Lord_Potato

Thank you, I just need to accept this build is not going to done when I want. Patience is a virtue I guess

shoulder bridges are attached and I added snaps to my armor: Took out my RS belt to use it as a reference to cut my Walts belt: I am very upset with myself. I actually had my ears pretty nicely aligned. They were a little meatier that I wanted but I thought they looked very good. After I screwed the ears on I realized that I thought I cut along the bottom mold line of the ear. The bottom of the ear mold line was barely visible and I had excess material. My dumb self decided to re cut along the actual mold line and I threw both ears out of alignment. I tried to correct it but I just made it worse. The ears are now unusable. I have more ears coming from Walt but I know the color is going to be off so I dont know what to do for color matching. The thing that has really gotten me in a bad mood was that the ears were aligned very well in my opinion. I should have left them. I just wasted lots of time for nothing. The only good thing that came out of this was I got some practice using a compass to help the ears align with the sides of the helmet. I am just angry with myself. Ill post some pictures with me wearing the arms and legs with my undersuit to show how it looks on me. I hope you all had a more productive weekend than me.

Thank you for your advice. The armor with the frayed elastic is from my already built RS propmasters TK that I am using as reference. That is how RS propmasters assembled my kit. I have soldering iron that I have been using to burn the edges of the nylon squares and to burn holes for my snaps. When I do have to replace my RS strapping I will definitely make sure those edges are either sewn or burned

The lenses are complete and installed Hovi Mic tips: I have a second set of ears from walt being sent before I continue with putting on the ears. I know this is going to be hard even with lots of guidance on the forums. I just suck at stuff like this. Re glued my shoulder bridges (need to wipe away excess glue before it harden) and this time I made sure they aligned with the back tabs as best as possible this time. It wasn't perfect but the slight variation should be easily corrected by the little white elastic bands that go on the bridges. I keep hoping around from task to task.....its a bad habit. I decided since the limbs were pretty much done, I decided to start adding a strapping system (which will help see how everything fits together). There are lots of different strapping methods here. I have decided to loosely copy the arm strapping with the RS. Here is my left RS arm: It uses a 2 inch black elastic to connect the bicep to forearm and uses a 1 inch elastic strap to connect the bicep to shoulder bell. I am basically using the same method but instead of gluing the strap right onto the armor, I will have it connected to snaps. I made 2 inch wide nylon strips for the two inch elastic parts and i inch nylon strips for the i inch elastic parts: Right now I have everything taped to what I think is how it should go. I put ther RS arm next to my walts for comparrison: Unless anyone sees any glaring issues then I will glue them on and see what happens. I wanted to out the snaps closure to the edge of the forearm but the "swoop" wouldnt allow me to do it. Unless I position my strip at slant instead of horizontal.

Thank you for your input! And yes, along with straps on the shoulders I have one strap on each side to help keep the two pieces in place during this process. I underestimated the length to use so its pulling the chest piece towards the back. And yea, it looks like I need to trim a little off the top of the back tabs. It looks if I cut where you have highlighted I wont have to do any reshaping.

Have a strapping system for my chest and back: Need help/opinions......Looks like the chest is good but it looks like I need to slight bend my back plate tabs "inward" a bit. Any opinions?

Found my biggest pot and hot water bathed the top part of my chest; slightly flattening it out (to help better align with back plate shoulder tabs) Added a snap strapping system to help get these pieces to stay together when I put it on either myself or my mannequin so I can properly align my shoulder bridges when these snaps dry. (just using masking tape was such a hassle......) Finally, finally, finally, I made a chicago screw/militput housing for my right lens that is actually holding together. Now I can mimic what I did to the other side. I don't know why this thing kicked my butt. I know it was partially not having the bases at a proper height and not letting the e600 enough time to cure. I don't know. I haven't seen a thread where someone struggled as much as I did with lenses. *It is not very pretty, but it works and I can easily take my lens of for cleaning or replacement.

With all the craziness going along I did what I could with my time. I went over my limbs and sanded down the return edges. I tried to keep the initial "curve" of the return edge for personal preference. Tomorrow I will try and heat bend the top of my chest plate so I can finally get a good alignment for my shoulder bridges.

Left forearm is almost done, just waiting on one side to dry. After that ill go through and remove all return edges from my limbs as recommended. I am again attempting to try and install my lenses. I have failed the past couple times.....I bought some lenses from trooper bay and they are alot more flexible than the ones supplied from walt. It is easier to cut and to handle, hopefully this time I am successful. Removed old glue and have both bridges with extra abs plastic and made them more screen accurate by making the front part straight. Bought a mannequin thingy to aid with body strapping (just have to adjust it to my body measurements Before I go gluing on the bridges I would like some advice. As of now the chest tabs do not align with the back plate tabs for the shoulder bridges, I know screen used TK's use elastic bands (I use them as well for my RS) But the amount of re-positioning of the shoulder bridges seem a little off to make it reach somewhat nicely to the back tabs. I also dont want to rely only on little bands to ensure it stays somewhat in place. Here is how the two pieces meet up: NOW, I was thinking If I heat bend the top part of the chest to "flatten" it out, all tabs align a lot more nicely: By flattening the top chest piece it looks like a far better fit. Here is a picture on my RS, as you can see the chest and back tabs naturally meet up:

Right forearm was the last thing I did and now for the left side! Inner cover strips installed: I was not a fan of resizing this weird shaped piece. As you can see, it seems to be a nice fit until you get to the end (near the elbow) and its a little snug..... Hot water bathed it and made it a bit more of an oval shape: (There is actually a bit more space than what is shown due to the armor resting on my forearm. Not a bad fit. I am just going to verify the slightly modified shape holds its shape before I add my cover strips. tomorrow. As I mentioned before: I did not like sizing the left forearm. I did my best to make it smaller in circumference and to make it roughly around the same size as the right.

I don't understand, I literally have an RS commission build I own and the shoulder bridges are exactly cut as the reference image you sent me! why did I not see this??? I am so frustrated with myself. It must be me looking at various WTF builds and mimicking what others are doing VS me actually referencing screen images and my RS kit. Thank you so much

Thank you for the advice! I ended up removing them and im going to try and align them better. I agree that the elastic would probably do the trick but I would prefer to have the shoulder bridges align just a bit better without the extra aid. I still plan to use little elastic bands to enforce alignment and screen accuracy.

No, no, no, your English is wonderful. It was my fault for quickly reading through your comment. Thank you for your advice so far. Sent from my SM-N970U using Tapatalk

I am trying to manage my time better with trying to build around taking care of a newborn. I kinda suck at the moment. I just need to be more pro active when he is sleeping to quickly jump on my build. So the abs paste dried on the shoulder bridge and I sanded it down. Glued it and it finally stuck! This is when I realized that even though some of you awesome people tried to warn me about this, I did not take heed. The shoulder bridges down align with my back plate. I am upset that I didnt pay attention to the courtesy responses mentioning this. So I will remove the bridges tape the chest plate and back plate on my body and have someone position the bridges on my chest and mark where they need to be to make sure the align with the back tab. That should be the jist of what TK spartan and Adam tried to inform me. I did some slight reshaping of the left forearm to aid me during the slight sizing down of the forearm for a better sized fit as I did with the right forearm. I added a inner cover strip so I can have some reinforcement in case I have to do more hot water adjustments when both sides are connected.

Yea, the images dont display and I misunderstood the importance of this step until i already glued the shoulder bridges and saw they didnt align with the back shoulder tabs. I thought the main purpose of doing this was to make sure the bridges werent too long and getting too close to the O/II back plate.

Yea, I thought it was weird as well. One shoulder bridge stayed with no issue and the other kept falling off. I havent seen anyone complain about gluing shoulder bridges as much as I have. Well the extra plastic via the ABS paste worked. And thank you

I think I misunderstood your advice until it was too late. I thought the purpose of putting the back plate and chest plate on was to make sure the length of the shoulder bridge was good. I didn't realize that it was also to make sure the bridges are aligned with the back plate tabs as well! I am so dumb. My shoulder bridges dried and I noticed that the shoulder bridges dont align with the back tabs. I guess its not the end of the world since I used E600 glue. Your images don't show up and it wasnt until I saw my mistake that I understood what you were trying to say. I am a goob ha ha.

No matter how many times I glued the shoulder bridges, they kept falling off. Eventually I got the left bridge to dry and stick. The right side never dried properly. I filled the "trenches/gaps" with glue, let it dry and then glued the bridge to the chest. So I left the left bridge alone since it actually secured very well and I made abs paste and filled the gaps of the right bridge with paste. Hopefully this will create more surface area for the glue to adhere to. My laptop caught on fire so I'm using tapatalk on my phone to continue my progress and I'm not used to this app. Seems like all photos just show up at the bottom of my post. Sent from my SM-N970U using Tapatalk

Thank you! And I know right? The left side is terrible lol. I wouldn't be surprised after resizing the "swoop" will be a little off. Hopefully I can prevent that from happening and if it is a little off, I think I can cut the swoop to try and make it look centered. Sent from my SM-N970U using Tapatalk

Thank you for the compliment on my progress. It means alot. I will remove all return edges. Once I am near completion of my build i go over every piece and double check all return edges are removed. It makes sense and I have received armor bites from trooping in my RS kit. The only return edge I intend to keep is the return edge on the bottom of the chest plate. Thanks for checking up on my progress. Sent from my SM-N970U using Tapatalk

So I finished resizing the right forearm and tried it on to see how it looks with my bicep. Looks like it lines up well enough. Now to do the left forearm. Not looking for to it since the natural shape of the left side is really wonky. Sent from my SM-N970U using Tapatalk

I filled up the shoulder bridge spaces with glue again and making sure its fully dry then I'll try and re-glue them to the shoulder tabs. So starting with the right forearm, I had to trim down the width to make it proportioned to my forearm size. Unfortunately, this left the two ends meeting at a point where the cover strip goes versus the flat ridge that used to be there. Measured 8mm from the edge and made a line to reference where to try and recreate a flat ridge: Got a sealing iron and practiced using it on a piece of scrap plastic: Started to recreate the flat ridge: I think it came out okay (it is a little distorted, and lumpy) considering its my first time doing this. But for the other side of the forearm I decided to try something else that seemed to be faster and a little less dangerous to the plastic. I put a butt load of clamps where I wanted to bend the other side and put it in hot water: Here is the end result: Unfortunately that's all I had time to do. It looks like I am almost done with the forward flat ridge side. I am going to smooth out my new flat ridges by putting an inner cover strip then placing a row of magnets down the middle forcing the inner cover strip to put a flattening pressure on the sloppy flat ridge and then dip the flat ridge in hot water. This should at least flatten the flat ridge a bit better. Once that is good I can finish sizing and rear facing cover strip side.

It's been a busy couple of weeks for me. Being a first time dad, I am trying to find gaps of time to continue building. Seems like when I have a chance to build, baby stuff comes up LOL. Ill get the hang of balancing everything. The work I have done was not a lot. Seems like since there was so much glue in the gaps of the shoulder bridges and the extra glue to secure the bridges to the chest........the glue took longer than expected to dry. Im used to gluing just cover strips and they are usually pretty solid in less than 24 hours. I also realized that the chest plate tabs curved to much making them ding into my shoulders rather than rest against them. So since the shoulder bridges fell off due to not being 100 percent dry (I waited almost 48 hours) I took the bridges off and flattened the chest tabs so they arent digging into my shoulders. I also had to reshape the bridges a little so too much pressure wasnt resting on my shoulders. I kept the same curvature but I had to flatten the front part of the bridge that goes on the chest plate tabs. *Note bridge is flat on the fat tab (side that glues to the chest plate) I think it looks good and the curvature seems pretty good. I tried to tape the back plate on and see if it will work *note it looks extra sloppy as it was hard to keep everything together with masking tape. But it looks like it will look good with everything strapped. Looking forward to criticisms/advise. Like I said, it looks a little wonky but I believe its mostly due to trying to keep everything in place with a few pieces of tape. I did make the elastic straps to hold the shoulder bridges to the back plate tabs. Also getting ready to make my left forearm. If my shoulder bridges look good according to the pros looking at my build, I will reglue them.

Started to glue shoulder bridges but pulled it away. It didn't feel like it was going to be a firm/secure hold as there isn't a lot of surface area on the bridge due to all the gaps from all the tabs/ridges. Maybe I am over thinking and there is enough surface area to make a firm hold. I'm going to do some snooping on other build threads and see if anyone has done anything to help make it possible for more glue to cover the area. I was thinking about making some ABS paste and filling the "trenches" on the inside of the bridge that will be sticking to the front plate and sanding it down to create a lot more surface area for glue. I guess I'll just see what other people have done first. As you can see most of the glue is just chilling in the gaps: No more return edge on the sides of the back plate and almost all return edge removed on the side of the chest plate: While I research on how to better secure shoulder bridges I decided to do some work on ab buttons: I used this image as a reference: It was too big for the housing it is supposed to rest on so I had to do a lot of sanding on all sides: Looks like the plate does not want to sit flush, might have to water bathe and flatten: I am not big fan of these divets that surround the base of the button plate. But that is how it came..... Nothing is glued on yet, just placed plates on their bases to see what I need to work on. Looks like both button plates need to be sanded all around to make them a bit smaller. Looks like a little bit of the base is suppose to be showing on all sides according to screen used suits: I wish I made more progress today but work days give me little time to work on my kit. Hopefully tomorrow I can sand the pieces down just right and hot water flatten them along with figuring out a good way to secure my shoulder bridges on my chest plate.

Cricket, Thank you, I will be removing the return edge