Finally Coming Together!

The project is finally starting to really look like Boba!  Let's start with the knees.  I added velcro and epoxied some 1/2" #8 screws to the inside of the knee plates:

When the epoxy was dry, I dyed some 1" elastic straps to match the flight suit, and applied grommets:

My wife sewed velcro to the knees of the pants:

And we have finished knees!

I got my vest and neckseal from my mother-in-law, who made the pieces from scratch with no patterns.  She did a hell of a job!  I weathered them with the same method that I used for the flightsuit in the last update.  Here's the neck seal on my very dapper mannequin:

For the chest armor, I epoxied screws just like I did with the knees. When they dried, I added a little graphite dust to the tips of the screws and then pressed them into the vest while it was on the dummy.  I used the center-line of the vest (based on the distance between shoulder seems) as my guide.  The graphite powder left a mark for each screw, and then I added grommets:

Here are all the finished pieces on my dummy!  It's finally starting to look like Boba!

 More to come...

~N

Chest & Neck Finished!

After the yellow layer, the next step is to do a layer of Rustoleum Spruce Green (misted with black) on the left side of the abdominal plate.  The butt of Boba's blaster has rubbed against this area in the movie armor, and scratched it down to a lighter green.  No other plate has this treatment, so I only had to do this for one piece...

Once that was done, I added the "scratches" to all the pieces with liquid mask, and sprayed everything with the top coat of green (Rustoleum Hunt Club Green, misted with black. This is a darker green than what was used on the helmet, per movie photos.)

Once that dried, I picked off the liquid mask, and added the vinyl decal to the upper right plate.  Then one more misting of black, and some scracthes with a screwdriver and some gravel.

Here is the final right chest plate.

And the final left chest plate. Note that the display holes here will have a piece of the same material I use for the visor on the helmet.  So it will look gloss black.  That' will be taken care of before I attach the armor to the vest.

Here is the final abdominal plate. Now you can see the light green scratching from the stock of Boba's blaster...

The final neck plate...

And the whole set assembled together with the small center piece... I made this photo extra big so you can see more detail.

The vest that these attach to hasn't been made for me yet, so in the mean time, I'm moving on to the back plate and the knee plates.

More soon!

~N

Chest & Neck Part 1

Here we go again.  I've started the chest plates and the neck plate.  First up, I gathered my reference photos, and printed everything out for my workshop.

The pieces were already primed (love that,) so I sprayed a layer of Rustoleum Aluminum over everything.

After they dried, I scuffed them up with 0000 steel wool so that the next layer of paint would stick better.  Metallic paint tends to be pretty slick, and I don't want the other layers to peel off.

The next layer is the yellow layer that shows through around the damaged areas.  So I used liquid mask to cover up the litle bits of silver that will need to show through later, and then I sprayed all the pieces with Rustoleum Line Painting Yellow.  Once that dried, I peeled off the liquid mask, and we're left with this:

Starting to come together!  The next and last layer will be the green.  Then I'll apply the decal in the upper left.  After that I can do the fun work of adding all the scratches and bumps.  Unfortunately, it's going to be rainy and humid here for the next couple of days, so I can't get to that just yet.

More soon!

~N