revlimiter

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: Full Body Photos: Front Back Right Left Right Detail Left Detail Action shot Armor Details: Ab Buttons Cod/Posterior connection Interior Strapping Wrist openings Ab/Kidney rivets Han snap Sniper knee Sniper knee Sniper knee Ammo pack Ammo pack Ammo pack Helmet Details: Front Back Left Right Green lenses Hovi tips and vocoder Accessories: Neck seal TD Front TD Rear Holster attachment Whole belt, rear Boots Rubber gloves Blaster: Left Right Rear / D-ring Thank you for your time!

One small thing - the PDF does not mention the thigh ammo pack photos needed in the check list. It has the pix for them, but no listing. I was, of course, following the PDF for my pix.

Sooooo... My bucket is insanely amazing and better than I ever expected. With the headphones on it's a perfect fit. Better than my actual racing helmet. The SHA works incredibly, the voice is loud, clear, yet garbled in the right way. The fans keep me cool. It's comfortable and not floppy. I have amazing vision through it after the careful repositioning of everything. It's a dream. ... and I can't actually put the helmet on while wearing armor. I have to slide one or both headphones in and out to install and remove it. I can't do that with the gloves on or the arm articulation I have while wearing the armor. I've tried but... it just doesn't work. Not workable at all. I have to be able to slide the helmet on while the speakers are in place. I have 3 more sets of various thin headphones on the way to fix this issue. I will fix this.

Here's the fitment with the ear/mic packet in place. It's flush! I still can't believe it all fits well. This is how the foam compacted after a day or two. Not bad at all. For test fitting the headphones, I just put some velcro over my screws and popped the headphones in place. It worked but that didn't seem like a great mounting solution forever. Or even for a day. I wanted to do a more solid foundation for the headphones, so I made boxes to go over the ear screws. This is a pre-finished version of the ear box. A passage for the mic wire and space for the three screws and nuts. I made it as tall as my tallest ear screws... ... which meant shortening my extra long ear screws to be about the same height and shorter than before by a thickness of spare armor plastic. Shortening the screws is why I had the ears off again for the photos above. And here's an ear box in place. The layers of plastic were E6000'd together and they sat for a day. The next day I cleaned them up and evened out the edges. Then I did repeated test fittings while grinding down the edges to match the radius of the helmet around the ears for as flush a fit as possible.

I got mine on trooperbay. It's perfect.

I started working on my SHA. Because it's nice to be able to hear things outside the helmet... and I kinda can't so much right now. And also because I got some spiffy new headphones! This is a set of cheap Sony headphones. They're not quite over-the-ear like my nice Bose noise cancelling ones. They kinda sit on the ear. For $18 on amazon, they seemed like an inexpensive test of having real headphones in my bucket. I figured they can always be swapped out for ear buds if I can't fit everything inside. They're model MDR-ZX110 if anyone is interested. My original plan was to just hot glue the SHA in these nice little holes I drilled in the helmet 2 years ago and call it good. But grinding from the fans made that an immediate non-option. I tested it with the headphones out of the helmet and the fans running (so I was standing next to the helmet while holding a headphone to my ear) and the fan noise... dang. This is my test fitting of an outside-the-helmet mounting. 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! Everything is coming together. Seeing the excellent ideas in this thread, I scoured the garage for some foam to isolate the mics with. I used some high-impact seat foam I had sitting around to make ear-recess sized foam isolators. They're about 32mm by 16mm and wedge into the ears quite nicely. Hollowed out... And mics in place. The mic bottoms out on the canvas backing to help keep the ear packet as slim as possible. Gaffer taped in place for testing. It's not a real TK without gaffer tape, right? No blue foam is visible. That means I got the mic lined up right with the holes. Finished off with some spare packing foam that was rattling around the shop. The idea of this is to give a bit of insulation for the entire ear from the inner helmet. And it works great! I didn't take a pic of the re-assembled helmet yet, but the ears snug down just as they did originally with all the extra stuff inside. It works better than I hoped. 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. And what I hear OUTSIDE the helmet - wow. I had no idea they would be this good and powerful. While tinkering with the helmet in one room, I could clearly hear my wife and daughter talking quietly in the next room. With my bucket on! I could not hear them with the bucket off. Loving this upgrade. I just need to finalize the headphone mounting and my bucket will be packed with tech.

I never saw your build before today and am LOVING that latest update with the white paint. Seriously impressive and a gorgeous set of armor. As for bucket build, I recently re-worked mine and posted in my thread. I think this is the right link. I didn't wanna yuck up your thread with pix of my own stuff. Check the pic then my description should make sense. Basically, my whole bucket is lined with velcro. The top side has fuzzy and the rest has hook. No pad on the top. The fuzzy is all my head needs for padding. I used to have a pad on either side in the upper head area. My ICOMM and amp sat on either side of the head near my ears. I use one of those cylinder USB packs and it sat in the very back of the bucket behind the UKSwrath plastic fan holder thing. This configuration worked and everything fit, but the weight was low and that battery at the back slowly tugged my helmet back and obscured vision. So I removed everything and relocated the ICOMM and amp to the top in place of the padding. I gave the outside some fuzzy velcro as padding and was amazed that the helmet actually fit better and more securely. My head touches both boxes and the forehead padding and matching back padding (can't really be seen) keeps things comfy. The weight is now all up high which makes the helmet feel lighter as it isn't dangling around my ears anymore. The USB pack got relocated to behind the vocoder. It isn't totally hidden like before with the back mounting, but it balances the helmet much more nicely. It's much easier to swap out and charge. And it keeps a bit of forward pressure on the helmet so the eyes aren't migrating up my forehead. Wiring: 2 wires from the ICOMM run straight down and around the back. Then they go up to the am in the same path. The USB pack has a plug right there at the side basically behind the speaker tip. All the loose wire hides behind that fan mounting plastic. Does that help at all?

I had my first troop today!!! It was a comic store opening. A pretty low-key event, but still a lot of fun. There were about a dozen of us in attendance. Two TKs. I'm the shiny in the middle above. The armor performed flawlessly. Everything stayed connected, buttoned, and aligned throughout the ~2.5 hour troop. It was comfortable and easy to move around in. I have no complaints at all. When test-fitting, the armor felt pretty tight around the neck, but it didn't feel bad or bother me while trooping. My bucket was also very comfy. The @ukswrath comm system worked perfectly and everyone could actually hear me. I kept one fan running and stayed cool the whole time. I'm looking forward to adding the SHA and seeing if it'll all fit inside with the big headphones I chose to hack up. Visibility was also amazingly good after removing a bit of padding and shifting electronics around. A+ experience!!! Will troop again.

YEAH!!! Looking good! The bells look nice and close to the torso. Fantastic! My neck is also top-button-buttoned-with-tight-bowtie levels of uncomfortable. I should probably grind it out a bit, but it looks good and is so evenly cut right now... I can't bring myself to cut more yet. Gonna troop in it this upcoming weekend so I'll see how bad it is after a few hours.

Nope, not one bit easy to figure out. I cut the front along the lines (which were great on mine) and got them nicely centered and glued. Then the backs got very rough trimmed and I put them on. A buddy taped them up and marked trim lines with a pencil. We then cut one half of each thigh, re-taped, and re-verified where the center line needed to be on the remaining half. Marking, centering, re-measuring, re-re-marking, and finally cutting with the help of a friend and a yard stick is huge. Have the thighs, shins, and boots on together to get a straight line from the boot seam all the way up the thigh. Hope that first bit makes sense. It was all done in a couple days and was kind of a blur.

Reach out to AP? You should be able to get some cover strip material shipped out to finish up the build. I'd offer my extra AP cover strip material, but I know it's barely enough for a single leg worth of strips... def not enough for two.

Browsing various threads here, I noticed something about my bucket... BEFORE I didn't do the best job of painting my vocoder. It's not terrible, but there's room for improvement. The AP helmet is pretty soft in this area and the vocoder isn't well defined. I struggled with figuring out what to paint... 2 years ago. When this build started. heh. Also, the hovi tips are not so white. Again, not terrible, but could be improved. These are the built-in-speaker tips from Ukswrath, which I really really like. They just need a bit more white. AFTER! While maybe still not perfect, this is a LOT better IMO. Worth the half hour of careful painting, measuring, and repainting. I also redid the inside of my bucket. I want to get the SHA and headphones built in and working, so I needed to move some stuff around. The ICOMM and amp used to be basically next to my ears. I had some padding at the top that was making the helmet flop around. And the USB battery used to sit in the very back, which caused the helmet to always be slowly pivoting backwards and obscuring my view. Everything now fits better and it's much more comfy. Happy with these small changes. I managed to drop my Hyperfirm and the counter popped off. It was held on by standard CA glue which was pretty crusty and sparse. Black stuff to the rescue!!! I sanded down the blaster side and matching side on the counter to remove all old CA glue. A quick coating of black stuff... Repaired. Hopefully much more resilient than the old crusty superglue. And finally, more magnet boxes from @Scimitar! These ones are in a slightly sexier black, complete with shadow trooper-sourced ABS covers. These are going on the other side of the torso to keep alignment correct. And since there's far less visibility on this side, I installed them a bit differently. Each set of magnet boxes got polarity and positioning figured out, then set aside. Then I sanded and E6000'd the area and all boxes. Next, I installed a box on one half of the armor, being very careful to line up the seem edge with the box edge. Some blue tape was applied to keep the box from shifting forward when it's buddy appeared for glue-down. Finally, I added the matching box, applied a little force to keep them in place temporarily, and repeated on the 2nd pair above. Located, glued, placed, and clamped. And there they sat another 2 days. Everything was dry enough tonight that I got to try things on and inspect the alignment... and it's just epic. No bulging. No gap. The belt doesn't skew anything. Nothing but perfection. These magnet boxes are something else. Huge thanks to Eric for sending them. And, well, everything else in this build. It would still be in a sad brown box in storage if not for him.

I dunno if this helps, but it's how I did my shoulder bridges. Small bits of spare ABS to fill the voids. I slopped them in there with E6000. Then, while the E6000 was still curing, I added a piece of aluminum stock from Home Depot. I used the thinnest they had, which I think was 1/16 if I remember right. Glue in place and don't let the aluminum go all the way to either end of the bridge. Having a gap at the end allows you to heat and shape the ABS slightly to hide the metal completely. Last, I covered with fuzzy velcro. It's extremely easy to reshape this way and it holds whatever shape you bend. Other troopers have used this sort of metal shoulder bridge for years without problems. Hope this helps! And congrats on the snap setting.

OOooooooo. Thanks!! I have more magnet boxes to glue on and will try that.

A set of magnet boxes arrived from Eric @Scimitar as seen in his build. THIS might be a link to the correct post. It's a set of little 3D printed boxes with rare earth magnets embedded inside and separated by a thin sheet of ABS to give them easier opening. Nothing special? Or something very special? I'm super jazzed to have them!!! This was 95% of the work - getting the torso halves aligned to my liking, taped in that correct alignment (on the down side just barely wrapping around to the inside), and the magnet boxes lined up correctly with the seem. Maybe I could have done the boxes separately, but what fun is that? All at once is much more fun. Aligned, glued, and clamped. And there they sat for 3 days. ... well.... 12 hours. I opened them after 12 hours. But I just HAD to see if the boxes and armor aligned nice, the armor opened and closed, and I didn't have to redo it. and then they actually really did sit with the clamps on for 2.5 more days. Really. It was hard to not tinker with things during the long drying time. And I didn't! The alignment was dead on!!! Top, bottom, sides. Just right. A little bit of excess glue seeped between the magnets and needed removal. That was the extent of the extra work. Just perfect. The armor snaps onto my body with a satisfying magnet-click. And it's aligned perfectly. This makes those 2 torso snaps wayyyy easier to find and snap. There's a troop coming next weekend. This armor will get some use soon!!! And then I'll think about EIB cert.

Beautiful blaster! I have a Quest Design on order and am very excited to receive. Also, amazing looking Boba!

While the cover strips are indeed not centered on the armor itself, they ARE centered on my leg and pass the yard stick test. The strips go straight up from boot to thigh... as long as I manage to line up the boots with the strips that is. I didn't do too great at that with my last set of pix. But yeah, the strips are centered when worn.

Oh yeah. If you're not using the 24 Line snaps, you're gonna have a hard time. That's certainly the issue.

This vid might help? It's basically the same for doing snaps in webbing, but you burn a hole in the webbing with a soldering iron instead of using the punch.

There was a Trunk R Treat within walking distance of the house on Oct 30th, so I trooped over there with my daughter. She in a blow up T-rex and me in the TK. It wasn't a long troop. Maybe 30 minutes and a half mile of walking, but it was enough to reveal something that needed fixing ASAP - thigh mobility. The shins feel pretty good, but the thighs dug into my knees on every curb or stair. I trimmed them as symmetrically as I could and am pleased with the result. But the gaps at the backs became VERY noticeable to me. Just more gap than I wanted and more than I thought I'd be able to get away with for Centurion. ABS paste mixed up! Thanks to the excellent thread here and an old baby food bottle, some scrap armor got turned to goo and applied to the backs of the knees. And then it was the learning curve to sand and finish them. I tried sanding while things were still a bit soft but wasn't happy with the finish. Waiting for full cure seemed to produce a smoother finish. I mowed things down with the dremel and sanding drum, then 220 grit to flatten things down to the right level. Then 400 -> 800 -> 1000 -> 2000 -> Medium cut compound -> Ultimate compound. I could torture myself trying to get a flawless finish, but this seems more than good enough. Especially in a low area that's not often noticed. I mean, I even got a shine on the plastic. Pretty pleased for my first time doing ABS paste.

Thanks guys!!! I'm far too happy about having a TK number. I got a little more work done. I addressed my thermal detonator finally. First, I unrolled it to get the donut rotation closer to correct. I managed to not take pix of this. Just careful unrolling of the metal clips to an even level and then a bit of bending to remove the arc. And it was great, but the TD hung waaayyyy down under the belt. It wasn't good. The rotation was great, but it was just way too low. So I unbent the metal clips and hammered them somewhat flat. Then it went in my bench vise and new bends were installed at the right height. That's what the above pic shows. Fortunately this metal bends very easy. I can do most of it by hand. But flattening and adding even bends are jobs for tools. YES! Not only is the rotation good, but the det is even on the belt. Wild success! I snipped off the overhanging ends of the metal clips and re-re-re flattened and bent things flat behind the belt. I reapplied the little angles at the tips and re-covered them with fuzzy velcro. Worth the hour or so of bending and hammering. And then I printed a new sticker for my E11 with my TK number on it.

Thanks for the suggestions! I'm working on getting that TD to be a bit better. As for me, I'm approved and got a TK number!!!! TK 89400 reporting for duty!! Also, I did some work on my blaster. It's a vintage Hyperfirm B grade, apparently one of the last they sold. It had weathering all over the place. Lots on the grip. Some on the T-tracks. TONS of brass on the scope. So I repainted it completely. I'm a fan of weathering. I like it and tend to weather most of my models. But it needs to be at least realistic and not too obvious. Major wear areas should have weathering visible from a few feet away, but the rest should be very subtle. At least in my opinion. I tried to do that here. I also added an accurate D ring to the blaster. I drilled out the scope a bit and fit a dot of black vinyl with an epoxy dome to give the front a bit more character. Sad black rubber scope was sad... and now it's much happier. And then I printed up a counter sticker and something fun for the scope! I drilled the scope out to a bit over 24 mm and gave it some depth. Then I filled it a tiny bit with resin to give it a flat base. And then I printed a scope sticker on holofoil with an epoxy dome. The design is based on Crosshair's scope in Bad Batch with a little bit of tweaking. Even with being stuck in a shallow well, the holofoil manages to catch light nicely and reflect rainbows as it gets waved around. Super fun. The counter sticker is black and white printed over dark grey vinyl. The design is simple, but overlaid on a hengstler counter photo to get the dimensions right. I'll swap this one out for one with my TK number shortly. The nicer weathering and small personal details have me loving this little E11. Fun to combine my day job with TK tweaks!

TK 89400 requesting access https://www.501st.com/members/displaymemberdetails.php?userID=34307 thanks!!!

I could probably tweak the armor for another month, but it feels pretty good and solid. It was time for basic approval pix before I could put it off any longer. To do: - magnet boxes on one side of the torso - something to align the other side slightly nicer - finish weathering the blaster - mobility cuts in the legs

Are you just after a snap tool suggestion? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01C84JX94 Check out this little guy. It's 2 sided. 1 side for each gender of snap. You just hammer.