yet? I have mine secured with strategically placed Velcro around the bottom rim of my bucket but in doing so can't get the fans any lower than cheek height. I can deal with that, but I'm having a hard time figuring out where to put the battery. I was wondering how you did it
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Oops double post
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For e6000 that has squirted outside a cover strip, I use a guitar pick (a Jim Dunlop nylon pick to be exact). I run it up and down the edge of the cover strip and the friction brings up the glue real easy and leaves that clean strip area. You can use a piece of your scrap as well. As long as it's not harder than your armor it's not going to wear into the material
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For e6000 that has squirted outside a cover strip, I use a guitar pick (a Jim Dunlop nylon pick to be exact). I run it up and down the edge of the cover strip and the friction brings up the glue real easy and leaves that clean strip area. You can use a piece of your scrap as well. As long as it's not harder than your armor it's not going to wear into the material
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Hey Rob looking good, you can try to shortening the shoulder strap and I would definitely remove more of the lower bell return edge.
Success! I took your advice and took down the shoulder bell's return edge. Brought it down to about 5mm and it went together without pulling off to the side. Now all I have to do is strap the right arm together, and some other little things like paint my rivets and I should be good to go. Thank you!
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Tony,
So I have made chest to back shoulder straps from white elastic, and measured and placed the sew on snaps for the shoulder bell. I only did the left arm so far to get it placed right, then I'll use the same measurements on the right side.
I offset the female snap towards the inside of the strap. Putting everything on, the white elastic gets pulled out a bit from under the plastic shoulder straps. I'm thinking that either I need to lessen the snap offset, but snapped it's perfectly lengthened to touch the ribbed strap. Tighten the bicep strap to hold the bell closer is a possibility , or maybe tighten the white elastic so it's more taught. I honestly think that's what it is, the bell is pulling on slack of the shoulder strap. If you think that's the case too, can I just move the snap plate on the back plate slightly back to cure that? Or there's always the it's fine the way it is. What do you think? Thanks!
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Well after 4 months of building, my TK armor is finally done. I didn't do a build thread, because like so many others I diligently followed Ukswrath's build thread, and asking questions when I needed help
Well now I'm in the final stretch with fitting and strapping. There are so many very knowledgeable people here and I'm kind of running blind at this point. I've decided to use the Anovos Velcro for fitting, and once that's done pulling some of it out and replacing with industrial Velcro and the rest with snaps.
I already received my pencap garter system and have the snap plates drying on my thighs, so I'll get to that later..
First up, putting the torso pieces together. I figured the best thing to do was to get my chest and back connections set.
As I said, I used Anovos' system with Velcro.
This pic is just to illustrate how I set it up inside, back, kidney, and butt were all aligned flush with each other.
So I put everything on, and tried to align the back plate as best I could, fitting it to the form of my back.
As you can see, the kidney is flailed out. I'm sure that will wrap around with strapping and the belt.
Right off the bat I detect a problem-- the butt and kidney are too high. I also put the ab plate on and confirmed that I can't push it up high enough to align it with the kidney..
Next up: I took some advice to start with the bottom. I snapped the crotch together and put the ab/butt and kidney on, lined them up, and put the backplate on lining up with my shoulders and back. Once that was lined up I had a helper attack the Velcro and put on the belt.
Now I've got some gap.. The backplate was still to my feeling not quite high enough so I adjusted it up. I didn't get a picture but it's now a little less than an inch gap.
Now at this point I could hot water straighten the tabs on the backplate but without having a reliable measure due to the kidney and ab not being secured enough to call them perfectly aligned I wanted to hold off..
I thought about it, and decided I don't want to do a semi-permanent set of strapping incorporating the rivets. I'm 5'10 and 180lbs and dropping (I lost 15lbs so far while building). I've been told at my height I shouldn't have a gap, so that makes me question my ab/kidney alignment even more.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the kidney wraps around with a sliver of a gap at MOST.
I decided on 2 2" elastic straps on either side to pull everything in and keep the front and back together, and (hopefully) keep the ab and kidney aligned. The reason I want to go with elastic rather than webbing is so there is a bit of flex in case I need it. If not, then the two halves will be together as intended.
These are just two pieces of 2" Velcro to illustrate what I have in mind.
I planned on putting two 1x2 snap plates 1 inch from the edge on both sides of both pieces. (I cut the elastic straps to a length with the 1" inset in mind, although now I'm questioning whether I should have planned for them to be right at the edge.) the reasoning for the 1" inset is so the plates could be mounted to have the elastic on the bottom and top edge, which because there's rivets in the way would require the snaps to behind them.
Hopefully my math is right lol so I figure that's 1" of travel, another inch for the snaps. That's 4 inches of elastic per side between the ab and kidney. I added another inch to fold over and double up on the end where the snaps will go.
I cut a total of 4 6" pieces of elastic, and 8 1x2 pieces of black webbing. I doubled over the ends of the elastic and seed them down
I tried the "hot nail" technique to put the holes in, but it just didn't work for me because the holes were coming out all over the place.
I hopped on the computer and made a template so the holes would be evenly spaced and be in the exact same spots on every piece.
Taped it to the piece and used a punch to do the holes. Much easier, at least for me.
Once the holes were done in everything, I started adding snaps
That's it for tonight. Since I'm really thinking that perhaps I should just use the snap plates right on the edge of the kidney/ab I stopped with putting snaps in and just have one elastic piece completed. I'll have to think about, but if anyone has input I would be very interested to hear.
My hopes are the with the ab/cod together and aligned I can determine where EXACTLY the back plate falls on my back without a gap and if I have to, bend the tabs to fit me better.
As my title says this is my first time doing this so any and all advice is welcome!
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Thanks, Rob! Glad it was helpful.
You could easily use elastic on the sides, but I'd be sure to use some of the nice thick 2" like Anovos gives for the arms, so it doesn't stretch open too easily.
That's a good idea, thank you for that. Probably two or three pieces on either side affixed with snap plates would work. I just picked my white elastic and webbing for the chest so I'll start with that first
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Reading through your thread Kalani has really alleviated some of my anxiety/confusion/"where do I start?" Regarding the strapping.
I began putting in the Anovos strapping, substituting industrial Velcro for the Anovos Velcro in the shoulder caps and through the bicep and forearm. I quickly realized I prefer the solutions for the chest to back that you have used rather than Anovos' kinda "flimsy" set up. I'm going to use your ideas and just use the Velcro for the ab-->chest, back-->kidney-->posterior.
For the side strapping, I'm still not sure how to go, although I really like your snap plate setup. I almost would like to use some elastic on the sides as I haven't shimmed, and will have maybe an inch of gap on the side. I want to leave the rivets non-functional.
As I said though, the thread is great and has helped myself and I'm sure many others too!
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Yep
Connecting snaps no. The posterior and right ab must have the base snaps though they don't need to be functional.
I was under the assumption the right ab only required the snap for Centurion approval. Is that incorrect?
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I think you could get away with 15mm and still be good. Like you said any support will help. Keep up the good work
Great! Makes me feel better! Thanks again!
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Inner cover strips are not required at any level of approval so technically you can make them any size you'd like
.Thank you lol. I was more curious along the lines of whether that would be sufficient to do the job. I guess any additional support is better than none!
Thanks again!
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Posted · Edited by Stratcat96
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