Lt. Dan´s Death Trooper WIP

[IcyTrooper[CMD-DL]]

I second @nanotek, some better insoles goes a long way with boots from IB!

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

Mail day after six months of waiting! Soft parts from Dark Side Closet came in today and what should I say!? Awesome stuff, looks great and fits perfect (expected nothing else because I have measured three times?). That tells me also, that I have not gained weight in between?Now its all about the hard parts to get started, still waiting for them to arrive. Got confirmation from Armory Props that my armor is at the paint shop at this time. So hopefully it gonna show up within the next weeks.

 

[PaulM[TX]]

I haven’t been on in a while. I would have to say you’re doing a great job keep it up.Your blaster is most impressive. ?

[SrtWnab]

blasters lookin nice man. if only i could push myself to paint all three of mine hahaha. and i think when my darkside closet order finally came in i was more excited than when my armor came in lol

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

Got the rest of the Darksite Closet order: corset option and pouches. Stuffed them with foam to give shape. Don´t know exactly how I´ll integrate the corset once I have the hard parts, been thinking about a harness. Talking about the hard parts: got confirmation that my helmet and armor is ready to ship from Armory Props. After seven months now, I can´t wait any longer!??

 

[Chaos[CMD-DCA]]

21 hours ago, Lt. Dan said:

Got the rest of the Darksite Closet order: corset option and pouches. Stuffed them with foam to give shape. Don´t know exactly how I´ll integrate the corset once I have the hard parts, been thinking about a harness. Talking about the hard parts: got confirmation that my helmet and armor is ready to ship from Armory Props. After seven months now, I can´t wait any longer!??

 

Hey Brother, I changed my set up to include a corset design and am going to a trooping today so hopefully I won't have to make any adjustments . I'll post up how I incorporated the abdomen and lower back armor pieces. It basically looks like the Shoretrooper.  

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

Armory Props Shop mail day!? Thank God, the wait is over! Now the real fun can begin!?

To be honest, I felt like a little kid and I´m a little bit overwhelmed after unboxing everything? So much parts, where the heck should I start?

Good news is that all parts are undamaged from transit, unfortenately the cod armor piece is missing. But I wrote to Denis and I think it will be resend asap. Nevertheless I have enough work with the remaining parts ahead. Think its time to make a plan, as my goal is to have the costume approved by the end of September. Then the German Garrison has its annual meeting at Speyer Technical Museum.

First of all I´ll start with the helmet I think. Put in a hard hat, some padding and the audio system. Although I took a size L helmet I have problems putting it on because I wear glasses. My glasses are too wide. My idea is to put a vision film on the inside of the visor, so I can leave the glasses off and still see to some extent. Hope this will work, as I can´t wear contact lenses?

Next step will be the reinforcement of the back of all big armor parts with fibreglass and resin to give them extra strength. I need to revise them anyway because there are residues from printing fillament. After that I can begin with strapping and fitting. I'm still thinking about whether to use a harness with snap buttons or a velcro system or a combined mixture of both. There are so many selections out there, quite heavy in my opinion.

Long story short, I'll start first and then see what happens next?

 

[Chaos[CMD-DCA]]

Daniel when you get to the strapping part give me a shout. I use a combination of UKSWRATH's harness system, a simple suspender type set up for the abdomen corset stuff, and part of the Paul's Shoretrooper strapping techniques. I trooped for the first time in my overhauled set up and I was quite impressed at how much more comfortable everything was. Hopefully when Denis made your kit all the measurements came out, if you need to make adjustments post up here first, I am sure someone has encountered the same issue. Best of luck!

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

Today I started the reinforcement with some of the big armor parts. As I´m not familiar with fibreglass lamination I did a bit of research and finally ended up with 2K epoxy resin (doesn´t stink, as polyester resin does) and fibreglass mats with a strength of 225g/m². What I can definetely say is, that I have bought way too much resin. Its very productive, but hardens within 30 minutes, so you have to be pretty fast? All in all I must say its not as hard as I thought to laminate, on the contrary it was fun. I pre-cutted the fibreglass pieces and then did a layer of resin on the parts, fibreglass on (overlapping) and another layer of resin, thats it! As you can see on the pics I finished the abdomen plate, the lower back piece and the posterior armor. Tomorrow I´m going to do the chest and back plate.

Talking about the back plate: what really gets on my nerves is the fact that all the recess areas on the back plate and the small glue in parts were wrong painted by Armory Props. Instead of matte black, the recess areas are gloss black and the small parts are gun metal instead of matte black. I have to rework them all, because they were additionally painted so thick that they partly do not fit into the recesses. I hate sanding and cutting on freshly painted parts. That was the reason why I bought a ready-made kit, to avoid exactly that!?

 

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

Also velcroed the pouches covers, fit perfect! Question @all: How are the lids of the small boxes attached, so that you can still get access to the screws?

 

[Chaos[CMD-DCA]]

5 minutes ago, Lt. Dan said:

Also velcroed the pouches covers, fit perfect! Question @all: How are the lids of the small boxes attached, so that you can still get access to the screws?

 

You have several options with the boxes. 1. put the Chicago screws so that female side is epoxied to the inside of the box and the male side is outside and thru the belt. 2. place a thin layer of E6000 on the inside edges and then put the front panel on. If you have to get to the screws you and always pry off the fronts, clean the E6000 off and repeat as needed. 3. E6000 small magnets inside the boxes and the front, only issue with this is that they can get knocked off. I use the #1 setup.

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

Today I held the individual pieces of leg and arm armor against the respective body parts to see if they will fit. Thighs are ok, so as the shoulder bells and upper arm parts. Unfortunately, I had to find out that the shins and forearms are much too wide and slobber around although I wore the undersuit. How can I make the parts tighter the best way? Foam inside the parts or better add material onto the undersuit?

[Chaos[CMD-DCA]]

1 hour ago, Lt. Dan said:

Today I held the individual pieces of leg and arm armor against the respective body parts to see if they will fit. Thighs are ok, so as the shoulder bells and upper arm parts. Unfortunately, I had to find out that the shins and forearms are much too wide and slobber around although I wore the undersuit. How can I make the parts tighter the best way? Foam inside the parts or better add material onto the undersuit?

@Lt. Dan   If you go for a clamshell type closure you can easily adjust the radius smaller, when making the overlap use the side that has the least amount of detail. If that makes sense.

On the shins, use the cover strip attached to the outside piece to overlap the inside piece. Thin velcro along the seam keeps them closed.

 

When you pad the insides to fill out the extra space, you run the chance of the armor looking "un-proportional"

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

Thanks @Chaos, got your point! With the shins your idea might eventually work, because they are two-halfed and have material left at the inside strip which I could trim a bit. Hope that this would be enough to make them snug fit. The forearms are one piece unfortunately. They are cut along at the inside to make them flexible, but they are very stiff and I'm aware they could break when bending too much?

[IcyTrooper[CMD-DL]]

2 hours ago, Lt. Dan said:

Thanks @Chaos, got your point! With the shins your idea might eventually work, because they are two-halfed and have material left at the inside strip which I could trim a bit. Hope that this would be enough to make them snug fit. The forearms are one piece unfortunately. They are cut along at the inside to make them flexible, but they are very stiff and I'm aware they could break when bending too much?

You mention one piece, is there a cover strip holding them together or were the seams filled?

[Chaos[CMD-DCA]]

3 hours ago, Lt. Dan said:

Thanks @Chaos, got your point! With the shins your idea might eventually work, because they are two-halfed and have material left at the inside strip which I could trim a bit. Hope that this would be enough to make them snug fit. The forearms are one piece unfortunately. They are cut along at the inside to make them flexible, but they are very stiff and I'm aware they could break when bending too much?

@Lt. Dan if your forearms are from Denis, they are 3D printed with an Armory Shop special semi-flexible filament then painted. Did you line them with the fiberglass like you did the larger pieces? If your forearms are one piece split, then you can gently heat the inside with a hair dryer. Then gently and slowly compress the diameter to make the circumference smaller. Make sure you spread out your applied pressure across the entire surface area. You dont want to end up with a thumb indentation like the ANH TK bicep. The paint should bend with the PLA, Denis uses a primer with his paint. Where it will be tricky is the two wrist bands, but the diameter should be sufficient enough to open and close around your wrist. 

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

7 hours ago, Chaos said:

If your forearms are one piece split, then you can gently heat the inside with a hair dryer. Then gently and slowly compress the diameter to make the circumference smaller.

I´ll give that a try, thanks! So much work ahead?

[IcyTrooper[CMD-DL]]

On 5/6/2021 at 2:39 PM, Lt. Dan said:

I´ll give that a try, thanks! So much work ahead?

The joys of costuming  

[Chaos[CMD-DCA]]

@Lt. Dan I found this over on Paul's Shoretrooper build page, a lot of the Rouge One armors where built the same. The little greeblies inside are where elastic filament is threaded to pull the forearms together but allows them to clamshell open. I modified mine to do the same.

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

9 hours ago, Chaos said:

The little greeblies inside are where elastic filament is threaded to pull the forearms together but allows them to clamshell open.

No bad idea! I´ll think about it when I come to the forearms and the heat gun number will not work properly.

At the moment I´m concentrating on the reinforcement of the body armor parts. Finished the back and front today. Next step will be covering all the parts with Plastidip inside to give a smooth surface. I decided not to reinforce the arm and leg parts, as they are round and its very hard to come inside with all this unhandy fibreglass stuff. The parts are stiff even without reinforcement!

 

[IcyTrooper[CMD-DL]]

That extra reinforcement will give you better peace of mind when it comes to trooping, for sure.

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

So, redid the recesses and inserts on the back armor as Armory Props painted them unfortunately in gun metal instead of matte black. I followed exactly the color scheme in the CRL, although the guy on the pics has another paint scheme on his back armor?All in all I´m not so happy with the result, as I don´t know which type of color Armory Props used. My paint came a bit off in the corners, it was not as compatible as with the other paint. I chalk this up to battle damage or wheatering?Fortunately, those were the only parts I need to repaint?

 

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

Worked a bit on the helmet today and fixed a hard hat inside plus some foam pieces for better comfort. Bought the stuff on Amazon, the foams are knee pads?They can be cut by scissors to fit. Hard hat is fixed with velcro to prevent wobbling. I stuffed the nose section and lower rear section with foam parts and relocated the LED switch to the backside. Although I ordered a size L helmet I must say its very tight for my head (60cm circumference). Not much space in between, but all in all it sits still comfortable. For this reason and because the helmet already has a considerable weight, I decided against the audio stuff I bought from Ukswrath. I wouldn't know where else to put this? Nevertheless, I will use it for my next project probably!?

 

[Lt. Dan[501st]]

The CRL says: "At the bottom of each shin there is a raised angular extension or flap that wraps around the inner ankle forward from the rear cover strip."

I have to reduce the inner diameter of the shin to fit to my calf. I will work with velcro. As the raised angular extension is a part from the outer shin it extends more and more outside the closer I put the inner shin inwards. Question: is it allowed to cut the raised angular extension at the cover strip from the outer shin and glue it on the inner shin? When both shins are closed then it should not be too noticeable I think!?

[Chaos[CMD-DCA]]

3 hours ago, Lt. Dan said:

The CRL says: "At the bottom of each shin there is a raised angular extension or flap that wraps around the inner ankle forward from the rear cover strip."

I have to reduce the inner diameter of the shin to fit to my calf. I will work with velcro. As the raised angular extension is a part from the outer shin it extends more and more outside the closer I put the inner shin inwards. Question: is it allowed to cut the raised angular extension at the cover strip from the outer shin and glue it on the inner shin? When both shins are closed then it should not be too noticeable I think!?

Dan post a picture of your shins, I'll take a look, my angular extension is part of my outer shin so it's not an issue if it is not part of the inner shin, as long as it is there.