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[Arco'thyel Wyshla]

Woah, really?! Exciting news if so! I figured this CRL line in particular--

Any element based on a non-Mandalorian outfit or armor that is added to a Mandalorian kit must not be instantly recognizable from its original purpose or origin. As such, it must be altered to fit the Mandalorian kit seamlessly.

--was pretty much opposite the trophy plate's intention of "Look at me, I'm a cool mando who took down a shoretrooper specialist! Look at their armor I'm wearing! ". I'd love that unmodified shoulder + unmodified shknee combo, though. Let me know if you get a definitive yes -- I'd like to be careful and make 100% sure it's approvable before going for it, given the CRL's wording otherwise.

Oh man! I've already started painting it with Rustoleum paints, and the beige paint they used on screen is Montana. Do I stay the course with the concept art plates, or do I sand back down? Don't mind me, just being indecisive again.

[Cattriss Wren]

Congrats on getting to use the shore trooper plate Arco!! Your kit is going to turn out amazing!! Glad to see you working on it again 

[Karson Wren]

That's great! Glad you were able to get what you wanted 

Also, i love you're custom helmet 

[Kandosii Tor]

Part of the Ruus discussion was that the wording there ought to be cleaned up and clarified. But according to my app team source, you shouldn't have any problems with that shoulder plate.

Remember that if you have 10 armor parts, 8 of them must be Mandalorian in origin to satisfy the 80/20 rule.

By my count, you should be covered, but it's your build, so make sure you double check!

[Arco'thyel Wyshla]

Alright! My refined concept has been OK'd by my Ruus Soly'c. I'm officially going for the unpainted shoretrooper plates! Okay, NOW I can't change my design for app anymore. Unless my paint swatches reveal that Montana Gold reacts poorly on top of Rustoleum, in which case, I'm changing my design again.

Thank you so much for looking into it, Kandosii!



My recent progress has been to alter the shoretrooper shin model. After printing a section, it turns out the model is too thin in places -- I imagine it was originally intended to be worn with the backing section, not by itself -- so I've been widening it for sturdiness. The original model is on the left in this image, my edits are on the right. It should be strong enough to wear on its own now.



While those are printing, it's time to work on the chestplate!

[Cattriss Wren]

  so exciting! Can't wait to see the chest piece

[ValinKrai]

The excitement of shore trooper shoulder being allowed. WOOOOOO

[Arco'thyel Wyshla]

Ok! Chestplate time. As a reminder, here's my template:



First step is to cut out the pieces! Sintra is so much more crisp than cardboard.



Next it's time to cut the grooves for heat shaping the creases. These are on the wrong side of the plate. I cut a shallow guiding line first, then a few heavier cuts until it's about 3/4ths of the way through. You can get a feel for how deep the cuts are by flipping it over and seeing how visible the crease is when the plate flexes:



Be sure to practice on some scrap sintra to get a feel for it. Well worth the investment!

Then I trimmed away some extra material to make the groove. I've found it's sturdier when you make it a \I shape, rather than a \/ shape. If you need a deeper crease, you can cut the extra material away from the other side, too.



If there's places where multiple creases intersect, be sure to cut some extra space where they meet:



As for heat forming, I was worried about how the slash marks would work, so I practiced on some scrap. I deformed the slashes to give it some shape, then tried shaping a crease into that. I wasn't a fan of how soft the creases were around it, so I decided to do the opposite for my plate. Here's the scrap:



Back to the plate. I cut the slash marks 95% of the way through, but kept them in place for sturdiness while heat forming. I added tape to the one that reached the edge so it didn't shift.



When heat forming, heat it very lightly from the outside of the plate. The goal is to make it so the thinner groove we cut reaches sintra's floppy stage, but the sintra around the groove stays rigid. I found my cardboard template was a nice anvil to use as reference for roughly how deep the creases should be.



So, rough shaping achieved! Tomorrow I'll don my soft goods and work on the tricky part of dialing in the shape. I'm also entertaining the idea of an extra backing plate around the iron heart area for more depth. I'll sleep on it!

[Karson Wren]

Looks great Arco!

I'm going to be making my chestpieces today, so this was pretty helpful.

[Aster Veris]

Chest piece build looks awesome! Can't wait to see the final product. Are you using 6mm or 3mm sintra?
Glad you got the okay for the shore trooper shoulder, that's going to look great with your kit colors!

[ValinKrai]

What am I gonna yell at you to do once you've got the chest plate done?!  Good going!

[Drace Olen]

Just stumbled upon this build thread and it's VERY impressive!  Awesome work and keep it up! 

[Arco'thyel Wyshla]

Looks great Arco!

I'm going to be making my chestpieces today, so this was pretty helpful.

Ooh nice, I'll have to keep an eye on your WIP!

Chest piece build looks awesome! Can't wait to see the final product. Are you using 6mm or 3mm sintra?
Glad you got the okay for the shore trooper shoulder, that's going to look great with your kit colors!

Thanks! The chest, shoulder, and thighs are 3mm, but the backplate and the kidney plate will be 6mm for durability.

What am I gonna yell at you to do once you've got the chest plate done?!  Good going!

Sword and knives, of course.

Just stumbled upon this build thread and it's VERY impressive!  Awesome work and keep it up! 

Thanks so much! Oh man, you just reminded me, I should update the first post now that a lot of my build has changed. Later, later!




Alright, time for more chestplate work! I threw this together for reference, figured I'd share:



I did the second round of shaping today, and patterned out the iron heart. It's coming together, but still has lots of work to be done with shaping and gluing.





I'm not sure if I'm a fan of the way the indented area looks right now -- it looks a little too "sintra-y" to me. I've been thinking of doubling up the front plate to make the indents twice as deep, or alternatively, beveling the edge. Any thoughts?

[kayelbe]

Definitely round over the edges.  I wouldn't double it up with more sintra.

[trashcanmando]

My vote is to bevel the edges too.

This looks awesome, happy to have stumbled on this WIP!

[Arco'thyel Wyshla]

Ok! Thank you both for your input, I'll go with the beveling option.

Productive last few days!

I did a scary thing: I deformed the damaged areas of my chest plate. The first thing to do is to look at references to see how they do it in the show.

The gauntlet looks like it keeps its shape:



But the chest plate does have some deformity to it:



It looks like Din hammered it inwards when he did field repairs, so I opted to do something similar instead of doing crazy wrinkles or having the damage pointing outward.



I know the plate will look better deformed than having it perfectly flat, but it still hurt to add that wavy texture I've otherwise been fighting so hard to avoid!

I've also added two layers of freeform air: one on the inside to keep it together, another on the outside to cover the seams. I'm concerned about durability with such a wide plate, so I'll be fiberglassing the inside, too.

In addition, I've been working on the iron heart. First, I tried making it out of sintra. I wasn't thrilled with how poorly the hand sanding was doing as far as beveling goes, so I decided to model it.



Turned out nice! I also like how I get to put a greeblie in it. I noticed that on a covert mando and it's been in the back of my mind since:



Overall, the plates are really coming along!

[trashcanmando]

That's looking awesome! Love the combination of sintra building and a but of 3D printing when needed.

[Karson Wren]

I love how you're able to take all of these pieves and make them different enough to be unique, but still look traditionally mandalorian.

[Arco'thyel Wyshla]

Thanks, guys!

Lots of great progress on all fronts! I'll have to take some time to do writeups on all my plates. For now, I figured I'd catch everyone up on how my chest plate is doing.

Picking back up where we left off, the next step was to work on the left and right sides of the chest plate and glue their darts down. The first step is to do a round of heat forming to bring all the edges together. I then held the edges together with duct tape on the outside of the plate, then cut out small tabs of sintra, and used them to glue the inside edges of the chest plate together. Next was to cover the inside seams with freeform air.



After the inside was cured, I removed the duct tape and added more freeform air on the outside to cover the seams.





I still wasn't comfortable with the strength of it, so I added a thin layer of fiberglass. I wanted to be able to still heat form the plate, so I went very light on the fiberglass.



I started beveling the inner edges around the iron heart.



This actually isn't a final pic of the bevel I went with -- that's the initial bevel made with sandpaper. I eventually used a flat needle file to give it a sharper angle. It took a surprisingly long time! It was about four days to get a sharp angle on the bevel and ensure that the left and right sides of the plate were as even as possible.

I got the iron heart resin printed. It made me really want glass candy...







The most stressful part of the chest plate is the gluing process. First, I wanted to see if two glued 3mm sintra pieces can be heat formed if necessary. So, I glued some scrap together with E6000, and turns out it does!





I still really procrastinated gluing the chest plate together since it was so high stakes. A clanmate kept pushing me to get it glued, but I reeeeally didn't want to take that step. I'd spent four days painstakingly sanding the iron heart area to make it as symmetrical as I could -- knowing that any little discrepancy would harm the focal point of the most important plate -- and I was terrified of messing up all that work.





Well, I was right. It takes four days of sanding to get symmetry, and five minutes of gluing to permanently ruin it.





It's really bad... a full millimeter off kilter. It was easy enough to sand the upper and lower halves of the plate to a straight line... but the devastating part is the iron heart. It took several days to even it out and shape the bevel BEFORE it was glued to the base. If I try to sand it now, it's going to be much, much harder...

I cut away the glue from the seams. This is much harder than I thought it would be; avoid letting any excess glue cure if you can.



Then I added filler primer to assess the damage. Yeah... when the iron heart is there, the skew is noticeable. It'll be even worse when it's painted metallic with accents that highlight the inset areas.



I want to remove 1mm from the top left and bottom right lines to even this out. However, given how hard it was to bevel these edges BEFORE I glued it down, I'm afraid that there is a high chance of damaging the plate and making it look even worse.

Another bad issue is this visible seam line. I did a final heat form to shape the plate to me, and as I feared, the 6mm section did not heat form evenly with the 3mm section, causing these vertical lines.



I'm not sure what to do about that, either. Sand it down? Try to heat form it flat and risk losing the form-fitting shape and risk warping the plate? It'll be really noticeable since my final paint is metallic silver, so I should probably do something about this before going forward.

In better news, here's an issue that's more solvable: the seams are still visible. I've started rounds of filler primer and Bondo spotting putty on those.



Last pic I took today. Go cure alone on the chewy box and rethink your life



The past few days on the chest plate have been pretty demotivating, so I'm going to spend the next couple days on something else -- probably the gauntlets or helmet.

[trashcanmando]

I still think you're making awesome progress! Your attention to detail is amazing and I'm confident you'll be able to fix it after putting it aside for a bit. I don't think I would have noticed if you didn't point out that it was slightly off.

[Vercopaanir]

How's this coming along?

[Arco'thyel Wyshla]

Thanks for checking in!

After some thought and discussions with my clan, I decided to not mess with the misaligned iron heart area. It would take a lot of time I don't necessarily have for my deadline, and I would be likely to damage something in the process. The 1mm skew is subtle enough that most people won't consciously notice. I also have a mythosaur necklace and a bag that can break up the lines there.

The other difficult issue was the heat form lines. I gently heated them a bit flatter, which helped, but the more I messed with it, the more I messed with the fit. I took extra care to even out the unweathered left side of the plate so it looked cleaner, but ultimately, the fit is more important. The heat form lines are very subtle now, at least with the filler primer finish. If they're noticeable in metallic, I think some blackwash or rust can break up the lines.

I also took the opportunity to add more targeted deformity around the damaged area -- specifically, indents where the claws dug in. Looks nice!



I was going to say this is ready for black and silver paints now, but I just remembered there was a hidden spot I wanted to heat form a smidgen more. That's gonna keep me up all night!




So! We have a con on March 17th and I want to work the table and photo ops. Therefore, I need to be at least preapp ready so as not to bring dishonor upon my clan. My goal is to be preapp ready by March 4th so I can have time to work on miscellaneous details! Here's where I'm at:

• The helmet is resined and halfway sanded. It should be ready for primer by the end of the week.
• The chestplate is ready for black and silver layers.
• The gauntlet accessories are ready for silver layers and to be glued.
• The shoretrooper plates (shoulder and shin) are fully painted, ready for weathering and attachment.
• All other plates are ready for accent paint, weathering, and attachment.
• I need to get back on the forums and do some WIP writeups so the preapp team has something to look at!

Barring any major setbacks, this should be doable. Oya!

[trashcanmando]

Oya! Excited to see this come together!

[Second Son]

Yustapir cheering section is behind you. You got this.

[Vercopaanir]

Oh yeah!  Deadlines!  Get'er done