Bass

I was going to drop on the stuff to wire my bucket... but now i'm thinking I might hold off and see where this goes. I like it.

According to the exhibit everything on display was screen used.

If you look closely in that picture you'll see item 23 was the stormtrooper blaster, you can see the grip of the e-11 in the same picture with a little 23 marker, which should give you idea of where it should have been in the case with those three. It was wedged in the front far right, and it was pretty prominent so I imagine it probably wasn't there when you went through as it would have been tough to miss otherwise. Glad I did some small bit of service, though! I just wish a few weren't so blurry, but I was pretty certain any minute a monitor was going to walk around the corner and bust me for being on the glass case, haha.

I dunno if anyone has any use for my poorly lit unskilled photos, but I went to the Times Square exhibit and ignored the "Do not touch the glass" rule(though i did respect the no flash, for preservation's sake) to get some pics of the weapons a little while back before TFA came out, and of all the costumes they didn't have the Scout armor, which was weird-ish. They had one scout helmet in an ewok exhibit but it was wedged in a cornerand barely visible. :/ I took pictures of pretty much everything if there's anything specific someone's looking for... I might have it. I also have a goodish set of pics of the electrobinoculars. Since this is the weapons forum, though, i'm just going to post what I have blaster wise and hope it can help somebody out, maybe.

I'm pretty much the same way. Most of the time the advice everyone gives is really solid, but the thought of taking the plunge is a tough hurdle to jump for me.

...and I took pictures! I noticed that everyone offers really good advice on the 'how to' on panting the snout but I didn't skim up many progress pictures regarding it. So I figured why not take a shot at it myself, personally i don't feel it turned out too bad. I'll admit, my method is probably not the sleekest, I know a lot of people suggest pin striping vinyl, which honestly seems to be the best way to go, but I'm cheap and I didn't have any on hand already. What I did have was a bunch of 1" painters tape, a stencil for round things, a hobby cutting board, and a hobby knife. So here we have two pieces of tape side by side, I felt that was just about wide enough to get the thickness I needed. The measuring grid on the hobby board made aligning the tape a snap. It doesn't have to be 100% perfect as I was going to cut out the center anyways, I just needed it tight at the top. Next, I needed to get the rounded top, 1 3/4" Worked the best, I tried a bit smaller at first and it just didn't fit right. This size is actually a bit bigger than I needed, but I'll get to that. I made sure to line up the center guide of the circle to the area between the two pieces of tape for symmetry, I also made sure to leave space at the top of the tape. So here we have the guide lines traced out. The center bit will be discarded, I'm looking a the outer portion of the stencil to be what I use. So I cut out the center bit from the picture above and was left with this. The top portions of both pieces of tape overlap a little bit to make sure I was able to get the desired shape. The thin portions of tape were pliant enough that I was able to manipulate them to where I wanted without creasing. The very bottom kind of looks like it's curved in, but I assure you they are straight down. Also I made certain that the lines were only covering roughly half of the humps. In my initial attempt at this I used thicker cuts of tape and it simply didn't want to cooperate. I'd also like to note to make sure that tape is pressed down. Run your finger over it firmly several times to help prevent paint bleed. So then I taped the sucker up and got it ready to spray the snout. Sadly there was a hole somewhere so I wound up with a black dot on a cheek, but that's what goo gone is for. So then I sprayed it with some satin black spray I had(outside, not on the couch.) Unfortunately I got all gung ho and completely forgot to put some tape in the center where I need to glue the greeblie. Those scratches are from me trying to pull a piece of hair off the snout with tweezers. Figured the center area was a non issue. I'll strip the paint off the center anyways when i'm ready to mount the greeblie. I used the blade of my hobby knife to fleck off the little stray bumps outside the main line and clean it up a bit after taking this photo. Still, at arm's length it looks nice enough for me to be satisfied with it. I might bust out the acrylics and my detail brushes and run a line over the outside to smooth it up, times like this it pays to have an interest in painting miniatures. So there it is. Perfect? By no means, but hopefully for those visual learners out there like me this might prove a helpful starting point.

Alright, so shortly after I did those cuts I got knocked down with some disease I can only assume was the black plague, during the tail end of it I decided to make some more cuts... then I wound up going to mexico for a bit on vacation, and now i'm finally home. So the image above is what I wound up with after getting a bit more off. I honestly feel I should have gently curved the top more now that I'm looking at it next the screen capture. I think I'm going to revisit it tomorrow and give it a really hard looking at and see if I can maybe do some kind of damage control without compromising the face. Edit -- Alternatively I could take what Nexous said about 'variations' to heart and just not over-cut on my lens hole

Pandatrooper's SC build has some really good visuals around page 3 for the belt. He also goes in depth on some clever ways to reinforce the belt.

Haha, yeah, I can only imagine the stencil on there is smaller on purpose to give room for error when cutting it out. It would certainly suck to have a blade slip and take a chunk out of an expensive helmet piece.

I'll probably just go with trimming the top of the lens area then and not worry about grinding out the bottom bits. Thanks for the input!

I didn't even think about timing on painting, if you hadn't mentioned it I bet I would have waited. Good call!

Hello! Started work on my helmet today and took the plunge to do my cuts, I think they look mostly about right... I'd like some input from you folks before I widen anything else. I mostly used the guide stencil for the lens but the shape looked off, so I've penciled in where I think I need to widen the hole. Also curious if I should flare out the ear holes a bit?