Building: Day 2

Since it was the middle of February and rather cold, we went to my friend's parents' place to work on the costume. They have a fire in the garage so we didn't freeze to death.

First we cut out the hole for detail piece in the back plate. Then we did some test fitting of the rear body section. Finally we got stuck into the legs. We are going for teh "seamless" look which means hiding the join lines between the parts. This is done by gluing everything together then filling the gaps up and then painting over them so they cannot be seen. It also requires some rather special tricks on some pieces, most notably the calves which get a spoon assembly. The rear of the calf is made from two identical pieces which are hacked to pieces. Once completed they will fit together in such a way that the join should not be visible.

It's not as hard as I imagined it would be but it does require some planning and also a lot of waiting while glue dries. The stuff we are using is super strong but it takes at least 24 hours to dry so we have to set vices on everything to hold it all together.

Building day 1:

I started off by laying all the pieces out on the floor to work out what was what. Then I took some of the pieces that I thought would be easier to work with and began to trim. Since this kit is made as a one-size-fits-all, there is a lot of work removing excess plastic and shaping the parts to fit my body. Luckily I'm a fairly average build so there shouldn't be many major problems along the way.

First to feel the wrath of my Dremel was the chest plate, then the back plate, the butt and the codpiece. Each was was marked with a pencil line that I intended to trim down to, then roughly trimmed using the cutting wheel before I finally used the sanding wheel to trim down to the line. After that I used some fine sand paper to smooth out the edges a bit.

Stage 1: The parts

Before making this kit I had put together a Biker Scout and a Darth Maul costume. The Biker was really easy, just a few pieces of velcro and one or two rivets to get the plastic parts together and then a lot of sewing for my wife who made the flightsuit for me.

Maul was the same, lots of sewing and experimenting with makeup but not too much plastic to worry about.

The clone is clearly going to be a whole new ball game...

First entry...

Hi everyone,

Those of you who know me already know that I'm a Star Wars fanatic and have been since A New Hope was released when I was 4. For the past 3 years I've been a member of the 501st Legion, a group of fans who dress up as the Star Wars baddies and help raises lots of money for children's charities.

My first costume was a Biker Scout from Return of the Jedi but I sold it at the end of 2008 to fund my latest project, a clonetrooper from the newer films. This project has gone through several phases, first I would do a plain white clone, then I was going to do a 41st Elite clone with a cool radio pack but now I have decided that I'm going to go for an airborne clone.

There were two reasons for this. First of all, these guys are really cool with lots of extra bits and pieces all over their armour. Also, there are a group of about 5 of us making clone costumes and we are trying to make sure we match together well. One is doing Commander Cody so we decided the rest of us should do troops that fall under his command.

A friend and I are working on my costume first and then we'll do his.I'll be using this blog to track the progress of my work. I've already done lots of stuff so I'll add all the pics soon enough. In the meantime, here's a pic of what the finished article will look like (I hope)...