Cricket

Allow me to chime in here. I'm just 64 inches tall, 106lbs, and I'm currently sizing my RS Props TK to fit me (requiring height and width reductions everywhere). I'm a little more than halfway there. This is my very first armor build, and it's been a really fun journey. Let me assure you that if I can do this, you can too. Pandatrooper has a good thread about how he sized down his AM kit to fit well. Penguintrooper is currently working on a TK build, and he's 65" and 150lbs. I don't know who made his armor, though. While my RS kit is the only kit I have experience with (for now), I've also read that ATA and AP are also good for those of us who are Vertically Challenged. Good luck with your TK search!

After taking a good look at my armor yesterday, I decided I needed to make the leap and.... Slice the cod!!!! Well, not that cod, but you get the idea... So. Here's where I began yesterday. I carefully reviewed Pandatrooper's pics I decided that the width of my ruler was perfect for what I needed to remove. For all you who love numbers, for my 5'4" stature, it was 1.25". I clamped the ruler to the cod and made a pencil line for where I needed to cut. Then I took a really deep breath and cut with my lexan scissors. Looks terrifying, huh? I should post all of my armor mods together in their 'before' state as a Horror thread. Muhahahaaaaa.... Okay, don't go running away yet! I've got a plan for all this, really. In Pandatrooper's mod for the cod, he takes a 1.25" slice out of the cod entirely. After cutting the cod on my armor, I decided that instead of removing that part, I would opt to keep it all one piece. So I left that 1.25" part of the armor intact as a base where I could securely- and permanently- attach it. I decided to place my sliced codpiece on top of the area where I detached it from. Using a pencil, I created a natural line where the cod would merge with the ab plate. Then I trimmed those areas off. You can see the trimmed parts on the floor in the background. Next, I matched the ridge line of the cod together from the inside and verified that the cut lines were sufficient. It looked good, so I decided that it was time to reintroduce my cod back to my ab. My first thought was to secure their relationship with e6000, but then I remembered that I wanted this bond to last. Forever. <3 ABS paste stepped in and said, "I can make this last!" And since ABS paste was commonly used as glue on TKs during filming, this would surely be approved by the Emperor. I sanded down the areas where the paste was going, and frosted the ABS paste on. My paste had the consistency of very thick honey. Then I stuck everything together and lined the ridges up. Using tape and magnets, I assembled it all together to secure their bond. Forever. Awww.... In the morning, I discovered that the cod and the ab had happily decided to stick together, and they're never going to break up. Don't you love a happy ending? Okay, here's a before and after so you can see how much better it fits me now. I'm really happy with how this turned out. I wish I hadn't been so terrified to do this, because it wasn't all that hard to do. I still need to create the return on the top, which will be tackled today. Onward!

I can't see a thing in this helmet! This is my first time trying all the torso parts on myself. Here's what I've done to get it to this point: Chest cut. A lot. Biggest area removed was the scoop at the neck so it would fit me better. (In this photo, the chest had shifted down, so the neckline that's visible is a fitting adjustment. The neck fits snug against my neck seal when it is seated properly.) Shoulder areas trimmed as suggested. When removing that much material from one part of the armor, all the other sides needed also to be reduced in size. So cuts were made all around. I had to re-create the shoulder 'strap' areas on the chest as I made the chest plate smaller around the pectoral area. Ab cut at the top. No return yet. Still may need to trim more. Cod trimmed a bit at the bottom. I really don't need all that space down there. Now I'm considering cutting the cod away from where it meets the ab, removing an inch from the top of the cod, and then reattaching it to the ab. I don't want to move the ab up any further, but the cod still needs to be pulled in closer to my... ah... um...... girly bits. (link to Pandatrooper's Cod Slice-o-rama) Trimmed all around the back. Reducing the sizes of the chest, kidney and ab also now makes it impossible to proceed without trimming the back, too. I've removed the return from the bottom of the back piece and will create a new return. This reduces the overall height of the back piece for me by about 20mm. I've also trimmed the shoulder strap areas of the back as well as around the neck.

Hey Alexander, About those buttons, I found this over at the ANH TK Stunt CRL: "buttons are approximately 7/16" (11mm) in diameter". So if you're in that ballpark, you should be good I think. Many people choose to remove all of the returns off of the biceps. For my biceps, I trimmed off the tops of the biceps and removed the returns. You can't really see the tops of the biceps when they're on anyhow because they're hidden under the shoulder bells. Here's mine: Hope that helps!

Oh, and thank you Michael! For all you Vertically Challenged following along, I found confirmation over at Diana's Centurion Request post. Trim the ab from the top. Then line the ab and kidney at the top. Bottom of the kidney and ab parts are covered with the belt, so it won't matter if they're not aligned up. Should be good for Centurion approval, so I'm now back to work...

Your shins look good to me. I would remove those returns on the bottom before gluing them together, though. BTW, I had wonky scoring lines on my shins, too. The cover strip will hide any imperfections in the work.

Okay, just so I understand correctly: cut from the top, restore the return. Got it. So the bottom of the ab/cod won't be in alignment with the kidney anymore once I do that. I'm assuming then it's not an issue for EIB/Centurion because the belt will hide it all?

Yay for thermal det completion! Looks great. Actually, I'm a bit jealous. I still need to paint the screws on mine. Congrats, and onward!

Pics or it didn't happen. And such awesome customer service from TK Boots! Wow!

Really nice work. Great step-by-step tutorial! Love all the extra effort made for all the little details. Bravo!! (I may have to tear my lid apart now and re-do things in mine.) Do you have any issues with the lenses fogging up while installed like this? From the pics, I don't see any areas for air circulation around the eyes, but I could be wrong.

So sorry for posting more than once today, but I've got a question about sizing down the ab, and I can't figure how to solve this. As the armor is on my DTD, it's still too large, and I will be making further adjustments. My issue is with the length of the ab/cod (haha, that sounds really odd...). When I put on the ab so that it fits (meaning the cod piece is where it should be without causing me to go into fits of Silly Walking), it sits like this: It's not just an ab plate on me. It's an entire chest plate. I know I can trim it from the top, so everything would fit fine cod-wise, but then I will run into another problem. That's with the kidney and chest pieces lining up together at the top. Here's how it looks now with kidney trimmed (dig that spiffy DIY kidney notch): I need to take off a lot off the top of the ab. Which will bring everything up, including the cod. Then the lower edge of the cod won't be in line with the kidney anymore. Will that matter? I'm using the view A below as my reference: I've read Diana's thread, and I don't see any specific outlined details of how they tackled the ab, aside from general comments about trimming. I don't want to cut the cod across like Pandatrooper, so that's not an option right now. Any suggestions as to how to reduce the size of the ab length-wise and keep the centurion lines would be appreciated. Thanks, troopers!

Thanks! Just be sure to practice well on some ABS first. You don't want to end up having to rebuild returns like I did. And post your pics if you do this! I'd love to see how yours turns out. Thanks, Christina! Knowing how well you've built your TK, TD, and Tusken, I know you would totally do this kind of thing if you needed to- and you would do it to perfection! Hey, thanks David! Glad you got that pic up for me. Having the visual is very helpful.

Taking the advice of the wise troopers in the FISD, I reshaped my kidney and butt plates by pouring boiling water on the areas that needed to be changed. Here’s the kit before shaping on the left, after on the right. The kidney and butt plates have a bit of a tapered-in appearance now, they’re proportional to the arms, and I’m happy with them at this point. Next area to tackle was my chest piece. I trimmed off about an inch off the bottom of my chest plate because it needed to be gone due to my height (or lack of height). I really want to use brackets on my pieces, but now the lack of a return on my chest made that impossible. I figured that it would look more like a Luke suit, but I didn’t like that this kit wasn’t going to be a full Hero suit. No return! Sad! I spent 4 hours waiting at the Honda dealership for my car’s airbags to be replaced today, which gave me loads of time to think about this. I re-read over Diana’s build thread because she and her hubby had created a return on her chest plate after taking some off the bottom. It would involve a heat gun (noooo!), and a jig (more stuff to build…), but it looked do-able. Once home, I got to work. I traced my chest plate’s bottom edge onto a piece of spare plywood. I cut it out using my jigsaw, then attached some extra wood pieces to keep it all upright. I traced about 5/8” around the bottom of the chest as a guide where the fold of the return should go. I had to psych myself up for the next part. I figured that if I mucked up the returns like I did with the kidney, I could always fix it with ABS paste. Here goes… The beginning of the return... Using my heat gun on LOW, I slowly heated up the edges beginning in the center, and working outwards toward the edges. Taking one section at a time, I pressed the new return gently into the wood. Moving along... And whaddya know… it was working! It took me less than an hour, but I soon had a nice new return edge all along my chest plate. It's not perfect, but it's good enough that most people won't even notice that I recreated it. I will be able to use my brackets now. Heck yeah!

Thanks for that info, David! I can't see the image you posted, but I think I understand what you're talking about. ☺

The RS TK kits have two left shins. I've confirmed this with RS. You'll want to remove the returns from the bottom. <br><br> Good luck with your build! I'll be following! ☺

Looks great! Good luck (but I don't really think you'll be needing it)!

Thanks! The back looks like it fits fine width-wise, but the chest seems too large across still. I was able to dress up my dressform with my DTD. It looks like she's saying, "Taaaahhh- dahhhhh!" And with the torso added: Then for fun, added the arms: The kidney/ab/butt areas look ridiculously large in proportion to my arms. I think I've got the vertical parts trimmed down fairly decently for my height. But they definitely need to be sized in on the width quite a bit, even with padding. See CRL pic below: The kidney and ab taper in slightly. I'll be needing to give it more of a curve than I can with just with the belt. Even if I can get just a little more curve, I'll then need to remove some more material from the kidney and ab so I don't have an overlap going on at the sides. My goal is Centurion, so I want to get this correct on the first go-round. I think that the consensus of reshaping and padding will be the way to go on this. Thanks for the input, everyone! Another question: At the shoulders where the chest and back pieces meet, are they supposed to touch? In order for my chest and back to sit properly for my frame, these pieces connect. Just checking if that's something that should be going on up there. Thanks, troopers!

Alrighty then. I am sick of sanding. Sick, I tell you! I won't be rebuilding returns any time soon. No, thank you. So. It all started looking like this on the left.... And now after what feels like an eternity of pasting and sanding, pasting and sanding (but it's just a little over a week...), here's the result on the right: Before on the left, after on the right: And after: I'm just going to hold off on polishing until I get this thing fitted correctly. No need to polish stuff that I may need to cut off anyhow. So glad to be done with fixing this! Which leads me to the next part of my journey... I'm stuck trying to figure out how to fit the width to me. I'm more than a little gun shy about pulling out a heat gun to bend my ABS, and these pieces are too large for easy hot water bathing. Or are they? I took the advice of my GML and made a duct tape dummy (which resulted in slashed clothing and blood spilled, but it's a story for another time), but I just don't know where to begin trimming the armor parts. Would be awesome to find an armor party! Gonna start asking around here. Until then, I may start on my jawa until I find some hands-on help.

Congrats, Sarah!!!!! Woo hoo!!!!

I attached mine using the method Ukswrath shows here. I've seen the elastics placed on the inside of the arm (along where the arm folds) as well as on the outside of the elbow. I've also seen elastic size range between 1" and 2" used. Ukswrath used 1.5" elastic in the tutorial, so that's what I used as well.

Whee! I'm covered in a fine powder of ABS dust right now, but taking a much needed break from all the sanding fun to share my progress... Pics incoming! Let's review the horror show I began with... No need to see the other side of that mess. It's identical, believe me. Then I slopped ABS paste all over the edges and let it dry for a few days. I began rough sanding some of it off with my belt sander once it was fully dry. There was just too much of it to sand it all off by hand. Ain't nobody got time fo' that! Then I got to work sanding with a small block and 120 grit sandpaper... As I sanded down, I realized that I still needed to add more to the corners of the edges. Here ya go, Frank! Yep, that paste build up isn't going anywhere. It bonds permanently with the original substrate. One benefit of this repair is that my return edges will need no reinforcement for my brackets after this. They are approximately 4mm thick under the edge right now all the way across. The pics below look messy, but I assure you, they do end up looking better... keep reading... Keep in mind that this was with the first layer only, so all the bubbles were expected. I added another layer of ABS after this initial sanding, both on the sides as well as the return edges. This was done to build up the edges where I wanted more corner edge as well as fill in the bubbles on the top of the return. The next day, I began sanding again with my block and 120 grit paper... I've made the edges more crisp and clean, and the return edges don't have as many of the holes as were present just after the initial sanding... And I'm not done yet, but I'm very much on my way. I still have to finish sanding, as you can see. I may still add another thin layer of ABS and re-sand again if I'm not absolutely happy when I'm done. Not sure yet. No polishing until I'm 100% good with it. It's taking longer than I expected, but that's because I'm being really picky when it comes to making sure that the surface is totally smooth and even after sanding.

I've received a lot of messages about how either crazy or brave I am about sludging up my armor to repair the edges. And since y'all are interested, I'll post some in-progress pics for you to judge. Aaaaannd in our last episode, my butt plate looked like this disaster: So I said F*** it. Sludge it. I waited for two days for the sludging to dry, and then I got to work sanding it. I highly recommend using an orbital sander for this kind of modification, because it's a huge time-saver. I already own an orbital sander, so I picked up a foam pad and some fine and micro mesh discs for sanding the armor. After about 15 minutes of wet-sanding the left side of the butt plate with an 800 grit disc, here's what I ended up with: Progress, right? But there were still uneven areas of the ABS that I didn't like. Just like frosting a cake, I added another thin layer of ABS to the areas I was unhappy with and waited a day for that to dry. Again, I'm just focusing on the left side for now. Once dry, I went to work sanding. I am now here: Do you still think this approach is crazy or... brave? I'd like to think I'm a bit of a crazy warrior myself. hee hee... Some things I'll share about ABS paste: Acetone can be your friend in small doses on ABS. When I dipped my finger in acetone, and rubbed it gently on the ABS paste, it is kind of like wet-sanding drywall. In small spots, you'll end up with a nice, smooth surface to work with, and usually, it will dry quickly and very glossy. (With smoothing out buttercream on a cake, you do the same kind of thing with water instead of acetone.) If you apply ABS paste thickly, you will end up with lots of tiny bubbles dried inside. Which is a PITA when sanding because your smooth sanded surface will be porous. Gah! For mods like what I'm doing, be prepared to apply several layers of ABS paste and have the patience to sand each layer down smooth before applying a new layer. The last layer should be very thin and smoothed with the acetone method as described above. This should make the final sanding process fairly bubble-free. I still wasn't 100% happy with the edges in the pics above, so I added yet another thin layer of ABS paste to the edges. I'm waiting on that to dry this evening. If all goes well, I should be sanding and polishing the final layer on the left side tomorrow. As always, any additional tips are always appreciated! Thanks for watching, and stay tuned!

Yes, this all seems crazy to me, too. But you know what they say... when you've got nothing left to lose, you only have everything to gain, right? Or maybe I've been spending too much time around the acetone lately....

Yep, Big Boo-Boo pretty much sums things up here. I feel like I'm in a lot more control with using the ABS paste over the heat iron. It definitely feels more like I'm headed in the right direction now. I felt like I was flailing before. Thanks! When I was building my ATA bucket, I ended up learning a lot about using ABS paste. Filling in the teeth to make my Stunt a Hero was one lesson. I learned the most about it when I built out new edges to areas where I had removed too much plastic. You can't even tell where I created new areas now. I have some new pieces lined up, but I'm still going to finish this repair. If only for the challenge to make it look good.

Thanks, Luc! I need all the luck I can get right now... Thanks for the encouragement, Jorge. I figure that it's important to post my fails on this so that others can learn from my mistakes. It's actually really, really a tough thing for me to do- posting my mistakes out here. I'm a perfectionist when it comes to most projects, and this one is no exception. To admit that I've messed up- even after ALL the research I've been doing- is hard. This build is a journey. And no great journey has ever been taken without pitfalls along the way. Actually, the most memorable trips are the ones that come with problems. Like the time I was kidnapped in India. Or when I got stung by jellyfish while snorkeling in Australia. Or when I crashed on my motorcycle when driving on Kauai. Or when I overmelted my kidney returns on my TK. You get the picture. That said, I may back away from things, but I do not give up. Ever. There is always a way to make something work out how I want it to. And I remembered this: So I put everything away in my Husky box yesterday. All of it. I spent the day out of my office and with my sheltie. In the back of my mind (but while focused on other things), I continued to try to solve the edge issue on the kidney. There had to be a way to make it work. Thanks for your support Eric! I think you're referring to Diana's build. The wood jig is a fantastically good idea for creating the edge, but I don't think it'll help me much to fix things as they are. (Note to self: create wood jig for next build...) I didn't want to keep applying heat to the edges. I found that yesterday that when I applied heat to some areas with the iron, I would end up inadvertently warping or dinging an area that I didn't want to change. And the lack of control over how the edges were changing was maddening. As I examined the white bumpy return edges, I began thinking about buttercream (stay with me, here...). I have made my fair share of tall creative cakes with fondant and all that. With fondant, you want your base layer of buttercream to be almost glassy smooth before applying the fondant. It never starts that way, though. You usually have to add several thin layers of buttercream, smoothing things up as you go, in order to get a fantastically smooth finish. Same thing applies to drywall/sheetrock patching (that's for y'all who don't do cakes). That's when it became clear about what I needed to do. Instead of heating and bending the ABS on the kidney and butt piece returns to try to even things up, I decided to add ABS to bulk up the edges. By overbuilding the edges with ABS paste, I will then sand them all down to exactly the curve, plane, and angle I need to make them look good (or at least acceptable). So you wanna see something scary? Kind of looks like frosting, right? Scary frosting! I know that when it dries, I will be able to sand and polish this all out glossy and smooth. I've got some more ABS paste cooking right now, so I'll get to the kidney when it's ready. I'm pretty sure that this method will fix things for me. Stay tuned!