I figured with all of the amazing help out there on armor assembly, I didn't have much to offer. Plenty of great tutorials on shims out there, too. After KMan was told he needed to preserve the notches on his kidney plates, I decided I would take a stab at my own mod.
Put me down as another fellow who is built bigger than the average 1970's Brit. No hope of losing a few pounds to fit behind my ab plate, though. Those hip bones aren't getting any slimmer. Anyway, I need to add a few more inches to the whole shebang, but I don't want to fill in the nicely sculpted ANOVOS kidney notches just to cut them out again.
The following might be a bit more work than most want to do, but if you can fill two seams, you can fill four. Plenty of ABS paste to go around!
First up, the horrifying reality that is hacking off two chunks of your armor. I made my cut about an inch in from each notch.
For some reason, I thought it might be easier to leave the ab plate attached since I had it all nice and strapped with E6000 on all the rivets.
I selected a few big, flattish pieces of scrap I had left from the initial trimming. Some of the thicker chunks never flattened out properly. I don't have a heat gun, and I guess the water boils cool enough at my altitude that even bending was tough.
I also cut some strips for the inner side. Nothing was big enough to cover the entire 2" plus overlap on either side, so I made plenty of extras. This was a multi-step process. Here's the first gluing:
You know how all that goes. Here's the end of glue step one:
Well that was a refreshing break from sanding my seams. Plus, ROTJ is over. Time to pop in the next one and get back to work! Plenty more updates to come.