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OK all you awesome white armor types, I am officially back, and so DANGED happy to say that! As a few of you may know, I went through some health and personal issues over the last few months which has precluded me from being around, but thanks to lots of physical therapy and just plain refusing to give up I am back in the saddle and ready to take on the world! Although I won't be able to wear the HWT pack any longer I should be able to suit up in my regular armor within a few weeks. That being said, I signed up for a troop in Nov. so that gives me a goal to get my Stunt polished up so I can get back to putting some smiles on some faces and meet some of more of my new Squad members! My apologies for not getting back to you (yet) if you have PM'd me. I have a lot of catching up to do, so thanks for your patience! Also, a big THANKS to all those (especially Andrew, Paul, Mario, Chemi and Caleb) who went above and beyond. Now that things are back to normal I will be here 7 days a week as I have for 7 years until this setback. Please feel free to hit me up with any questions about armor or builds or just say hello. I love you guys and gals of the FISD... my second family. It's good to be back home here.

Thanks for all the advice everybody. Looks like I’m waiting for keep trooping.

Glad to have you back! It hasn't been the same without you

The 1500, are you ready?

Looking good

Getting close indeed, pardon the lack of daily update. We're focussing hard on getting it done for Sunday right now. That my chest piece popped up above the abdomen was due to the latter fitting very poorly. Tilted sideways a lot. This was corrected in the following images. Soft foam is going to be used a lot more than i had initially thought. Thanks to my posture my right hip causes a lot of issues, so we'll be padding a couple areas around the hip to hopefully prevent discomfort while wearing the kit. I am quite scared of that, as i love how this all comes together and would hate to feel uncomfy in it right off the bat. Over the last days we continued with snaps, painting of the teeth and vocoder on the helmet and making a little simulation how the eyes would look with lenses to cover it. In the third picture it is just a piece of black cloth for effect. Seeing how this shapes up more and more gives the needed boost to keep going. I continued with preparing the little belt boxes, drilling holes into them. As well as test-fitting the biceps armor thanks to a tip to align the lower part of the biceps with the end of the shoulder bells. They sit great and don't hinder me at all when moving my arm. Promptly marked where i had taped it for snap placement and got to glueing, so the E6000 gets enough time to cure. Waiting time was used to make the connecting straps of elastic and a couple more snap plates. Doubled over the elastics just to be save. White velcro was added to the shins. A bit of a finnicky job, but doable with patience to get it placed just right. Soft side towards clothing, once again to save myself trouble later on when putting it all on. Don't want the other side to catch my yoga pants and leave marks. Soft side points inwards - they are overlapping 'wrong' in the second picture on purpose. I took it seconds after placement of velcro and the packaging said to not put stress on it immediately so the adhesive can bond properly. Ear pieces and trapezoids painted and later secured with clear coat. Added snap bases for thighs and one for the chest armor on the corset, securely taped in and held together with neodym magnets while E6000 cures. Clamps used on the butt plate for snaps. Workstation during night and basement storage during day. It looks so chaotic in here... Marked and glued in snap base placements Did the belt and decided on placement for the belt boxes, finished drilling and screwing them in. Lack pictures of wip belt after initial placement.

Hi Tim The Sniper knee looks ok the dint is almost not noticeable , What I just would suggest to trim the edges a little to match the Shin line About the canvas belt take a look to the bottom section of the building thread bellow link and check the videos Second one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnJc9t4KQlo

Welcome aboard Kian, I'm not too familiar with the FOTK but found the TM TK I had, fairly forgiving and my absolute Fav when it comes to chores liker sitting and adapting to my physique. boing! but as Jonatan rightly points out, not all amour is the same

Welcome back Joseph, pleased to know you are as mentally strong as ever and excited to continue giving to this community. You have always gone over and above to serve the membership and I know they truly appreciate that as much as I and the rest of the staff do. You are a credit to FISD and the legion.

Sorry I don't have any photos handy, I have since sold the mannequin as droids have taken over available display space. Basically just used foam and duct tape in areas that were a bit loose.

We missed you big brother!!!

This may be old news? I looked but couldn't find anything via the search option. if so feel free to delete but it was new to me, so I thought I'd share it in the event anyone else interested in original kit had missed it? https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/a-new-hope-reassembling-a-stormtrooper-costume

Hope you are feeling better Joseph.

Glad to hear you're doin' good!

Glad to hear you are back again Joseph.

Absolutely not. This is one thing I never intend to do to another blaster. Literal months of pain with those tiny wires and trying to shoehorn the guts into odd places. If I ever need another one, I'm just gonna commission BlastFX / TRamp to do it. It would be worth the time waiting and money spent.

Great to see you back Joseph, it's a long hard journey and coming back from the dark secluded corner is a trial for sure.

Here’s a video to go with it

What a day... We geared up almost entirely with tape just to see how things look and feel. And oh boy was it required. We found out i am suffering from false posture thanks to an old injury from years ago. Extremely noticeable on the corset here. My right hip points forward a lot more than my left one. When fitted as we thought it should be things were quickly off after i started moving and a bit of the tape gave way. The pressure on my right hip was extremely uncomfortable and the whole thing looked off. Experimenting around for a couple hours and almost getting frustrated, we ended up taking a break. Things just refused to sit right, or they sat what we perceived as 'right' but it felt painful to wear for me. The shoulders were taped on wrong here, we're aware they are not supposed to tilt like that. The entire chest and back pieces have yet to be somewhat adjusted to myself, all we did so far was trim and sand. Fitting those happens once the corset and kidney plate are sorted out. Helmet is, as anything else, wip as well. No padding yet, so i had a funny bobble-head effect almost. We instead sanded the edges and other rough spots on all pieces (forgot to take pictuers, will do tomorrow), and removed even more from the codpiece for comfort. It does curve in a lot. After our minds being taken off the previous corset issue, we made an unexpected but great discovery. In the end a simple washcloth does the trick. My left hip bone gets a little cushion, the corset only slightly tilts to one side if at all while moving and the pressure on my right hip is evened out. All neatly placed where the big belt boxes should end up being positioned later, so a good chunk is going to be hidden. Later down the line we might get a smaller piece to be less noticeable. And to end today's post: Have some extremely awkward movements from me in the taped up and ill fitting version. Still wanted some nice shots while i feared that the tape would stop working any second haha.

The 1500, stand and be counted!

On to the armor bin. I wrote up a bit more about this one: Building the Armor Bin: High-level tips on this bin: - There is such a thing as TOO MANY GREEBLIES. Greeblies -those little found objects and things that make a thing look like it has some utilitarian function of some kind. If you cover every spot, it loses something. Star Wars objects look best with areas of flat, and then areas of detail, with asymmetry being key. - I used a lot of fasteners, and getting them one at a time at the hardware store can get expensive. There are almost no Phillips style fasteners in Star Wars, so I needed a non-standard bolt. I found a good kit of small nuts and hex hole bolts that were all M3 size but in many different lengths. This allowed me to not only know every hole was my 1/8" bit but also I could find the perfect length of bolt, to minimize the protruding end INSIDE the bin. I also capped every bolt with a small cap, glued on with E6000, or hot glue on my vents. I really want to avoid any chance of scratching the glossy white armor. - For the wiring, test it all first before mounting, and use quick-connect wire connectors so you can assemble it all and test it, and then take it apart, run them through holes, and hook it all back up. Run any switches to the outside of the bin, so you can roll up to a troop, and then turn them on when people will see them, without having to open it up and do some switches every time (save battery power, and the buttons add to the look). - Roughen with sandpaper all parts before gluing. But also, all greeblies and knobs are also bolted on. I have seen glue fail so many times, and on a bin that gets knocked about, everything should be secured with a bolt if possible. - Because things get stacked on a bin, any greeblies on the lid should be secure, and tough, and not go above the top edge so that things could rest on top of it. The build: It started as a Husky 45 gallon tote. On my very first bin years ago, so much of the spray paint chipped off in that first year. It was like the plastic was resisting the paint. Later as I was washing off some cast parts to prep them for painting, it hit me. Like ALL CAST PLASTIC, bins have a mold-releaser spray residue on them when they come out of the factory. So a super important part of my bin painting process is the wash all parts with warm soapy water before starting. I did this one in the shower (with dish soap), but my bigger husky bin I washed in the driveway, like a car wash. Painting the bin was straight-forward, a few coats of primer, letting it cure for more than a day. So many painting issues, especially in winter, come from not letting the primer fully cure. Then some coats of white glossy paint. I usually do the weathering before the clear coat, but after applying some vinyl decals, in a few spots they started peeling off the paint. Not everywhere, but enough that I didn't want to risk more. I painted them back to white, and then did a satin clear coat to help the paint all stay. I used satin because gloss is really hard to paint weathering on, it has no "tooth", so I did a gloss coat after the weathering. Next I wanted to try and do the light panel thing, so I did that first. I go over it more in my previous posts, but the basic idea is I created a matte black decal using my new vinyl cutter, and applied it to a rectangle of translucent plastic. To get the red, I used a square of 3M self-adhesive brake light repair film behind it. You have to have some black area to cover the overlap, as the red light will "bleed" out a little, and you want to cover that transition. The light is a battery dimmable night-light thing with batteries and two LED strips. I opened it up, took a red wire from the batteries, and soldered in a quick release cord, and soldered the other end to a toggle switch. That way I could cover the dimmer switch (it's in the center) and leave it "on" but the switch is now on the outside of the bin controlling it. I mounted it to an aluminum bar to keep it about 5 mm away from the plastic, so that the light diffused enough to make a more even panel. For the frame, I had been saving a few of these diaper wipe lids that had a cool shape. I trimmed off the lid piece, and the part you see is the bottom, where it has a flat area they glued to the package. For the two small lights, I found these great 8mm indicator lights, basically a 5mm LED light with a metal mount around it, and pre-wired with resistors. I wired them in parallel to the 9v battery and with a toggle switch. After looking at the specs, I figured out the hole size, and had these custom laser-cut aluminum hex plates (with my 1/8" holes) to give them a cooler mount. Their 9v battery case is velcroed into the corner for easy removal to change the batteries. I used a lot of the quick-connect wire connectors to do my circuits, because there were a lot of parts that had to go through the walls of the case, and those allow you to do all of your soldering on a table, and assemble it, rather than try and solder in the case. All of these wires could get smashed and caught, so I found a white two-piece pencil case at a dollar store that was the right size, and made a cover for all of the wiring, held on with acorn nuts and wing nuts so I could remove it without tools to change the batteries. For the vents, I had been looking for years for good small vents for Star Wars projects, and this time, I realized I could just use an on-demand metal cutter site (I used SendCutSend) that I used on another project to cut some custom vents. I made the shapes in Adobe Illustrator like I used for the viny decals, and they came out really good. They have the same 1/8" hole that my bolts all use, and I backed them by the denser Phifertex Plus mesh, glued on the inside with a hot glue gun (and I hot glued over the bolt ends at the same time, so that is another bolt protection solution). I added some greeblies from @Jettsonable which were painted with a sort of hammered finish spray (his last one came as a clean print), so I used filler primer to even it out, and then painted them white. I ended up glueing, but also adding two bolts to them to ensure they stayed put. Other greeblies were some old stereo knobs from a random lot I got from Ebay. Finally, for the trooper look, I had an extra belt piece that I glued to the top with white E6000 (and also bolted, the top flexes a lot). Vinyl decals finished it off. One area where the vinyl peeled off the paint on the lid, I had to cut a new rectangle of ABS, and glue/bolt it on, and apply new lettering (the area with "FISD" and "Imperial property" in Aurebesh). The reason I use the white paintable E6000 is because the seep out spots can be painted with the weathering. For weathering, I did my usual technique of painting with mostly black acrylic, wiping off with a rag, painting in, wiping off with a wet rag, back and forth a few times, until it looks right. Lots of gunk under the edge of the rim where all of those chambers are hard to clean, and less in the open areas. Grime near buttons where fingers touch. Mud spray from the wheels up into their cutouts. Just do it with intention and though for HOW it got dirty. Finally, a glossy clear coat, being sure to tape over all screens, lights, knobs, vents, and buttons to keep the spray from affecting those areas. All in all, I love how it came out, and I had few setbacks. I can't wait to roll up to a troop with this! Parts: Husky 45 Gallon (170.3 L) Latch and Stack Tote with Wheels Battery powered dimmable night light panel. 3M High-Strength Red Lens Repair Film Diaper wipes lid piece (Aiden & Anais, no longer made, but others are similar) M3 hex bolt set white dollar store two-piece pencil case custom Laser Cut aluminum vents Phifertex Plus black mesh Hot Glue white paintable E6000 8mm indicator lights 9v battery case velcro 1/2" wide aluminum bar (1/8") Round Toggle Switches Rustoleum white primer Rustoleum Glossy white spray paint Rustoleum satin clear coat Rustoleum Gloss clear coat Liquitex Basics Acrylic black and raw umber paint Antique stereo knobs from Ebay custom vinyl lettering decals stormtrooper belt plate I made this diagram for someone following my build. My LEDs came pre-resistored, but if yours aren't, you will need to use an Ohm's Law Calculator to determine the different resistors (white and red use different volts). I hope I didn't forget anything, but I am open to answer questions! I look forward to more people making in-universe transport cases!