mbone

Oh geeze, I can’t believe I never noticed that in these pictures, I had the shins on the wrong legs in the picture with R2 as well. I’m doing the Darth Vader belt grasp because my DLT-19 had broken in half on the way to the troop. As far as the ear goes, turns out bondo does not stick to wax paper, as I had hoped. Pics to follow as I progress.

Hello all, it's been a while since I posted and I've come a long way since the last post. I've completed my backpack, re-weathered my armor and am currently addressing the ear gap problem. Here's a shot or three of the rebuild/reweather: I'm not sure if RT-MOD is still a thing, the site seems to be gone, so I decided to do my best to separate the ears from the helmet as carefully as possible. They broke off reasonably clean, but as expected some of the bondo remained stuck to the helmet leaving a few chunks missing from the ears. I've dremeled and sanded the remnants on the helmet, and my idea currently in progress is to sandwich a doubled up piece of wax paper between ear and helmet and rebuild the missing bits with bondo, assuming (and hoping) the bondo will not stick to or eat the wax paper, then I'm going to remove them, clean them up, repaint/weather and reattach with hopefully an acceptable gap. Bondo is drying as I post this. Will update as I go. Still hoping to get this suit up to snuff and hoping this is moving it in the right direction. Feedback appreciated.

Yeah I thought so on the screws, but wanted to verify. RWA great, I’m already joined to that group. Thanks!

That's a major bummer. I'm pretty sure this was version 1 of RT-MOD but I'm not real confident that a new set of ears would be much better than the old set, and the old set, at any angle, came down less than halfway past the bump. In fact the bump that runs all the way around the helmet at the bottom was so mismatched I used a heat gun, a spoon and some canola oil (so the spoon wouldn't stick) to sort of blend them together better. I put together my helmet and another for a friend and had to do the same thing with the ears both times. I don't mean to be bashing the set, the rest of it I've been totally happy with, it's all good stout abs, and great for the big/tall/large head crowd. I'm not tall. Plus I keep reading about other people having to wait two years to get their armor, I think ours came in six weeks. At any rate, I'm going to continue on to try to make it as MEPD accurate as possible, even if ultimately the gap disqualifies it. Got the gap closed between the top/bottom and the mic tips are black and drying as we speak. Oh, couple more questions, please: The countersink screw - that's standard or phillips? Also, I did a lot of searching but it was some time ago...does anyone know a good place to source the toilet syphon thing for the backpack currently? Thanks for the help!

Yeah, the more I look at it I figured the stripes needed to be redone. Screws and mic tips, got it thanks. As to the ears, well that's a story and it caused the original build, which had been going pretty well, to come to a screeching halt. The ears didn't remotely match the contour of the side of the helmet, and no amount of trimming alone was going to fix it. Stalled the build for probably a year. Then I got an idea in my head, and it was either going to work or destroy the piece altogether, so I decided to try it as its sitting on the shelf wasn't accomplishing anything. Back when I was taking pilot lessons, I remember my instructor telling me that a way to stop a crack in an airplane wing was to drill a hole at the end of it. So I drilled a hole, cut a line to the hole (to keep it from cracking all the way through), then I had to attach the ear with the screws and use a heat gun to mash the rest of it against the side of the helmet. Then, bondo. And more bondo. And more bondo. Aside from the round part, most of the rest of the ear is bondo.

Hi folks! Mike (TD-60506) from the Great Lakes Garrison here. I'm in the process of rebuilding my armor. After reviewing photos from several troops, I began to notice that I seemed to have one 'fat leg'. It became apparent to me that on the shins, I had attached the right side of the right leg to the left side of the left leg, and vice versa. As we all know ANH armor isn't at all symmetrical, so this caused one shin to look abnormally large in comparison to the other one. After disassembly and reassembly the weathering obviously no longer matched so I knew I was going to have to respray and re-weather the entire thing. I also resized everything for a better fit and fixed some other minor errors (rivets on the wrong side, etc.). I decided to also shoot for MEPD approval with the rebuild. I think the helmet's about done and ready for weathering but I want to get some feedback first, please.Here's a 'before' shot: As you can see, the weathering's pretty ridiculously heavy and very spotty. I had used a craft paint technique. This time I'm going for the hairspray/fuller's earth technique. Here's the lid in its current state. I want to make sure it looks okay: This is an RT-MOD helmet. The traps/tears/stripes in the 'before' picture were all Trooperbay decals, everything is handpainted now. One other question please: Are the mic tips supposed to be black or grey? Thanks in advance, Mike