revlimiter

After researching and obsessing over other bin builds here (mostly of the 50 gallon variety and specifically @OddViking327 insane bin build thread) I thought I'd contribute my own. I started out with this little guy. The Husky 25 gallon. I'm a small car enthusiast and make my living by producing parts for small cars, so a 50 gallon was just not in the cards. This 25 gallon doesn't really fit most of my cars, but it fits ONE and my TK does fit inside it with careful packing. This is the newest (2021) Husky 25 gallon. It has integrated lid handles and a barely-there logo. That logo is easily dremeled flat in a few minutes. I didn't wanna go as all-out as OddViking with lights and switches, but I do want the bin to be in-universe. And to me that means white. All white. The two-tone black and white bins look cool, but they're just not quite the look I wanted. So just a few things got masked off before painting. I also cut out some of the inner lid support. Not all of it... yet. I want to see how it does with some of it opened up. This gives a bit of extra room for the chest plate to live and not be smooshed. There's also not too much in the way of lost rigidity with half the support gone. And then the painting. I think this is two cans in. I used just over four cans of paint for this little bin. Four cans. Two primer and two gloss white. I used an Ace Hardware house brand for the primer and a Rustolium "also bonds to white" gloss paint. I didn't use Krylon fuzion because I really didn't want the paint to bond TOO well to the plastic. It's cold here now, so I rolled the bin out to the driveway to spray. Then inside for the 20-30 minute cure and then outside for another can. Four coats total with a small spritz of the fifth can for final touch up. And there it is. All white and shiny!!! It won't be like that for long. Inside it's a huge TK picnic box. This black and white flannel was just too good not to use. I used spray adhesive on the walls to hold the fabric in place and hot glued the top and bottom edges in place. The fabric can be removed (and repaired) if needed, but it's really really in there. On the bottom is a flat pillow of toolbox liner. A 16" wide roll fit the bin perfectly. It's not a lot of padding, but it seemed preferable to no padding in the bottom. And that pillow just sits in there, so it can be easily removed and washed. Then I fired up the laser cutter and made a couple vents. Totally TOTALLY plagiarizing OddViking here. After seeing them in his builds I couldn't not do a few vents for myself. I also printed up a nice number plaque to fit in the middle recess. Because why not? I have all these toys to make car parts with. I needed something for the lid. So I went a little nuts and gave my TK the deluxe model of plaque for his bin. And there's the bin all built up. This is how I imagined a fresh and shiny brand new TK armor bin might look. Those handle recesses are just perfect for these vents. They're E-6000'd in place and some Jawa hood liner is blanking things out. I cut off some screw heads with bolt cutters and glued them in place as well. No need for any screws to touch my shiny armor... Yeah. I'm pretty proud of that. "Serving the Empire with Unquestioned Loyalty"

congratulations trooper!!!

Looking good fellow AP trooper!!!

Beautiful fitment on that armor!

Your helmet build was really inspiring and helpful to me while I was working on mine. Thank you for the fantastic info and pix! I'm considering an aker amp in the chest specifically for the TK chatter loop. I may have to do that shortly...

CENTURION ACHIEVED!!!! Seriously over the moon right now.

WOW!!!!! Thank you Joseph and everyone else!!! I'm blown away. Here I was tinkering with my new 25 gal armor transporter whilst all this was going on. Now to plan my next build?

This was my original mic mounting plan. This thread convinced me to not do this. But I had the hole pre-drilled and wanted to show how nice the mics fit in there. They also fit THROUGH a hole that size very nicely. A quick test with the mics taped into place here and the fans turned on discouraged me from doing anything with this mounting solution. I made some pencil marks at my approximate ear hole locations and test fitted the ears back on to see how much room there was for the SHA mics. And there was room! Plenty in fact. And the wires allow this sort of mounting. They bend nicely and there's space behind the ears in my AP bucket for this kind of mounting. This is a small rectangle of closed cell foam. It's high-impact seat foam I used to use in a racing bucket for Autocross. You do not need to use something this exotic. It was simply what I had laying around. A few layers of EVA foam would likely work, or even some open cell couch foam. Just something to isolate the mics from the helmet and confine them to inside the ears. My rectangles are about 32mm by 16mm. Full height of the material at about 25mm. They wedge into the ears quite nicely. I then hollowed out a recess for each mic. The foam is just there to isolate the mics, not to rigidly mount them. This type of cushion/foam has a canvas backing. I left that in place to hold the mics in as securely as possible. The mic and foam is gaffer taped in place. This seemed like a ghetto solution at the time, but it has the benefit of being accessible for service if needed. The mics are held in place securely, and it has performed very well for the past several weeks. I think the gaffer tape is a good mounting solution for this. The blue foam helped with mic alignment. If I saw blue foam while shoving the mic around, that meant it wasn't aligned right with the holes. Black = good alignment. I finished off the ear packet with some open cell packing foam that was laying around the garage. It's rather thick, but it compressed nicely. It further isolates the mics from inner bucket sounds. After being installed a few days I opened things back up to check on them. The packing foam compressed beautifully and there's not much stress on anything. Everything fits extremely well and there's no gap that wasn't there before. Fan noise with the helmet on and SHA running is precisely as loud as it is inside the helmet without the SHA running. So, while I can still hear the fans, the mics aren't picking them up at all. It's just what I hear inside the helmet anyway. I don't have words for how much I love the SHA and my hacked up headphones. Best bucket upgrade ever. Thanks again to @ukswrath, @fishgoh0nk and everyone else who has contributed to this thread.

This thread was a huge help to me while installing my SHA, so I thought I'd share my own mounting solution. I started out trying to fit a set of cheap Sony headphones in my bucket. They're model MDR-ZX110 if anyone is interested and about $20 from amazon. They mount on the ear instead of over the ear. I snipped off the over-head part and stuck on some velcro to hold them in place. The sony units did indeed fit, but I had to remove one (or BOTH! ugh) to put on or remove the helmet. Not too hard to do honestly. Just slide them up and then the velcro holds them in place. But this was unfortunately impossible to do while wearing armor. I just don't have that much arm articulation or finger dexterity with the plastic in the way. But omg, the sound from these things! Gloriously loud and very clear. So I sliced open some of my tactical armor pads. Each consists of three pieces - a fluffy open cell foam, a closed cell pad, and a sheet of vinyl. I hollowed out the closed cell pad for a headphone. PLEASEIGNORE THE ABOVE HEADPHONE. This was a cheap pillow speaker that didn't work nearly as nice as the ZX110. But it was a good proof of concept. Then I figured out that the Sony headphones could be unscrewed and disassembled. Each driver had two screws holding it in place. Removing it made these just slightly thicker than the pillow headphones. The padding got sliced up a bit more and the Sony drivers mounted inside. I put a healthy amount of gaffer tape over the back of each headphone to protect the delicate wires and everything else. I left the padded ear cups in place. This is my final helmet configuration. The ICOMM and amp live at the very top and are covered in fuzzy velcro. These act as pads at the top edge of my head and are actually comfortable. The SHA lives in the very back and gets covered by a neutered helmet pad. The headphones live inside those ear pads and fit perfectly. I can take the helmet on and off. It's a tight fit, but not a bad one. Fans and fan battery are mounted at the front. The battery lives inside the vocoder recess. Sound is amazing. With the SHA turned all the way up, I have much more acute hearing than without the bucket on. It's painful if there's a lot of noise nearby and I have to turn it down. With a bit of careful tuning, I was able to get the SHA to output basically normal hearing levels. Nothing's muffled or overly boosted. It's like not having my bucket on. Note: I was not able to achieve adequate volume with the pillow speakers. I needed these "big" Sony ones. But they kick out the volume. Well worth the effort to fit them. Posting the headphones first may be a bit backwards, but it was actually much more work for me to get the headphones working. Next up, the mics. Enormous thanks to @fishgoh0nk for all the info on mounting those mics, otherwise the headphones would not have been the hard part.

Name: Adam Wolf Height: 5'11" Weight: 165 lbs Armor: AP Helmet: AP Blaster: HyperFirm E-11 Boots: Imperial Boots Canvas Belt: AP Hand Plates: Rubber (AP) Electronics: Ukswrath (Hovi-tip Speakers, Hearing Assist, & Fans) Neck Seal: Darman's Props Holster: AP Build Thread: EIB Thread: Full Body Photos: Front Back Right Left Right Detail Left Detail Action shot Action shot 2 Armor Details: Cod/Posterior connection Shoulder bridge front Shoulder bridge side Shoulder bridge rear Ammo pack Ammo pack Ammo pack Sniper knee Sniper knee Sniper knee Wrist openings Ab plates Butt/kidney connection Interior strapping Arm strapping Helmet Details: Front Back Left Right Hovi tips and vocoder S-trim Ear screw details - Left Ear screw details - Right Interior build (showing green lenses) Accessories: TD Front TD Rear Rubber gloves Holster attachment Whole belt, rear Boots Blaster: Left Right Rear / D-ring Thank you for your time, consideration, and helping me build the best armor I can build!

I happened to have a spare set of Trooperbay vinyl stripes on hand, so I did this fix immediately. Mr No Stripes Saves Christmas. Spacing on the left with my CORRECT new stripes. Spacing on the right. So much better! FIXED!!! Ready to apply for Centurion.

I received EIB today!!!! Approval 1037!!! And my one big thing to fix for Centurion is my tube stripes. Which is... embarrassing. See, I was told that my tube stripes were backwards back in 2019. And I have a clear memory of fixing them! I ordered two sets of the tube stripe vinyl from trooperbay and have one set left. I knoowwwwww I fixed them. However, the stripes on my bucket exactly matched the original pix showing my backwards stripes, down to the millimeter. Even if I managed to re-apply the stripes backwards, I don't think I would have had the placement so exact... I can only surmise that I never did that fix. Very embarrassing. Anyways, here's a bunch of pix of tube stripes. WRONG. Backwards. I have no idea how I didn't fix this. OR where that second set of spare stripes went. Mr No Stripes Saves Christmas. Carefully measured and laid out. And fixed! It's so subtle but so much better. My left side was quite a bit too low. I had the right really good, but this one wasn't at the level. Careful alignment. Have I mentioned that I love these vinyl stripes? Yeah. That's the good stuff. Spacing on the right. FIXED!!! Ready to apply for Centurion.

YAAAASSSSSSSSSS!!!!! Thank you Joseph and everyone else!!!! I'll compose a more coherent reply shortly.

Boiling is generally the best, safest, and most gentle way of modifying plastic shape. Fill up a big pot and make some armor soup. Try to keep it from touching the bottom. I use my rubber TK gloves to protect my hands from the heat while reforming.

Congratulations Trooper!!!

In another universe we're all TX's.

So, I took EIB approval photos... and on the pix, my magnet-aligned torso armor decided to do this: It's not bad at all, but after taking the pix, I learned that the magnets can misalign themselves ever so slightly in either direction. It's not very much, but it's enough to be annoying. The magnets seem to have a little bit of grab in them. They don't slide smoothly, but can rather grab and lock down kinda. I needed something to ensure that they'd align perfectly every time. I could ask someone nearby to align them for me when I suit up, but it seemed like with a little thought, I could come up with something simple to do it. Like a little key to lock it in place just right by itself. So I was looking at the armor and I noticed that the space between the boxes was a perfect natural slot. If I had a key in one half, it would naturally close at perfect alignment every time. So I made a key. Two layers of spare material seemed to be just right. I wanted it to have some strength and not accidentally bend on a bad closing. Two layers seemed better than one. After getting E6000'd over night, I ground the two layers down to the right 13mm dimension for the 13.7mm slot. I gave it a little rounded edge as well to help the key shoot easily into the slot. Another night of E6000. And there we are! Half of the torso now has a key to align the magnet boxes. Hot keyway action. It's simple but I'm really pleased with this mod. Mod to a mod. Repeated opening, closing, and test fitting on myself showed that the magnet boxes close perfectly every time. I hope the misalignment doesn't come up with the EIB review.

For the gloves, try the Plastic Bonding System. https://www.amazon.com/Loctite-Plastics-Bonding-Activator-681925/dp/B000Y3LHXW/ It's pretty fantastic and glued my rubber gloves and silicone tops together. I got mine at a local Ace Hardware instead of Amazon, but the link at least shows you the product details. Took me about 2 days. I scuffed and glued about 80% of the silicone to the rubber, set some heavy books on both, and let them sit. Then I did the non-glued outside half and repeated with the book. And then the last remaining non-glued half.

Back to the bucket. This is a pillow speaker set. I had no idea this sort of thing existed till the other day. I guess they're meant for listening to books or white noise or whatever through your pillow. They're thin and soft and seemed like they'd be perfect for a bucket. Since I replaced the top two helmet pads with my amp and iComm, I had two spare helmet pads left over. They got immediately grabbed up and sliced open for headphone duty. I was surprised by all that was inside. Some soft couch foam, harder closed cell foam, and a sheet of stiff vinyl as backing. No wonder it's $20 for like 8 of these. Hole cut for pillow speaker! Taped in and ready for action. And I wish I could report that these were awesome. They DID fit. My head can slide in and out of the helmet with those pads at my ears. And the speakers do work... barely. They are extremely quiet. They seem to be designed to be pressed hard against your head for sound to transmit to your ear, like if you were lying on a pillow. That's great and all, but I can't have that with the bucket. That's what I had before with the big headphones and I couldn't take the bucket on and off... And then inspiration struck. I hacked apart my big headphones and shoved them in the helmet pads. I managed to only take this one photo. Basically, the headphones are held together with 2 screws each. Unscrew them and you get access to the little driver as seen above. The ear pad and driver are left mounted to a thin plastic wafer. It's about 3x as thick as the pillow speaker, but it's less than half the original thickness of these headphones. I covered each driver with gaffer tape very carefully. The tiny thin delicate wires are tiny, thin, and delicate. With any luck they'll last a while and not get torn away. But the tape is quite secure and should hold things safely. Then I cut larger recesses in the helmet pads. I cut the soft padding away completely, just leaving a donut around the outside of the headphone. Annnd... IT WORKS!!!!!!!! The big headphones are much louder than the pillow speakers and work beautifully. I can get in and out of the helmet without harming headphones or shifting the padding around. It's comfortable and I can hear clearly. I don't even have the SHA volume all the way up. I feel like my bucket is now "complete." I'll tidy up the wires and get everything situated to my liking after my next troop, but I'm just over the moon about this. - the SHA works beautifully, doesn't pick up fan noise, and I can hear things. - the amp is wonderfully loud and the iComm makes a lovely crackle noise just as I wanted. - the fans keep me cool. One usually does the trick. - the bucket is comfortable and I can see clearly thanks to careful padding adjustment to get my eyes in just the right spot. I'm a happy trooper.

Congrats trooper!!!

I'm far from the most knowledgeable, but to me that looks incredible. Very beautiful work!

The logo on mine is a black glossy label. It's either invisible or gets covered with black cloth tape. A quick strip of the old timey electrical tape is what I've done.

I got a 3 pack of these from Amazon and like them. Good compression, good price. Currently on cyber monday deal. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZF5RKYR For pants, I hit Dick's Sporting Goods and got their house brand. It has a pocket on the left thigh spaced perfectly to hide under your thigh armor. I can keep and retrieve a phone from there. The holster hides it perfectly. DSG house brand compression pants. They come in both regular and cold weather.

The AP sniper knee. It's a pain. This is how mine was. It wasn't bad but... man... it just wasn't great. I was not happy with it at all. I didn't feel confident in submitting this for EIB and Centurion... so it got cut right off and shoved in some boiling water. I boiled the knee for about 20 minutes. Warming the plastic, bending and manhandling, rewarming, rebending. The final shape had the outside end bent waaayyy down from where it originally was. The two ends were pretty even from the factory, but the knee armor isn't shaped that way. The outside edge is much lower. The sniper knee needs this shape as well if it wants to follow the armor lines. While boiling and bending, the knee cracked. And honestly, it was pretty fantastic that it cracked. This allowed for a tiny bit more reshaping and let me get the knee to the shape it needed. And then I clamped it. This was nearly as much work as the boiling. I got the outside edge clamped first and it started to cure and not slide around anymore. Then I added the magnets for the center and got it situated without having the outside edge move. And about 10 minutes later I was able to add the inside clamp. Everything sat like that about 2 hours until the E6000 had just enough strength... ... to fix the knee crack. I (very very lightly and carefully) drilled a relief hole so the crack wouldn't spread. I also stuck some extra plastic behind it for strength. Huge thanks to @Scimitar for the tips. Then some ABS paste to fill the gap and repair area. ABS also holds the plastic strip behind the repair in place. After all that, the knee got to sit for over 24 hours. The paste and E6000 got a good cure with clamps in place the whole time. I sanded the ABS paste flat and gave it a polish. Better than new! Here's the finished sniper knee. I'm SO proud of this! I'm no longer embarrassed by that knee. I submitted my pix for EIB immediately.

Right. I might not have stated the problem well. I know it's required. It just was not specifically listed on the PDF version. The PDF shows the photo but it does not have the check box for the thigh ammo pack. When taking pix, I printed the PDF instead of the top post in this thread. It's just a very small thing. Probably not worth mentioning. I was just trying to help future troops.