Another Tie Pilot Costume

[TIE1138]

And now the Chest Armour. I took the fibreglass Stormtrooper Front Plate Blaxmyth gave me, and started filling and sanding it so that I had a nice smooth finish. I then knew that I would need to add an apron of plastic onto the bottom of it to get it to look right. This I cut out of sheet styrene. I then test fitted it to the armour to make sure that it was all even and then glued it with SS Epoxy and screwed and clamped it as well to hold everything in place while the glue dried.

[TIE1138]

After the glue had dried, I took the screws out and commenced filling in the holes and flaring the plastic 'skirt' to the main armor.Once this was done, I then sanded, primed, sanded, you know the drill, until I was happy with the finish. This took quite a bit of time, but it was definitely worth it in the end. Especially the helmet, as that took most of the preparation time for the whole build.
Next step was to determine where the mounting plate? for the Chest Box would go. I measured it's position and marked it with a pencil. After drawing the lines, I then got a hacksaw blade which I wrapped masking tape round one end to form a handle, and proceeded to cut out the panel.
When this was done I wade up a template for the angled sides and then cut these out of 6mm Thinline. I thyen glued these to gether on the Chest Plate with SS Epoxy and braced it all until dry.

[TIE1138]

The pencil line you see in the above picture is where I ended up cutting the sides so that from a side-on view, it looked a little more vertical.

[oota goota]

awesome build Nick looking really good!

[TIE1138]

As you can see in this photo the angle looks a lot better.

[TIE1138]

Because the shoulder tabs were a bit narrow, I widened them with pieces of styrene which were epoxy glued in place, and then filled and sanded.

[TIE1138]

So, here it is with the plate modified and I have marked around the neck area to bring it down a bit more so it doesn't cut off my air supply.

[badges2nz]

That is an amazing amount of work that you have put into that, nice job.

[TIE1138]

So, now it was priming, sanding, filling, priming, sanding, filling, you know the drill, until I was happy with the surface, and then applied two coats of Gloss black.

[TIE1138]

I next got to work on the shoulder straps. After cutting out the corrugated straps that oota goota supplied ( thank you again) I marked their position on the shoulder tabs (with the help of Blaxmyth) and then cut out the rectangular washers? from thick black styrene. Then I glued these to the straps and drilled holes through them and the plate straps and then bolted them all together. the screw caps I used are very similar to those on the original armor, and I purchased these from Bunnings. They are Holdfast White caps( our branch didn't have black) and I painted them and they do look the part. The buckles used on the elastic straps, were made from weedmat staples that were cut to length, bent in the vice with the help of the tools you see in one of the pictures, and then I sewed the elastic strap to them. You will also notice in the last pic, that I didn't fasten the shoulder straps to the back plate. This is because when wearing, there would be a lot of stress amd movement at this point as you turn your body or move your shoulders in any way. So the alternative was to mount everything together on the straps and I glued a piece of heavy sponge rubber underneath so the nuts wouldn't mark the paint. Apparently it worked out really well.