bobojuice

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Sup! Got a bug in me to build a set of binders last minute for todays troop, so I popped into home depot and scrounged some stuff I figured would work. Anyway, lets gooooooooooooooooooo!!!! First off here's some of the stuff I bought. Three 3" PVC coupling hubs. A set of 1 1/2" hinges. 4 drawer magnets. Some threaded pipe thing. (don't remember what it was called.) What you can't see here is the weather stripping foam I got and obviously all the tools, glue, tape, etc that I used for this project. I measured the PVC coupler at 2" since the hinges were 1 1/2" and I'd have a quarter inch gap on either side. I used tape to make a straight line for cutting. Unfortunately I don't have a saw at home so I had to use my dremel. If you do this, be prepared to get messy, and wear some type of eye protection. Seriously. Here's the cut piece. You can see some marks on the inside where I had to remove the piece of PVC that separates the two pipes when connected. This part was a pain. I used the dremel again with a few different bits and finally with the sanding bit to remove most of the rest of the gunk. I then grabbed some coarse grit sand paper and got out most of the rest. Doesn't have to be perfect as this will be getting covered up with foam. I did this three more times, which was actually the most time consuming part of this project. Using a bit of eyeballing and measuring tape I figured out what looked like the middle of the PVC and taped it off for cutting. Here you can see it all taped up and ready to go. Carefully, I cut only TWO of the PVC couplers in half and sanded down the edges a bit. Using the hardware provided, I attached the hinge. The magnets were removed from the little plastic boxes and oriented so they attracted each other when they were facing. I then attached those to each edge. This was done on both sides. The next part I didn't get any pictures of because it was a pain in the butt and I wasn't really thinking about taking pics. What I did was I took the threaded pipe fitting and marked it off on one of the sides of the binders. Using the dremel and some sand paper I cut a hole JUST A BIT SMALLER than the size of the pipe fitting. For the next part, I placed the pipe fitting on my stove. I have an electric stove so I put it on high heat and just let it sit there. I grabbed my big set of pliers and when the pipe fitting was hot, I basically threaded it through the hole. The heat from the fitting melted whatever plastic was in the way and created a perfect thread. As soon as the pipe fitting was set to my liking I ran it under hot water to cool it off. I did this for both sides. Here's a pic of what it looks like with the pipe fitting attached. Now for the other plastic bits that go around the binder. This is what the third PVC coupler was for. Using some tape I measured the entire PVC coupler and found it to be just above 12 inches long. This part took a bit of guess work to figure out where I was gonna place all the pieces. Seeing as I only had a bit of PVC to work with I figured I'd cut two 2" pieces and eight 1" pieces to go over the drilled out parts where the magnets and hinges were attached. Here you can see how I marked and cut the pieces. The 2" pieces weren't the right size to fit over the binder pieces so I heated them over the stove and then rolled the binders over them to get them to the right size. The 1" pieces being so small were actually perfect. Here's an image of all the pieces all set up and ready for gluing. I sanded them all down to get them ready. I pulled the binders apart and used CA glue (superglue), ultragel to be exact and clamped them all down. Here's a pic. Here you can see all the pieces glued and ready to go. Then I grabbed the weatherstripping and laid it all down over the inside parts. This size weatherstripping is actually too small, so it'll have to be replaced, but it'll do for now. I still have to bondo, sand, and paint everything so it needs to be removed anyway. Here's a final pic of what my binders look like. For painting I'm going to remove all the foam, bondo some of the edges and sand that stuff down so it looks a bit cleaner. Then I'm going to prime everything and paint the pipe fitting BLACK. I'll let this sit for a few days so it's cured and ready. Then I'll mask that off and paint the rest white. I haven't done that yet, but I'll update with the FINAL pics later. And there it is. My binder build.

I found myself almost instantly. I'm the idiot turning around and looking back. I was looking for my gf who helped out a ton to direct all the TKs. She's the jedi in grey and red you can see walking by.

Here's a video of our march to the FISD photo. ------------

Makes me think I should put mine together and sell it on the bay.

If there were only 8 FX buckets out there they must have all been surrounding me during that pic. I did see a lot of armor that made me jealous though. Thanks for the kind words about my armor though, Paul. I'm actually in prep to do some intense overhauling to it to make it look a bit nicer.

I used 2 coats of clear nail polish. Problem solved!

Yeah unfortunately that part was when my thigh piece snapped off and she had to help me fix it. There's one more of those pics I didn't post, but it didn't really come out too well. Either way, that skit was a blast.

Here's a sample. -----------

Please enable. http://www.501stlegion.org/members/displaymember.php?userID=11534&costumeID=1 TK-7164 Florida Garrison. Thanks.