shadan

Posted on SCG forums on 28/12/19. The front coverstrips are on the shins now and I’ve attached the sniper plate. This was a tricky thing to get sitting right, just just didn’t want to line up very well. In the end I just glued the centre in place and held it together with clamps. Then this morning I glued the outer edges. Basically it’s just three patches of glue, centre, left and right. Last night I also put the two snaps in the butt plate as I just got a huge resup of them in the mail. Can’t go past Tandy Leather Line 24 snaps, accept no substitutes! Next on the agenda today is doing some trimming on the rear of the calves and adding the last coverstrips. I had originally planned to do the original style bra hooks and elastics for the enclosures but I think that’s just going to be too annoying. So I’ve got some heavy duty velcro which will hopefully do the trick. I was very hesitant on this at first as I’ve seen so much velcro come off TK calves in the past. Can always revisit this.

Posted on SCG forums on 24/12/19. I just gave the shins a bit of a hot water bath and it looks like it worked ok. This involved lots of painters tape to hold the shins in the exact position I wanted, then carefully using hot water to heat the plastic. Once I felt it was enough (completely guessing I might add) I cooled them under cold water. I should have used more tape (or less water!) as I can see a slight amount of ripple on the back but these still need to be trimmed and the coverstrip attached. I don’t believe it will be noticeable once all that is done.

Posted on SCG forums on 24/12/19. Working on the shins at the moment and they’re a bit tricky. The RS kit has two left shins. Why? Because that’s what the screen-used kit had! Those on-screen TKs were just cobbled together as best as could be done on the budget. So this is going to mean some creativity. You can see here I’ve attached the two sides using rear coverstrips only at this point. I’ll put the outer coverstrips on later. I’m going to have to re-shape the edges near the ankles. But before I do that I need to address the backs... As you can see, things don’t line up this best. I’m going to have to work out exactly where I want each part to sit, tape everything into place and give them a nice hot water bath to try to get them to reshape and set in their new positions. Then I’ll trim the backs and attach the rear coverstrips. Finally I’ll get the sniper plate fitted.

Hello all, I’m reviving this build from the distant past and renewed energy! Lots of stuff has happened; new costumes got in the way, my little one with some health issues. It’s been a while since I’ve worked on this but I’m keen to finish it this holidays. I had originally planned to make this a Heavy Weapons Trooper (for something a little different) but I’ve decided to go back to a classic TK now. So.... The helmet. I did build this right away and I am reasonably happy with how this turned out but looking at it now I am definitely going to go back and lower the brow. While we do see some regular TKs with brows like this on the Death Star, generally they are much lower. I think I’m fairly happy with the painting. A few little fixes need here and there but I’ll detail those when I get to them. Redoing the frown will most likely mean some tinkering with the ears which isn’t a bad thing as the left side ear isn’t exactly how I’d like it. I love that RS’ kits are pulled from moulds made from an on-screen kit meaning they show just how wonky the originally kits were. I did replace the supplied lens film (it’s literally a film like cellophane) with a more sturdy plastic visor for strength. On the inside I still need to secure the frown mesh in place. Previously I had assembled the thighs, biceps and forearms. Trimmed all the torso pieces and installed the structure bracket kit and assembled most of the belt. I've been posting updates over the last few days on my local forums so I'm going to re-post most of it here. For full disclosure...

Cheers for that. I’ll have to see how my popper snaps go. I’ll probably either replace them or perhaps do what you did.

Thanks Stephen. I didn’t get any strapping or snaps or anything from RS, just the hard harmour, so I’ve been sourcing it all myself. I got the Tandy snaps which seem extremely strong (as everyone says) but I did cheap out a little with the poppers for the belt. They aren’t too strong at all so I might have to redo them at some point. Oh yes the two identical shins. When the kit first arrived I feared I’d been sent the wrong parts. But it didn’t take much searching to find that it was normal. I haven’t trimmed my shins yet but I assume people try to reshape the ankle curves to be symmetrical? Or do they leave it as is? To me it looks as though it would be easiest to make both sides of each shin the same rather than try and replicate the two different curves.

Thanks Rob. The Black plate hadn’t actually concerned me at all until I saw that EIB submission the other day. I love the accuracy of the RS kit (it’s why I chose them) so I won’t let it concern me any longer. Wth the shoulder straps, I have only added reinforcements under the bumps which will be glued to the chest plate, this is to create maximum surface area for the glue to adhere to when I glue them down. The straps themselves remain flexible.

Well overdue for an update I know but I moved house a couple of weeks ago and as I've pretty much finished unpacking I'm all out of excuses.Anyhow... Torso!I finished trimming all the back pieces and marked out the positions for the brackets. After I had drilled the initial holes I added some extra material to give the brackets a bit of reinforcement. Then, when the glue was fairly dry, drilled through the support material to the required size hole.Then it was a matter of coutersinking the holes and installing the brackets. After a chat with Sith Lord at my place yesterday we agreed that I'd left a bit too much return edge on the bottom of the chest plate. I removed a fair bit and think it looks much better now. I'll paint the screws another day. Don't you just love the RS wonkiness? I sure do.The brackets are a bit fiddley to install but not hard at all - provided you drilled all your holes in the right places, which luckily I had done.Another quirk of the RS kit (well its a quirk if you're on the tall side) is the curvature of the back plate near the shoulders.It tapers in very sharply with makes it sit very high on your back.This is something that was commented on in Mr. V's EIB application as something to possibly look at for Centurion. Not entirely sure what I'm going to do; a hot water bath perhaps? But I'll address that later.Next up I plan to measure and trim the sides to make them sit nice and flush, then add the strapping to connect the two halves of the clamshell. From there will be the elastic shoulder straps on the inside and the plastic straps on the outside. But that's for another day.

Well done mate! Loved watching your build both here and at home. Hopefully I’m not too far behind you!

Credits transfer complete: 4H086751LC5603055

Mine is the same. RS is a warts and all kit. That is to say it’s accurate to the screen used armour they acquired

Very clean build you have there. Impressive!

I had a go at making up a thigh garter this morning. For the belt I used a simple luggage belt that I had originally bought for the base for a FOTK belt - way before JAFO came along with his Belts of the First Order. Incidentally, I had previously used the other one (they came in pairs) to make the waist belt and bandolier for my Tusken. It was meant to be. Anyhow, I trimmed off a fair bit of excess material, melted the end to stop fraying and resewed it. Next I sewed loops into some 3inch wide black elastic (dammit that’s not metric!) and pulled the belt through. Simple. I’m till not great at using a sewing machine but it was way quicker than doing it my hand. I fully expect to need to sew the elastic into the belt to keep the thigh pieces in place. Hopefully in the next couple of days I’ll be ready test it out. I haven’t decided if I’ll use glue or snaps to attach the elastic to the thighs yet.

Nice build. It’s great to see Tom’s helmets out in the wild

Nice, thanks. I haven’t put any of the back pieces together yet so I’ll see how it all fits together before attaching them.

They actually come curved from RS. I believe they’re pulled that way unlike other makers. Thanks man, it ‘feels’ right there [emoji4] Edit: not all makers but I’ve certainly seen flat ones out there

Thanks mate. Here’s a question for the masses: how far down the chest plate should I mount the shoulder straps? I was thinking of aligning the edge of the first bump to the angled area as shown here...

Awesome stuff. Just trying to be helpful, you’re well ahead of me though!

Great application mate! It’s a little hard to see in the pic but I assume the sniper knee plate is aligned with the shin ridges? It looks to be so disregard if so! Not sure if the TD clips are meant to overlap the control panel. That might just be my OCD though. Do you have black elastic holding the shoulder bells in place? Again it’s probably the pics. Are you planning on going onwards to Centurion? Looking great though. I’m sure you’ve got this.

Congrats mate! Looking sharp. Now onwards to centurion!

A few more bits and pieces today. I remembered that I had glued my hand-guards down a couple of days ago so today I checked on them. They turned out pretty good. The wife was happy because she got two tea-towels back. I had rolled them up and stuffed them inside the gloves to give them some shale which is pretty standard around these parts. When I put them on the plates don’t feel as if they’re trying to tear themselves free so I’ll take that as a good sign. The plates and gloves are from trooperbay incidentally. I know there are many others about but I had very limited access to these forums while I was away last year and TB was a bit more accessible. Made things easy. Next up a did a bit more painting, tough ups really. The screws in the TD were simple. I unscrewed them about 5mm (yes, everything I say will be in metric thank you :p) and gave them a quick paint. Once they were dry I screwed them back into place and gave them a touch up. Then I added some gray to the ear bumps over the black that I had previously put down. Not perfect but I think I’m happy. All my black lines a fairly thick. Hopefully not abnormally so. I’ll get the black rank bar done tomorrow hopefully, then it’s just some white paint on the screws. Note to self: go get some white paint! While I was going I had another go at the vocoder. Turns out I didn’t really need the rounded brush, just some patience. Please ignore my old lead pencil guide lines that I also obviously ignored. I’ll rub them off tomorrow also. Again, not perfect. I’ve also glued the front cover strips onto both thigh pieces now. I wasn’t too happy with the strength of the join and unfortunately RS do not seem to supply enough PVC for both inner and outer cover strips. Fortunately they leave plenty of spare material on individual pieces so I’ve used so of that instead. It’s not as thick, but I think it will still provide that extra bit of strength. I’ll post pics of that another time.

A bunch of little updates today. I had a go at painting the ab buttons. I just took it nice and slow when I had no distractions, kids and wife were all asleep. They probably would have been easier with a template but I think they turned out ok. Next I gave he brackets in the chest to ab prices had a test fit. I still have to go and counter-sink the holes before I do anything permanently, then paint the screws of course. I have probably left far too much return edge on the chest peice but I didn’t want to go too small first go. Easy fix to remove some material now though. The shoulder straps were pretty straight forward, I really just eye-balled it and sanded flat with a sanding block. I also cut some spare PVC to fit in the grooves on the back to give some reinforcement for when I glue them down - I’ll get a photo of the reinforcements when I glue them down. Poppers installed for the canvas belt... yeah I messed up a few before getting the hang of it. I then worked on the thigh pieces. When trimmed and taped up they feel quite comfortable. Not too tight on my legs but not too much spare room either. There are some big discrepancies when lined up so I plan to trim them down before I glue the cover strips. I know some people leave them as is but I want both legs to look similar. Looking at the back back of the thighs there is no way to line them up the same without serious trimming. Again I’ll trim them so they are similar. This will also stop them sticking into me and I’ll be able to bring them slightly higher. Unsure yet if I’ll have to trim out the back of the thighs. I’ve got them lined up pretty well so if I can avoid it I will. But we’ll see how they feel when I’m wearing them.

$15 you say? Hold my beer

Haha I figured as much!

I can’t vouch for timeframes for a full RS commission but their kit got to me in Sydney in one week, so no complaints here. Obviously one would expect a commission to take considerably longer. Just thought I’d share that irrelevant fact