Lorelei's 5'4" ATA ANH-S Centurion-Hopeful Build

[gmrhodes13[Staff]]

Nice work, I do prefer a heat gun over water bath, there is more control but you really do have to practice before using one.

 

I've seen a few local troopers with RS armor have issues with the shins cracking at the top due to stress opening, you can either glue some strips of ABS behind or use ABS paste, both will help it cracking further.

 

Looking good.

[TheLorelei[TK]]

On 11/27/2018 at 10:02 PM, PhilBobTheFish said:

Good ol' fashioned squeal-a-little-and-frantically-push-them-back-out dents. 

Truly an important part of every great build. 

Hahaha - good to know I'm in good company!!

On 11/27/2018 at 9:02 PM, Bud Spaklur said:

I suggest taking off a bit where I drew red dotted lines- just a couple mm each side, and refit it.

Yeah, I ended up doing that. But also in my hot water bathing I straightened out the backs of the calves too much, they were rather flat, so I ended up pushing them back into curves which a) gives my calves more room and b) gave me more to trim at the top than the middle. It was weird and I can sketch it out if future readers need clarification.

On 11/28/2018 at 12:03 PM, shashachu said:

Shins look awesome to me. Like was suggested, I'd also trim the bottoms to match. Are the shins being held together with the tape or do they stay closed by themselves? One piece of advice I found helpful is that you'll have a much easier time with the shin closures if you're able to bend them into shape so that they stay closed naturally rather than having to be forced closed with Velcro, bra straps, etc.

 

Side note: I recently got added to the DO team so I will be eagerly awaiting your EIB and Centurion submissions.

Thanks! Gotcha. The shin bottoms have been trimmed to match - I followed the original curves with a protractor so they stayed ATA-accurate.

In re: tape, they stayed together by themselves when left alone; they didn't stay closed when around my boots.

CONGRATULATIONS on your elevated status! Go show those tall people how it's done! Haha. But yes, I look forward to submitting. Eventually.

On 11/29/2018 at 1:41 PM, Pretzel said:

Looks great! Keep up the great work. Just make sure they are not too tight that you can't walk. 

Thanks! Not gonna lie, the left one touches my calf muscle. It's definitely not so tight I can't walk, but I think it might prefer to flex open when I flex my calf. I will likely put the halves together with a few mm gap to account for this, unless the rest of y'all's armor touches your calves, too.

On 11/29/2018 at 3:35 PM, gmrhodes13 said:

Nice work, I do prefer a heat gun over water bath, there is more control but you really do have to practice before using one.

 

I've seen a few local troopers with RS armor have issues with the shins cracking at the top due to stress opening, you can either glue some strips of ABS behind or use ABS paste, both will help it cracking further.

 

Looking good.

Thanks! Yeah, I can see the perks to a heat gun... and hey, check out what happened when I boiled that crack I repaired with ABS paste:

Maybe I didn't let it cure(?) for long enough? It's still hard, just foamy looking. Annoying to re-clean it up but at least I didn't polish it before. Anyway there's my word of warning about boiling ABS paste repairs.

 

This weekend, I'm not letting the >50°F weather catch me by surprise. I plan on getting almost all the remaining glueables glued tomorrow (minus outer forearm cover strips on the undersides, hand plates on gloves, belt rivet covers, and shoulder straps), and am prepping like nuts today. Here's my list:

 

-make 4 double snap base plates and 14 singles

-cut magnetic closure mount holes in shins and glue holders in

-outer front shin cover strips

-evaluate outer thigh cover strips - redo if necessary

-outer bicep cover strips

-mount snap plates in thighs

-finish sanding drop boxes, glue in elastic, glue shut

-mount snap plates on chest to back connection at shoulders

-evaluate chest to ab connection, move snap plate/remake elastic if necessary

trim ab and kidney to proper size, mount closure slidey bits and glued snaps (visible snaps later)

-figure out snap placements in bicep, forearm, and shoulder bell and place those (hopefully doable while outer cover strips are clamped)

 

SO. Off I go!

[TheSwede[TK]]

1 hour ago, TheLorelei said:

unless the rest of y'all's armor touches your calves, too.

Mine does, elliminates all need for extra strapping to keep the shins from twisting But you don’t have to take my word for it, you can see for yourself 

 

[PhilBobTheFish]

1 hour ago, TheSwede said:

Mine does, elliminates all need for extra strapping to keep the shins from twisting But you don’t have to take my word for it, you can see for yourself 

 

Now you just need to go ahead and jump! 

[TheSwede[TK]]

30 minutes ago, PhilBobTheFish said:

Now you just need to go ahead and jump! 

Jump? 

[TheLorelei[TK]]

On 12/1/2018 at 2:29 PM, TheSwede said:

Mine does, elliminates all need for extra strapping to keep the shins from twisting But you don’t have to take my word for it, you can see for yourself 

Ha, that's fun! And great to know. Thanks. Went ahead with the spacing I had on the right (trimmed since last picture) and widened the left along the seam just a smidge.

 

Despite not getting done all I hoped over the weekend (next time I'm telling the tree it can decorate itself), I made progress. Not necessarily progress than makes for good pictures - nobody wants to see me gluing things wearing a post-apocalyptic respirator huddled by a pile of firewood in the wintry half-light with a chilly drizzle and thick fog lazily tumbling by - or wait, it might sound like it'd make a good picture but it wasn't nearly as poetic as it sounds, I was sitting on a lunch sized igloo cooler for the love of Mike. But anyway I got work done. And THEN I went to a garrison-mate's house and got help sizing my ab&kidney AND an offer to come over and use their workspace (and belt sander!!) whenever I need it  which is just so awesome and generous and I'm quite excited. I also got feedback on my chest plate, which was looking like this:

AKA huge. It's been recommended that I start by bending the sides in and the tops down, and see how that goes before trimming. Works for me.

 

I'm making my own holster, and cut that out last night. It was surprisingly easy, using a template I found floating around the forums. I mocked it up in cardstock first, made my edits, and used a utility knife to cut it all out. Really not bad. I'll be casing the leather (getting it saturated with water to make it easier to work with) and punching my rivet and thread holes tonight. Should be a quick assembly after that!

[Rat[TK]]

Looking awesome Lorelei. Nice call on making the holster.

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[PhilBobTheFish]

2 hours ago, TheLorelei said:

And THEN I went to a garrison-mate's house and got help sizing my ab&kidney AND an offer to come over and use their workspace (and belt sander!!) whenever I need it  which is just so awesome and generous and I'm quite excited.

I hope whoever offered that likes waking up at 2am for last minute stress sanding. 

 

(Also, props to whoever is helping that much with your build) 

[Pretzel]

Nice Work so Far! Looking forward to seeing how the Holster comes out. 

[TheLorelei[TK]]

18 hours ago, Rat said:

Looking awesome Lorelei. Nice call on making the holster.

Hey thanks Rat! It seemed like another fun challenge, and since it's so different from the rest of the build I knew it'd be a nice change of pace. It's been super fun so far, and really not that difficult. I'll provide a rundown of my madness-- I mean, method - later. This no-camera thing is getting quite frustrating, though.

 

18 hours ago, PhilBobTheFish said:

I hope whoever offered that likes waking up at 2am for last minute stress sanding. 

 

(Also, props to whoever is helping that much with your build) 

Me too, Rowan, me too.  Kidding, kidding. See, my tactic to avoid such nocturnal ventures is to keep my kit at my boyfriend's house - that way I have to confine my work to reasonable hours, because it's simply not around to be worked on.

(Yeah, they're some real great folks! Neither have TKs but have spec ops troopers and such so can help plenty. Side note: this is such an incredible community.)

[TheLorelei[TK]]

Alright! Let's talk HOLSTER! Part 1

 

I found this post (https://www.whitearmor.net/forum/topic/23643-making-a-holster-for-anh-stunt/) quite valuable, and essentially followed it. However, I had just a few things to add. So here. My stuff.

Clockwise from the lower left we have:

-a small sledgehammer which was likely overkill (but available!)

-a corner of a piece of leather

-pliers (you really, really need them)

-bits of leather I didn't clear off my mat

-a sharp pencil (does double duty as a writing thing AND a scratch awl)

-a sharp razor/utility knife

-a 5/32" punch (a truly awful one)

-a scarily sharp 4-tooth 3mm lacing punch (teeth are 1.5mm, space from tip to tip is 3mm) (really great quality, less than $5, go AliExpress!)

-a pack of leather needles which I'm so glad I picked up on a whim despite thinking I had one already because you do need at least two

-waxed thread for sewing leather (a lot thicker than expected, but looks and works great)

and, in the center, two 6x6 plumbing gaskets on top of a magazine.

 

Armed thusly, and with as much knowledge of leatherworking as one can gain by watching a vendor at the renaissance faire, I set to work.

 

I found a reasonably sized and priced piece of 8oz (~1/8") black leather for just under $20 on Amazon. Nice and thick! It seemed too good to be true. Because, as with many things in life, it was. Turns out it was quite matte/scuffy. Turns out (more hours of research later) that's easy to fix with a 50-50 mix of water and black Resolene swabbed on with a sponge in layers. That stuff is great! You can see the pleasant shine in the pics below. I'll likely go over it once more to even it out when I'm done.

I drew Troopermaster's template (from the thread mentioned) on an old poster. Then I copied only the width on the leather and wrapped it around my blaster to be sure it'd work with leather as thick as mine; I ended up widening the pattern by under 1/2". 

 

Misc. Discoveries:

a) my 5/32" punch is absolute rubbish. Do yourself a favor and buy a decent one

b) one must hammer on a cement surface to get anywhere

c) "casing" leather is very nice, softens it enough to work with

d) 6x6 rubber gaskets (available in the plumbing aisle of a good hardware store) make nice *cheap* backer pads so you don't dull your (potentially) sharp tools - either use two gaskets or stack it on a magazine as one gasket is likely not thick enough

e) the link in the other tutorial appears to be broken, but saddle stitching isn't as tough as it may sound and Tandy has some great tutorials on YouTube

f) if done after casing, drawing along your stitching line with a sharp pencil lends a desirable stitching groove

 

Everything else you can read in the other thread.  midway through stitching, the holster looked like this. Please note I did not punch my snap/rivet holes yet because I'm chronically impatient. I likely should have done that before stitching.

Front:

Back:

And hey, that's good enough for me!

Finished product to follow. 

[Rat[TK]]

Looks awesome Lorelei.

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[PhilBobTheFish]

[TheLorelei[TK]]

Confessions, Part... something.

 

Man, I hate typing this out. But here goes.

When I got the help sizing my ab+kidney, I barely even looked at the positioning before scoring and snapping. A bad idea. I know. Well the size itself was fine, but I realized later that one side seam was further towards my back than the other. It wasn't HORRIBLE because you'll never see my right and left sides at once to compare but it was noticeable, at least to me, and it put the seam under a snap plate too. (How that didn't tip me off before I cut it, after all the measuring I did to make the snap plate locations even, I cannot say.) Well anyway I decided to rectify my mistake, and had fortunately saved all the snapped off pieces so I could tell exactly how much to add back to the kidney and remove from the ab to keep the overall size where it was.

A clean cut at least. I CA glued them together and ran a bead down the back with some accelerator to solidify it.

Then I slathered some ABS paste over the whole dealio. Figured I'd have a nice lesson in shimming. I haven't done enough sanding yet in this build, anyway.

That was yesterday. Today I cut the shim down to size (hence the smallness in the next pic) and wrapped some 180 grit around a paint stick and wet sanded the mess. And now I have this dark line running down the middle and I can't figure out why.

Was there pencil graphite on the seam that I didn't notice before gluing? Is it a shadow? An unfilled crack? Most importantly, WHAT on EARTH can I do about it now? Best I can figure is to carve it out, or sand it down past (???) the darkness and build it back up and sand it back down again.

 

It's been a quick process so far so I'm not too worried about it, just bewildered and highly disappointed in myself. So. Any advice greatly appreciated, as always. Y'all are the best. Just think - after this I'll know how to help somebody else who gets into the same situation! *forcibly shifts paradigm*

 

Now nice things! I hot water bathed many items yesterday. My chest tabs are bent down for a closer fit (front/left is current, back/right is original):

And the side wings are bent in too.

Boy, was that a pain. One insisted on curling at the end. I ended up clamping it between two paint sticks with binder clips for the rest of the work which flattened it well.

My shins were a bit off as well. The cover strips weren't lying flat.

But now they do!

And I finished my holster, which was awesome. More on that later.

Edited December 8, 2018 by TheLorelei
Clarity

[Frank75139[501st]]

Don’t let anyone ever tell you that your not hardcore! Your doing amazing, this will be your crowning achievement and you will proudly serve the empire! Or it’ll get all messed up and look horrible... Just kidding, really, great job.


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[TheLorelei[TK]]

38 minutes ago, Frank75139 said:

Don’t let anyone ever tell you that your not hardcore! Your doing amazing, this will be your crowning achievement and you will proudly serve the empire! Or it’ll get all messed up and look horrible... Just kidding, really, great job.

Hahahaha - *perfect* response. Thank you for the grin.

[Rat[TK]]

I'll ditto Cranks response. Awesome work and cant wait to see that holster.

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[PhilBobTheFish]

For the seam I would say just do another go 'round of ABS paste and see how it turns out.

[DStep[TK]]

Oh those shins...I did a lot of hot water baths to get my rear cover strips to line up on my ATA kit.

Great job so far on your build and the fix on the kidney! Keep up the good work!

[TheLorelei[TK]]

A quick rundown, 'cause time that I can be posting is time that I can be working on my armor! Haha. I've been chipping away at my to-do list (so impressively long now... so impressively long...) pretty much every day, as much as I can. There's a stand-alone heated room I have access to in which I can glue/let things cure without harming anybody, so that's been handy. Still not many pics. Still sorry. But hey, my camera takes pictures almost sort of ok if I shake it as I take the photo so it doesn't have time to try to focus! (And there was much rejoicing: Yay.)

 

Last night I got all this done: finally finished my right ear (fourth time's the charm), drilled holes to attach ears to the helmet, and trimmed the neckline so I can finally fit my bucket on my head.

Sliding that thing on sideways and turning it to face forwards was almost an emotional experience. Also, my glasses fit fine for the nonce.

See the unevenness at the side seams caused by the back half of the helmet being tapered? I contained my terror long enough to slide the s-trim on and discovered that s-trim covers a multitude of sins. I could commit edge crimes for a solid inch, practically, and by the time they'd be visible above the trim, they'd be solidly hidden by the ear. Do not fear the seam, folks.

My bucket has the ATA...attribution?... bit inside, and I wanted to preserve that through plastidip-and-cheesecloth-ing it, so I measured it as best I could, made a cardstock test piece, compared and trimmed, laid out overlapping painter's tape pieces on a plastic bin, traced the cardstock shape onto those, ran along the lines with my trusty utility knife, and ended up with a nice little custom shaped protective logo covering.

Not rocket surgery by any means, but I hadn't seen someone detail their attempts to preserve any such logos before, so, here.

 

After determining how I'll mount my lenses (AFTER - because you may not want to mount onto plastidip but rather to your actual bucket, and consequently place lens mounts before plastidipping), I taped things off and prepared for work. I'm plastidipping before assembling my bucket halves for ease of dipping and creating lens mounts later. 

I also taped off *some* of the reverse edges, preserving areas that wouldn't be well hidden by overlap. (The white stuff inside the face is my assortment of precut cheesecloth pieces. My cheesecloth came rolled in 6"x10"ish panels which I cut into quarters. 3"x5" panels worked great for me. I also cut smaller pieces but didn't use them much, opting to overlap or leave cheesecloth hanging off the edge most places instead.

Turns out the more I taped, the more comfortable I would've been while dipping, but it wasn't that messy of a process anyway so it was no big thing.

Others have detailed how to do the actual coating bit. I used one small container of brush on plastidip, one pack of Guardsman cheesecloth, and a 2" chip brush to apply things because it's what I had. The only other thing I have to add is if you've fiberglassed with woven mat, you'll be just fine doing this. Very, very similar concept. (Thanks, failed Seventh Sister test bucket!)

An hour and a half later, I ended up with this.

I figure on slipping a pair of nail scissors into the painter's taped areas to trim them out, but I'll apply my second coat first. Not sure if I'll add cheesecloth again, or just plastidip. Regardless, it was a good experience, and it's added to the "je ne sais quoi" of the bucket already, in my opinion.

[Frank75139[501st]]

We will be trooping together in no time!


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[DStep[TK]]

Looking good!
I can’t count the number of times I trimmed and test fitted the ears...patience is a virtue lol

[TheLorelei[TK]]

49 minutes ago, Bud Spaklur said:

Good progress! Keep it up. How long does it take to fully dry?

Thanks, Matt! Rumor has it all smell-of-doom is gone in 36 hours. It dries to the light touch within minutes, and the can says to allow at least 30 minutes between coats and 4 hours before handling but that's without the cheesecloth... so it's anyone's guess. According to my research, it's pretty flexible (pun intended) stuff. Like, it doesn't even have recommended application temperatures. It'll just cure slower in colder temps.

 

54 minutes ago, Frank75139 said:

We will be trooping together in no time!

You betta believe it!!

 

22 minutes ago, DStep said:

Looking good!
I can’t count the number of times I trimmed and test fitted the ears...patience is a virtue lol

My goodness, I *wish* that four was merely the number of times I trimmed them, D'Angelo.

Why yes, I do have nine ears. But I didn't use all of them! So much win!

[TheLorelei[TK]]

5 minutes ago, Bud Spaklur said:

Lorelei- I think Frank’s new nickname should be “Smell of Doom.” Just sayin’.

Hahahahahaha!!

[Frank75139[501st]]

Lorelei- I think Frank’s new nickname should be “Smell of Doom.” Just sayin’.


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Don’t let him fool you, he’s my bff he tells everyone this in the attaché section.


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