The Thigh Re-Re-Master Pt 3:Sew What? and the Re-Shim

The belt was done in time for the Southern California Garrison Orange County Squad photo shoot, which was fantastic. 62 out of our 90+ current squad members were in attendance and it was the biggest squad photo shoot to date, thanks in no small part to ANOVOS and troops who signed up because of their kits. Certainly, the majority of us new to the squad are TKs as you can see.

I was even able get some close-up shots for use with trading cards and for my listing on the 501st site.

One thing that bothered me, as it did in Comic-Con, was my right thigh. The garters for my right thigh were still troublesome, to the point where my right drop-down was getting caught on the top of the thigh piece when I walked. (Thank goodness you can't really see this issue in the trading cards being drafted by the squad.)

This is not the sort of "thigh gap" a trooper wants or needs.

After having made the thighs higher (after cutting them far too low to begin with) it was clear that they were low again because the garters needed to be adjusted or replaced.

One thing was especially clear to me:

• My shoulder bells and arms connected to my body with elastic straps and worked great.
• My thighs, on the other hand, connected to my body with inflexible nylon straps provided by ANOVOS (although modified for use with a garter belt) and were troublesome at best.

Taking a play from other troopers, I decided to make the garter straps for the thigh pieces using 2" wide elastic bands (as the industrial Velcro I'm already using, as well as the ANOVOS H&L tape before that, are 2" wide also). However, because I still prefer the Velcro system for some adjustability (especially as I continue to loose weight and get fit with diet and exercise), I decided to sew industrial Velcro to the ends connecting to the thighs, instead of gluing them onto the thighs with E6000 as other troopers do.

The industrial Velcro proved to be more work than I anticipated. Firstly, my wife's simple Brother sewing machine kept wanting to eat the elastic when I tried to sew through it. Secondly, the industrial Velcro was far too rigid for the weak sewing machine to puncture. Thirdly, the Velcro had adhesive backing, and the adhesive interfered with sewing it onto the elastic. So in order to get this job done, I had to sew by hand.

The design is fairly straightforward. I used a length of 2" elastic long enough to sew a goodly portion of Velcro to, and also to sew a 2" long belt loop on the top; I'm currently still using the web belt, but may decide to change to a wider belt in the future. The sewing took a couple for hours by hand, but the results were fantastic.

While I was at it, I also needed to reinforce the elastic loops for my hand guards; they were glued on with E6000, but the elastic didn't adhere well to the H&L fastener supplied by ANOVOS. So I sewed the perimeter of where the extra loop I added connected to the H&L square that fastens to the underside of the ABS hand guards.

I also sewed reinforcement for the shoulder straps I had customized for eventual EIB and Centurion status, to keep them from falling apart as they were also made using E6000. They're still standing up pretty well, but since I already had the needle and thread out, I figured why not?

This is the underside of the straps. I used black thread because it's a thicker, reinforced thread and wouldn't be seen as this is the side that sits on my shoulders. The cross-strap that connects to the shoulder bells was reinforced with regular white thread since that would be visible to those looking closely.

All these modifications were done before my fourth troop in Costa Mesa for an Air Force reintegration event.

That's my pal Blacky who recently moved on from TK to SL :D

One of our handlers even made some looping pictures; as you can see, I had no trouble walking that day as the new garters held up my thigh pieces, and very nicely at that.

The only other thing I had issues with was the thigh shims I added early on to support my larger thighs. They were really my first attempt at shimming, didn't look that great, and kept cracking near the back of my knees. So it was time to revisit them and redo the shims, cosmetically for the most part, but also structurally near the knees where they kept cracking.

I roughed up the existing shims and sanded down just a little before adding a new coat of pristine ABS paste (the old past was discolored due to poor handling techniques during my first go at it. Then it was just a matter of what I did with the front of my thighs - sanding, filling dips, re-sanding, etc. then finally light sanding, polish sanding, and polishing with Novus 3 and 2. I also severely reinforced the inside back of the knee with scrap ABS and lots of ABS paste and clamping to keep it from constantly cracking,

Of course, the right thigh was again the most troublesome.

But the back looks less like hammered poo now.

One more trick, this time in regards the holster: I'm using the rigid ANOVOS holster, which works wonderfully when it's stretched open to allow the blaster easier holstering and un-holstering. My trick is to put an old glass ginger beer bottle in the holster when it's not being worn. This helps keep the holster open when I troop.

I also took some time to make a personal logo for various forums, (501st, FISD, Garrison, etc.) and for use later on with my armor tote. I went with a tattoo art style to keep it simple and distinctive. Credits to GIMP for helping me transfer this from a hand sketch to a layered image with paths and such :)

Money's become tight in our household due to an unexpected increase in childcare expenses, so further upgrades to the suit, or even starting my older kid's Jawa outfit, will be slow going until next year at the earliest. But I'll keep making posts whenever I tweak or fix things, to help with troopers looking for more tips and tricks based on my continued experience. Until next time...

Industrial Velcro and Rebuilding the Belt

This is a long blog post that covers a couple of troops and related modifications and repairs as a result of wear and experience.

To start , I participated in a great, giant troop with the OC Squad (and other Southern California Garrison members) at the OC Zoo in the Irvine Railroad Park. There were about 50 members there between the 501st and Rebel Legion, as well as a few anchor characters like Rey, Vader, and Kylo. It was a lot of fun!

(With celebrity (pig) Kevin Bacon!)

It was a great troop, but it was a bit warm. I'm glad I had some spare white duct tape in case of emergency, because the ANOVOS H&L tape on my shins just couldn't take the heat. After the fact, I had a mess to clean up between the crap H&L tape and the adhesive from the duct tape.

To clean up, I used orange oil, Simple Green, and finally rubbing alcohol to prep the contact areas for some new industrial strength Velcro that I purchased at Home Depot.

After the clean-up, I cut the Velcro to the proper length and width, I carefully placed it onto the shin closures.

I've trooped in it once since then at San Diego Comic Con; we went even though we couldn't get passes for the con itself, because there's a ton to do in the Gaslamp district outside of the con - plus there was a 501st photo shoot Saturday morning for the Imperial Sands Garrison in which I wanted to participate, so it was the perfect excuse to troop! The shins held up very nicely, even when I had to run to the photo shoot at the con when I almost ran late trying to find it.

The serious photo

The fun photo

The really fun photos

My pauldron with a vinyl sticker I had made for the event. I ended up needing to use extra tape as the heat the previous day caused the edges of the vinyl to curl.

Trooping the con made me realize that I needed to replace the H&L contacts in my thighs and shoulder bells with industrial Velcro as well, as they were starting to separate from the armor. I removed the old H&L tape, cleaned the armor like I had for the shins, and then put in the new industrial Velcro.

The snaps for my thigh garters were slightly bothersome too; if they end up not working after this Velcro replacement, I may try to adjust the snap tension using some pliers, or modify it to be more in-line with a "traditional" belt garter system.

The other casualty was the floppy ANOVOS belt. one of the lower Chicago screws tore through the belt. I'd planned on eventually replacing it with a Rob Kittell belt from www.imperialissue.com, and it seemed like now was the time, especially with the annual squad photo shoot coming up this week and an opportunity to get pictures for my trading cards.

I had previously planned to shim my ab armor to fit around my girth, but after measuring my belly some weeks earlier to plan for this project, I was disappointing with my physical fitness. My wife had started a daily workout and nutrition regimen a couple of weeks earlier, so it was then I decided to join her for workouts in the mornings and to start watching my portion, especially carbs. Within a month I had lost more than a couple of inches form my belly, making shimming he abs completely unnecessary. This was also good because I wanted to get my ab sizing straightened out before ordering  the new belt, to ensure I had a belt the correct length.

I ordered his standard 40" belt online and it arrived within a few days - great turn around for flat postage. The belt was as advertised, at 40" with an extra 10" of overlap for the Velcro closure in the back for a total of 50". It has two canvas layers sandwiching a plastic center that gives it a lot more rigidity than the canvas-only ANOVOS belt. This also makes setting up the belt for ANH Stunt easier as the holster is only supposed to be fastened to the belt with two rivets/ Chicago screws instead of the four used by ANOVOS, which would be more inline with the ANH Hero trooper instead.

The first step was to lay the new belt out and mark where all the new holes would go for the snaps (to fasten the belt to the ab plate) and the rivets (to fasten the plastic ammo belt to the new canvas belt). I covered the inside of the belt with blue painters tape so I could mark up the tape - it would be easy to punch through with leather punches and remove before fastening snaps and rivets.

I started with the center at exactly the 25" mark , 1.5" from either the top or bottom as the belt is 50" long and 3" wide total. This would mark the rivet for the center of the ammo belt. From here, snaps were marked metrically at 17cm from center; the end rivets for the ammo belt were 20cm from center. I'd worry about the two holes for the holster closer to final assembly.

Next it was time to cross the Rubicon and remove the elements from the old ANOVOS belt. Knowing that the rivets fastening the ammo belt to the canvas were terrible to remove, I decided to at least get the ammo belt off the canvas by simply cutting it off the belt, being careful to avoid the elastic of the drop-down ammo boxes. I also had to do this for one Chicago Screw for the holster as it was incredibly torqued and refused to unscrew until I had removed it through cutting and was able to holder the other end with pliers.

Yeah, there was no going back now.

So now was the "fun" part - removing the old rivets from the plastic ammo belt and removing the cover caps from the front. I've read horror stories from the ANOVOS builders FB group and also seen UKSWrath's write-up on his belt. I'd also heard that some people weren't cursed with a crazy amount of pink epoxy and were able to remove the rivets and caps with relative ease.

Unfortunately, dear reader, I wasn't one of those people.

From the onset, I could tell that the caps were glued on with a large amount of pink epoxy (the smell of it reminds me of the stuff used in dentistry to create molds or fasten crowns to teeth). The first thing to do was to remove the rivet on the back of the belt using a Dremel. I used a cutting disk to care a cross into the rivet head so it could be easily remove with pliers and then ground down more.

You can already start to see some deformation in the ABS in the shot above right. Lamentably, in a situation like this, it's not about removing it without damage, but mitigating the amount of damage required to finish the job, to make repair easier.

I hit this epoxy with everything I had, from a butter knife like UKSWrath used, to a heated putty knife, to a cutting disk (this was far too risky and may have caused even more damage), to a sharp knife (I abandoned this for risk of personal safety) and a hobby knife (the blade wasn't long enough and the textured grip was causing too many scratches). I did the best I could, but in the end I had to pry up the last bit of the cap and rip out part of the ammo belt to get them off.

The center cap is always the hardest for anyone given the lack of space to attack the cap from the side. In the end the ammo belt backing was deforming so much that I cut relief cuts into it from the back to mitigate damage. Obviously this left a big chunk missing that would need to be repaired with scrap ABS and perhaps even paste to ensure the cap covered up any other blemishes.

Out of all of this, at least eh caps were removed without breaking, as those are more difficult to repair. I just had to take the Dremel grinding tip to them and clean the epoxy out from inside the caps to ensure they had enough room for whatever mounting hardware I decided to use.

It was a dusty job. Remember to wear a mask folks!

With the caps cleaned out, it was time to start repairing the ammo belt. So I dug into my ABS trimmings and found some pieces to CA glue on to the backside of the ammo belt. I clamped them into place for about 10 minutes to allow the CA glue to cure (I don't currently have any Zip Kicker).

After the glue cured, I went in from the front and filled in the craters with some spare ABS paste from my thigh piece rebuild. That was it for the night, so I decided to let the paste fully cure before resuming work the next evening.

The next evening, I spent an hour sanding down the ABS paste smooth and then polishing, with the help of 100-150-350-600-1500 grit paper (the latter two wet) and Novus 3 and 2. Still some light scratching, but otherwise not bad. The perfectionist in me could spend another hour removing all the light scratches, but I needed to finish tonight to give the E6000 time to cure before Saturday.

I had punched the belt holes (using leather hole punches) and put the snaps on the belt the previous night: I simply used the General Tools Brass Snaps and Fastener I used for the snaps on the ab plate, but the female counterparts on the inside of the belt, again with each snap 17cm from center on each side (34cm total). The new belt fits exactly like the ANOVOS belt, but it's obviously more rigid.

For the ammo belt, I fastened the center using a standard leather rivet with a washer on the back of the snap, to give it more support. I fastened the rivet backwards, with the rivet head on the inside of the belt, as this way was far easier to tap in given the shape of the ammo belt. The bonus is that the rivet head is far less likely to scratch my armor than the rivet back.

For the ends of the ammo belt, I used tow of the four Chicago screws from the hostler, since it was only going to need two of them for the Stunt mounting. I chose Chicago screws for one reason: as a stretch goal, I might alter the costume to support trooping as a Heavy Weapons Trooper (HWT), which don't have drop-down ammo packs on their belts. Using Chicago screws will allow me to unfasten the ends of the ammo belt to easily slip off the drop-downs if that ever happens.

When finished, the assembly was as good as new, on the new belt.

Now it was time for the holster. The first thing to do was remove the two extra holes at the top of the holsters. I measured 2.5" from the top of the holster and cut off the remaining leather, leaving only two mounting holes for the Stunt mounting. I also measured center-to-center on the bottom rivets to get the spacing correct for the belt holes - the measure is 5".

For the belt holes, UKSWrath used different measurements for his holster holes, but I opted to use the ANOVOS belt measurements and fasten the holster slightly higher using a 3/4" measure from the bottom of the belt; this also gives the rivets more purchase on the plastic stock inside the Kittell belt (this should NOT affect being able to apply for Centurion status). Because I had almost exactly 7" between the edge of the ammo belt and the edge of the Velcro, I decided to split the difference and give 1" from either side, which still put me very close to the ammo belt but not too close to the Velcro.

I marked the holes directly on the belt using a pen and very small marks, put the holes into the belt, and mounted the holster. You can't argue with the results - A very clean, strong mounting with all the pieces secure and fit for ANH Stunt CRL.

Edit: when using Chicago screws for the holster, try to use blue thread locker, which you can get form most hardware or auto parts stores. This will keep the screws from becoming loose and falling out, since it's hard to torque them down without deforming the flat threads (which also might cause them to scratch your armor).

Lastly was replacing the rivet caps on the ammo belt, this time using some proper E6000  in case of future maintenance. Before I did that, I CA glued the caps of the Chicago screws onto either end of the ammo belt, to keep them from floating off if I ever need to unscrew them for possible future HWT conversion.

After the CA glue cured, I carefully placed E6000 on the back of the caps and glued them back into place, about 1.25" from either edge to get them as centered as possible, with perhaps 1/4" at most away from the edge of the ammo belt for the caps on the ends.

So I should now be set for this Saturday, and one step closer towards going for EIB and later Centurion certification. For the latter, I still need latex hand guards for the rubber gloves, but I'll source these later as to spread around my purchases. I've already ordered more split rivets to correct the rivet spacing on the left side of the ab armor. Both will be covered sometime in the future on this blog. Until then...

Final Touches Pt 1 - Let's Touch ALL THE PIECES

As I get into the final stretch of this build before submitting for the 501st as IEB (Tier 2), I need to correct the issues I found during my last fitting.

First, I started with the rivets on the left side of the armor. I scuffed up the heads with 350 grit sandpaper, being careful not to scuff the armor, and then painted them gloss white per the CRL.

Next I wanted to tackle the extra Chicago screws in the belt that are not in the Stunt CRL but have been installed by ANOVOS. Instead of removing them and covering up the holes, I doubled down and not only kept them, but added washers to the upper two. The reason behind this was that I've already seen the two remaining screws tear through a few ANOVOS belts, so I wanted to keep all the screws to give the belt extra strength - not only that, but reinforce the upper two screws, as I was going to cover them up with iron-on patchwork.

My main issue is that the patch I had was too white. So to rectify this, I made a tea bath to stain the patch off white; then, I soaked the patch in the tea bath for less than a minute.

The patch came out a shade darker than the belt.

I ran it through a slight bleach soak. After that, it was about as right as I could get it without messing it up. But before I installed the patches, I installed the washers with the Chicago screws. Then the patches were installed over all that hardware.

I also took the time to put some loop tape over the hardware on the back of the belt, as the screws and rivets scratched my armor during the last fitting.

I gave the clips on the thermal detonator a similar treatment.

One of the things pointed out during my fitting was my wandering right shoulder strap. Without the elastic loop to keep it in place, it wanders too far center (at least I'm hoping so; otherwise I'll have to remove and re-glue it). For those loops to work correctly, though, I'll need a wider cloth shoulder strap underneath it.

the Stunt CRL for Centurion specifies that the cloth part should be white, preferably elastic. This being the case, I decided to take the plunge, deconstruct the ANOVOS shoulder straps, and replace part of them with white elastic. First I took 2' wide elastic and cut two lengths equal to the length of the current ANOVOS straps. I sealed the ends with CA glue to prevent fraying.

Next I took apart the ANOVOS straps by cutting the threading with a hobby knife; then I used those pieces along with the white elastic to make the new shoulder straps. I hate sewing, though, and decide to use E6000 to glue everything together.

After letting them site for a day, they came out very good. I simply needed to use some extra glue and magnets to tap down some stray corners.

Besides that, I also:

*Added elastic cinches to my TK Boots to make getting them into the shin armor easier (loop tape on the heal helps with initial placement and tightening)

*Trimmed the hand guards down for better presentation (untrimmed one on left, trimmed one on right). Used a hollow sanding on the front and back to add some curvature for better fit.

* Cleaned up the eyes of my bucket with the Dremel sanding drum, a hobby knife, miniature files, sand paper, and raw nerves (messing up was not an option).

 

* Refitted the sniper knee for better fit (NEEDED MORE CLAMPS):

* Cleaned up the right shin from a mis-installed sniper knee (thanks Shingate!)

* Glued down the final edges of the flannel I installed on the bottom of the shins to prevent damage to Te TK Boots

* Painted the rivets and gluing down the ammo pack on the right thigh

* Covered up the inside ends of the split rivets with low-temp hot glue to avoid catching on the undersuit (or my skin, for that matter)

* Cleaned up the ABS paste fill I did on the bottom of the left thigh to get rid of a huge armor gap

* Added some strap loops inside the chest piece for my Pyle Pro amp, using spare ABS from the kit

Finally, I also worked on the fan system for my helmet. I finally determined where the fans would be placed. I measured and marked the blank for fan placement. Using one of the fans and a Dremel burr, I marked where to drill the mounting holes, and then used a drill but to drill them out. I also used a Dremel cutting disk to mark a cut-out for the fan blades, but not how you might think. The disk only provided the stencil.

Using the drill and a drywall bit, I was able to remove the circular section; then I used the Dremel sanding drum to clean it out.

I then marked and cut a square hole for the switch in a similar manner, using a hobby knife for the 90 degree corners. The holes to either side of the square cut-out will be used to mount the switch to the blank.

Lastly, I clean the blank of burrs, sanded it, and commenced to coat it with PlastiDip spray.

That's it for tonight. And after tonight, the only thing I'll really want to do before sending approval pics is finish the fan system and get the Pyle Pro mounted in the chest piece. I eventually want to PlastiDip the inside of my bucket, but I plan on doing that after approval (if I mess up, it will delay me getting good approval pics).