87ninefiveone

That case is exceptional! Really nice work. Your thread needs to be bookmarked for others looking to 3D print this costume as well, lots of good info in here.

Looks great! Are you working on the inside of the case too?

That’s an interesting thought. Print it in TPU with high infill to allow some flex. Flex PLA might do it too. I wonder how well a painted finish would hold up to the flex though?

I had the same issue with the collar and I ended up cutting it in half about mid neck and attaching the front and rear portions to the armor separately. It’s not screen accurate, but it solves the issue and you can’t tell once your in costume with all the other stuff covering the neck area. Even printing in nylon that collar pierce is just too fragile to work as designed.

Looking good! You're weathering is outstanding, you should print and paint an extra bicep and submit photos for the medic CRL. In regards to the helmet buckle, I'm not sure if we have a really definitive reference shot of the actual prop or not. The only shots I've seen are dark and blurry screen grabs so I think the exact design is open to interpretation and the CRL isn't very descriptive other than that the buckle includes a tan colored square. I remixed Valok's buckle from Thingiverse for my build so it's similar in design to what the CRL shows, but I think the Facebook group buckle looks good and adds an extra bit of realism since it looks functional. If you're worried about approval, contact your GML to get their opinion before wasting time on finishing/painting.

I didn’t scale them at all them on my build as I thought they seemed in good proportion to the helmet and mask as is, but I didn’t scale the helmet or mask either. Yours looks fine from the shot you’ve posted. Any luck on dying the plasch?

Awesome build Ensi, impressive attention to detail! Congratulations on your approval!!! How did you find out that you’re number 26? I was kind of curious if I had the only mudtrooper in my area but couldn’t find a way to tell on databank.

Those goggles are too cool to scavenge from. The Sean Fields part isn’t totally accurate but that part would be super easy to model up. If you can get a nice clear top down and side shot next to ruler I’d be more than happy to model it for you. For printing the chest in PETG, make sure your bed is 70-80C and use a liberal coat of hairspray on glass (looks like a glass bed there?). I’d also go with about a 20mm brim to prevent lifting and make sure your printer isn’t near an A/C vent. PETG has a really tendency to lift on sharp corners. That and stringing are the major downsides to printing with it.

Thanks for the link to the hose! 6’ will be plenty, you'll probably end up at about 25-30” for each hose. Oh, and you’ve got a Carbon machine at work!!! Those things are crazy $$$. So many questions for you....super jealous of you’re bleeding edge equipment! I’ve got four machines to play with at work but they’re all FDM.

Great update! Either your printer is better or you’ve got way more patience than I do for sanding because you’re finishing work is spot on. Looking good. The chest plate fit looks about right, but what got me was the front to back distance which left a gap on top of the shoulders and at the sides (I printed with no scale adjustment and my chest circumference is 44 in). The shoulders gap is no big deal because it’s covered by the straps, but the side gap is a bummer. I would strongly suggest going slightly larger on the chest and back than you think you need to (maybe 3-5%). If you have measurements of yourself load up the STL files for the chest and back into meshmixer, fusion, or whatever. The way the files were sliced up by body the relative position of all the parts is preserved so you can scale them and check distances take sure everything will fit right (I didn’t realize this until after I printed them). Can I ask what hoses you ended up going with? My Russian gas mask hoses are a bit shorter than I’d like and I haven’t found a another source that looks right. Yours look pretty good.

Welcome aboard! I just finished a Sean Fields based build myself, let me know if you have any questions along the way.

Bummer on the shins. I can't believe they cracked from heat! Did that occur along a layer line or a glued part joint? If you reprint them find someone with a large bed so that they can be printed laying down and use PETG to get a bit more heat resistance and flexibility. The shins are going to get a lot of stress being strapped to the boot and will always be prone to cracking along part or layer lines if they're printed standing up. If printing them laying down isn't an option you might consider getting a sheet of 2mm ABS or styrene, cutting it to shape, and gluing it to the back of the shins as extra reinforcement. I did this on my printed chest and back armor and it stiffens things up considerably.

Thanks guys. I still have a lot of work to do to make the gear a bit more functional, but I’m pretty pumped to troop in it tomorrow!

TX-87951 approved! https://imgur.com/gallery/55Vb6ab

Thanks for the feedback guys. I went after the weathering last with a wet paper towel, magic eraser and a bit of sanding, but I'm not sure it improved things much. I'm still going to go ahead with submission after I get some suited up pics tonight, but I might be in for a repaint to get the effect right for approval. On the plus side I completed weathering of the soft goods which came out much better. I still went with some sponge dabbing, but I mainly used acrylic paint diluted down to 3-4 parts water to one part paint and did the application with a spray bottle that had an adjustable nozzle set for a coarse spray. I like the overall effect much better. If anyone is interested, I've 3D modeled quite a few small parts over the course of my build to save a few bucks and I've posted all of the parts to Thingiverse, you should be able to find them by searching my screen name or "mudtrooper". Here's a list of items I've made: 24mm hose connector for Sean Fields respirator Surefire M300 scope Large helmet buckle/greeble (design by Vahlok, but with curvature added). Large 40mm tri-glides for goggle strap Lower belt box set Imperial Officer belt boxes Respirator tri-glides and small Yugoslavian backpack buckle (modeled off the real part since I had them already) Shoretroooper/tanktrooper/mudtrooper 3" belt buckle A few final thoughts on 3D printing your kit. Total filament used was about 5.5kg of PETG/PLA. Around 230 hours of printing in total. The large armor parts can be printed at 0.2mm resolution using 25% infill and 4 perimeters (0.5mm line width). The goggles and respirator should be done with finer resolution, 0.1mm preferred to improve fidelity and reduce the amount of finishing needed. Be prepared to do a lot of reinforcing on the back side of the armor parts. I added ABS strips to the inside joints of the chest and back to prevent them from flexing/breaking and further reinforced a lot of seams with E6000. I still think going with a vac formed or fiberglass part is the way to go for the chest/back armor and will probably end up purchasing these in the future, but I ran out of time/money so the 3D printed parts will do for now. Build Cost Breakdown Pants/Coat (Jimiriquai), $200 Boots (Etsy, AntiguaHouse), $44 Highlander Spec Ops Gloves (Amazon), $30 Upper Belt (Etsy, DarmansProps), $53 Lower Belt (1.5" webbing from Amazon), $6 Ammo Pouch (Etsy, PlasticArmsDealer), $55 Helmet Padding (Amazon), $15 Small Yugoslavian Backpack for respirator hardware (Colemans Military Surplus), $25 Welding shield for goggle lens (Amazon), $6 Strapping Supplies (Miscellaneous strapping from Amazon and JoAnn Fabrics and using leftover hardware from the Yugoslavian backpack), $25 Cape/Plasch (Etsy, RussianGasMaskShop), $35 Shoulder and boot straps (Etsy, PlasticArmsDealer), $35 for shoulders and $70 for shins Respirator Hoses (Etsy, RussianGasMaskShop), $28 Paint, filler and sanding supplies, $80 Filament for 3D printing, $150 All in I'm at about $900-1000. I'm definitely over my original budget goal, and probably didn't save as much money as I would have liked over just ordering the whole kit from Jim. So, if you're considering the 3D printed route definitely give him a shout first to check current pricing and availability.

I skipped a few steps and went straight on to weathering...where I may have gone a bit overboard. I used acrylic paint so I may go back and wipe off some of the weathering I did today as it’s a bit much outside of the boots after reviewing the reference photos again. Thoughts? I just need to weather the soft parts tomorrow and I’ll basically be done and ready for submission photos. I did a quick test fit yesterday as well and discovered that this kit is nearly impossible to put on by yourself. I can get into Vader by myself no problem...but upper body movement is surprisingly restrictive in this casostume.

Photos! Completed back section. 50-55 hours and about 1200g of material for all of the parts. I spent a lot of time agonizing over how to slice this up to avoid supports and get decent quality on most surfaces. I forgot to take a starting shot of the chest, but here it is after one coat of primer and some filler. The chest was a much easier print than the back, 36 hours and about 800g of material, and only two horizontal joints to worry about. Here I’ve attached the collar and done two rounds of primer and wet sanding. The light gray is a filler primer while the dark gray is just a normal primer which highlights issues better prior to painting (black is the plastic). First coat of filler primer on the back piece (it’s rough). You can also see how the rear collar section was cut and attached here. Added the half circle indent detail on the back armor. And here’s where I’m at as of tonight. 3x color coats on the chest and a second coat of filler primer on the back armor. I’ll do a final sand a prime on the back tomorrow and then paint Saturday. Weathering and final assembly on Saturday/Sunday so I can hopefully take some pictures next week and submit. One more note as well. I’ve used super glue for assembly which is great, but not ideal for any sort of impact or shear resistance, so all of the parts seam lines have been reinforced with strips of 2mm ABS leftover from an old TK build and I’ll probably do some E6000 to hold those reinforcement strips in place as well.

Just an FYI, I ordered a set of the Imperial Army patches on April 30th through the website. A day later I realized I had ordered the incorrect patches for my build and emailed WTF to try and cancel the order. I didn't get a response so I emailed again on May 7th to try and cancel the order with no response again. I initiated a Paypal dispute on May 13th which also hasn't received a response and was just escalated to a claim as of today, May 30th.

Just in case anyone is making an E11B, I modeled up the surefire scout m300 flashlight ($300 ?!?!?!???) and posted it to thingiverse. You can find it here.

TLDR: my final shipment of stuff arrived and I printed the chest and back armor. No photos right now as iCloud isn’t cooperating, but I’ve received my last two purchases for the build. A generic olive green knit scarf ($12 on Amazon) and shoulder patches from Endor Finders (2 @ $10/ea). The patches look great and they actually came with Velcro backing. I tried attaching them by sewing on Velcro at first but I wasn’t happy with the look since the edges didn’t sit even with the fabric. I ended up removing the Velcro and just stitching the patches on by hand. It was a PITA, but worth the time investment. Last week I started contacting armor vendors about buying a chest and back. I’d love to pick up Jim’s kit, but the time to do that was when I ordered jacket and pants to avoid the extra shipping. Plus I’m out of time with my first planned troop the Friday after this one. Local options aren’t looking much better. Plastic arms dealer wanted almost as much for the chest and back as Jim does for his whole kit which also would double my spend on the project so far...so that’s not an option. My last chance, and what I had been holding out for was Intergalactic Supply to release his kit since he’s local and really reasonably priced. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to get ahold of him since my last PM a month ago to see if he’s finished his molds yet or not. So...I took advantage of the long Memorial Day weekend to to print the Sean Field chest and back armor. I had a few mishaps with the prints, mostly under extrusion issues due to using a 10 lbs roll of filament, so a few parts had to be printed twice. For the most part it came out well though. I wish I had up scaled it 5-10% (I’m 6’2” and 210 lbs). Live and learn. The major issues I’ve found with the armor so far: 1. It is apparently missing a key detail from the CRL on the lower part of the back armor. Not really an issue as it’s easily remedied by removing some material with a dremel and sticking a piece of ABS on the inside of the armor to create the semi circular indent. You could also just modify the 3D files but I’m not very good at manipulating STL files. 2. The collar design is crap. It looks fine, but it’s too thin to be functional from a 3D printing perspective and there’s no way you could actually get in and out of this kit as designed. I think the best option the fix this issue is to just split the collar in two vertically and attach the respective front and back parts to the chest and back armor. It’s not screen accurate but it’s a lot more functional and will also fix the alignment issues everyone seems to have with the collar/chest. I’m not super thrilled about going this route but with a helmet, scarf and mask I’d be surprised if anyone notices. 3. I’m too fat for this kit. Not really the kits fault, just saying. Measured and thought it would be fine, but again, 5-10% larger would have been smart on my part.

Over the past week or so I’ve been pondering how to attach my shins to the boots. I got my shins from PlasticArmsDealer on Etsy, and they’re a green silicone rubber cast with black webbing on the back side. The problem is that the webbing doesn’t run the full length of the strap and was pretty haphazardly placed in the mold which makes adding any sort of fastener or closure really difficult. Heres an example: I briefly tried industrial strength adhesive Velcro to attach the straps to the boots. That doesn’t work. So, I decided to 3D print a solution. Here’s what I came up with: The bracket above is for the top strap. I needed the full provided strap length so the strap and bracket will end up being glued together. It stays in place as is but I wouldn’t trust it not to pop off during a troop For the bottom bracket I needed to shorten the straps a bit (2-3”) which allowed me to design in a boss to grip the strap without using glue. The only issue here is that the straps aren’t uniformly thick, so I may need to adjust my models and reprint to get a nice fit on each strap. The red brackets will be painted black and get a piece of Velcro attached to them which will mate up to the shins. We’ll see how this works.

Thanks for taking the time to make that video! Very helpful.

Looking good! How are the buckles on the shins working out for you? I’m a bit hesitant to go the buckle route because it seems like such a pain to connect and adjust inside the shins. There aren’t too many build threads to go off of though and everyone seems to attach things a bit differently. I’ve been considering just going with industrial Velcro to attach the straps to the boots and then another strip of Velcro down the front of the boot to attach the shin, but I haven’t had time to play with it yet.

Slow going as I was on vacation with the family last week, but my jacket and pants from Jim arrived last Friday and I just picked them up from FedEx today. The materials and tailoring are top notch and these were produced and shipped within about two weeks as promised. The end is near. I just need the chest and back armor, a scarf and the arm patches to wrap things up. Then a bit of paint and weathering. My next troop is on June 7th so I’m hopping to have it done by then.

While we’re on the topic of the lower belt, can we clarify the wording on the box requirements? For reference, the CRL currently states: The belt features six boxes. 1 x standard drop box on the right side of the belt. 2 x small and 2 x medium worn in he center of the belt. 1 x long drop box worn on the left of the belt. What is a “standard” drop box? Who’s standard? From where, or what costume? I think these appear on the shoretrooper where they also annoyingly call them standard but haven’t seen them used elsewhere that I can think of off hand (*I’m not a CRL expert). I think changing “standard” to “large box with drop box detail” or something similar and more generic would be helpful. The third requirement for a long drop box could then be changed to reference the long part being worn below the large belt mounted box.