bantha hunter

Hey guys! The bucket is now finished and all it's missing is some good weathering. To recreate the tube-stripes I again worked with a rough 3d-mesh onto which I projected the images of the original helmet. From this I was able to create a detailed pattern that I'm happy to share with the community here. So if anyone is recreating the Davin Felth helmet in the future and wants a template... Here ya go! And here is my finished bucket

Bucket time! I attached the helmet and tried to get the brow height to look as close to the Davin Felth original as possible. For my built I decided against rivets and went with screws... I'm not sure if this will hold up to trooping, but it seems sturdy enough. I now know why people say that attaching the ears is the most difficult step in building a helmet. It's good that RS propmasters give you two pairs of ears to work with, because I definitely trashed one pair in the process. But I think in the end it turned out alright and I'm happy with them for now. Because I am replicating the Davin Felth helmet I tried to add some of the little flaws as well. In the original helmet the left ear seems to be positioned slightly lower and you can see a bit of the underlying HDPE-plastic "semicircle" peak out on the top. I made sure to get the same effect in my helmet. Oh, and I made a cheap helmet stand as well. It's a PVC pipe with a cheap toilet plunger (A fresh one!!!) shoved inside of it to cradle the helmet. It's actually super effective, and you can easily reposition the helmet on the plunger. Because it's rubber it nicely grabs on to the plastic of the helmet. Maybe not something to display it long term (Especially because there will be stuff inside the helmet later on), but for painting it works great! Yep! I will try to resin-print a mold and cast the cheesegraters myself. Not sure if it will work, but maybe worth a try.

Thanks Thomas! Something a bit different from me... I'm currently waiting for some RAL 7034 spraypaint to arrive so I can convert my helmet into a "totally not ABS" HDPE version, and I had some time on my hands. I wanted to see if I could digitally rotate the breastplate of my trooper to make the dirt pattern more visible, and I think I made a discovery that could be relevant. For this I 3d-scanned the breastplate to get a rough digital model and aligned it with a screenshot of the roadblock scene. I then used Blender to project the scene through the camera onto the breastplate. This enabled me to rotate the armor and view it from the front. To my surprise I discovered that the chestplate is the same one that was used for the captain in the Garinden scene! The "scratches" in the middle are partly hidden from view and there is some distortion, but the dirt stains on the left are a perfect match. This means that for the RT-97C private, the clamshell of the Garinden captain can be used as reference for the weathering, and there is less guesswork involved. From the looks of it the right shoulder bell is a match too, so I guess it was permanently connected to this particular clamshell during the shoot. Also, this right here is ready for printing! Any idea what it could be? .... (okay, it says what it is in the image, haha)

Yeah, that would look cool on my desk, haha. I like that they went with the original 1977 design for the Dewback. That sculpt looks identical to the full-scale model that was used on set in Tunisia. They could have used the version that was recently depicted in the Mandalorian, which also looked nice, but the scaley 1977 version is still my favorite.

Congrats David! Your TD looks lovely, well done!!

Next up... The teeth! I have to admit, this step was scary. I did a quick mockup and added grey paint in Photoshop to simulate how it might look with a paintjob. When you compare my helmet to the movie version you can see that I got carried away with the two gaps in the middle. They are higher than in the movie version. I think a good paintjob can fix this to a degree, but do you think this is still "close enough" to be considered accurate? I shaved down the last bit of "lip" at the edge of the eyes, and I like it a lot better now! Unfortunately it's not visible in the photos above because I did it after I took them.

Hey guys! Quick mini-update... I started on the helmet and went ahead with trimming the eyes. I tried to get it as close to the "Davin Felth" / "Look Sir Droids!" helmet as I could. When I look at it now, both eyes could use slightly more trimming.

Hey guys! Long time no see... I was caught up with other things these past months, but I managed to fix some strapping issues and finally finished the clamshell and shoulder-bells. I tried everything on yesterday, and this is how it looks now. The shins were sliding up in these pictures, and I still need to think of a good way of attaching them to the shoes. I was thinking of experimenting with velcro that I can stick to the top of the boots. I have rather long legs, so I figured I want the shins to sit as high up as possible without sliding over the boots... I was a bit concerned with the look of the shoulder-bells, because I'm a bit "wide" in the shoulders, but seeing the photos I think this might look good as is? In these photos the right bell is detached from the shoulder-strap. I think this was done on the "move along" trooper, and it might not be accurate for the trooper I'm replicating. As always, I'm happy about any comments you can give me. If you see something that looks off, I'd be glad to hear it.

Good point. I will probably have to give it one coat of paint to get both shoes to be the same color (one had fewer coats and is definitely yellower), but any discoloration that shows up after that might work well with the over all weathering.

Thanks guys Quick update... I finished my thighs and attached the knee ammo belt today. The clam-shell still needs some work, but I snapped a few mirror selfies to see how everything looks so far. The back piece is still missing, and I need to fix my butt-plate. I used elastic straps to fix the butt-plate to the kidney, and I think the elastics are too short, as it is constantly trying to slide over the kidney. The butt on the RS kit seems to flare out at the sides a bit, so ideally I want the outer straps to pull that back in. I will probably exchange the elastics for black canvas material and see if that works better. As you can see, the shoes are not completely finished either. They are brown riding boots from Euroriding that I painted with Angelus white leather paint. At one point they were completely white, but then the brown coloring of the boots "seeped" through and the boots yellowed. I will probably have to re-paint them a couple of times. I thought about spray painting them, but I figure that would just result in flaky paint. Cheers!

Hey folks! It's been two months, and I owe you another update! Between a vacation and the holidays I didn't get too much free time to spend working on the TD, but I can finally get going again. I spent the last few weeks with a lot of strapping and trying to get the clamp-shell to work. It's now finally getting there. I hope to share pictures of that soon! I also managed to make the gap between the abs and kidney a bit smaller by completely re-working the shim, and I think I have now closed it completely once the canvas belt sits nice and tight. In the meantime I made a few orders and got a few shiny toys in the mail that I can't wait to share This beauty was made by Angry Ape Props, and if I understood correctly it might have been the last of its kind. It is the RT-97C master that he used to produce all his kits. I promised to give it a good home: It has a brass scope and all. Really beautiful work. I still have to attach the scope to the barrel and will have to 3d print a few parts for that, but in the end I want it to be detachable and put a grub-screw in there to fix it in place. I also bought these wonderful pauldrons from trooper1 and couldn't be happier! He puts a lot of effort into his products, and it truly shows! The quality is superb. I went a bit overboard and bought all the colors I also managed to snag this extremely well-preserved Giostyle Safari600 bottle. It was actually still wrapped in plastic when I got it! The thing has never seen action and looks factory fresh. It sat in the basement of a German Ebay seller since the 70's... And finally... Pouches! I bought the two spanish pouches from our own bigwam (I love them! ) and the others are from Trooperbay. That's all from me for now. I have some strapping to do! Thanks Thomas! Your SWAT trooper not only looks excellent, but the whole submission process was of great help to understand this particular trooper. I have to admit that I went back to your post a couple of times to get my bearings.

Welcome Stian! Looking forward to your build!

I've noticed that the MEPD is not the most active detachment forum, but when you post, you almost always get a response from the regulars, which is awesome! Do any of you know how other detachments are faring? Given the current economic situation, I could imagine that the hobby is attracting less new people in general? My new years resolution is to continue with my build-thread and hopefully update it in the next few days.

Hey guys! I'm currently in the midst of building my TD, and I thought it would be a good idea to create this build thread to post about my progress. A couple of months ago I created another thread on whitearmor.net (Click me!), but now that I am starting with strapping the pieces together, I have decided to continue here... My armor is an ANH stunt kit from RS propmasters, and I had a lot of fun with it so far. I really want to recreate a specific TD to aim for SWAT down the road (waaay down the road), and settled on this guy right here: I really love the look of the RT-97C in combination with cheese-graters. I also discovered that my arms are slighty longer than average, which means that there is an unsightly gap between my wrist-openings and the regular hand guards. I think cheese-graters can help me hide that gap better, so this is what I'm going to try. Because I'm not exactly "70's stuntman sized" (I'm 6'2", 95 kg) I had to modify a couple of parts to make them fit me. Man, that was a bit scary at times. This is where I thank the dude who first discovered how to make ABS-paste. Thanks buddy! I couldn't have done it without you. I somehow managed to shim the back of my thighs and calves without completely ruining them, and have just finished shimming the kidney-armor as well. Lots of sanding and applying ABS-paste. And then more sanding... And more paste... And sanding again... This process has literally taken weeks, but I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is what my shimmed kidney looks like when I wear it with the chest and abs armor. I think I only added a 2,5 cm wide strip of ABS and tried to blend it with the original part as best as possible. I'm generally happy with the result, but I'm currently pondering if the gap between abs and kidney is still too wide, or if I'm overthinking it? I could probably bite the bullet and try to add another 1/2" on each side, to completely eliminate the gap, but I'm debating if it is worth the trouble. As I mentioned, I'm ultimately trying to aim for SWAT, even if that is still a long way off, so I really want this thing to look "right". What do you think? Anyway, once I have decided how to proceed with the kidney I'm going to continue with the strapping. I'll keep you posted. Cheers!

Hey guys! I just stumbled across this thread and thought it would be a cool idea to share my own Karrimor frame. So, I figure this is definitely not the correct size. It's too long, compared to the frames that were used on screen. Width-wise it seems to fit well enough, but to make this look accurate I would have to move the upper bar (the second one from the top) down a few centimeters and cut off everything above it. However, I believe these longer frames can be converted to achieve an accurate look. Mine got two of the red "braces", and the thing looks used already... Less weathering needed. Even though it doesn't look like it in the picture, the tape-measure is aligned with the bottom of the frame.