MrPoopie

Congratulations. We're very happy to have you. I know Bill must be pretty excited too.

I forgot to mention a couple things. If you've never made armor or have never printed large 3D parts and assembled armor I would suggest going the ABS kit route. making armor even from a kit can be daunting enough without having to figure out the 3D printing aspect. It will also help you understand how armor goes together better. 3D printing is a pretty big undertaking unless you have experience with it already. If however you like a challenge and enjoy making all your own parts then it's definitely something to look into. It can be very rewarding but it also takes a great deal of time and patience.

I've printed both (ABS and PLA) and made ABS armor. Here's what I've learned making armors and printing. ABS - Easy to work with and most kits come in this form. It can just be cut with normal lexan scissors and cleaned up fairly easily with minimal sanding on the cut edges. The downfalls are that the lines will never be as sharp or precise as something that's 3D printed since they're pulling ABS from a mold in a vacuum it will inevitably have softer, less defined edges. This doesn't mean it can't look good though. PLA (3D print) - fairly cheap to print with and very easy to work with on the 3D printer itself. Finish work is where this takes more time. PLA is notoriously difficult to sand completely smooth and takes a lot of work to get it to the point where you don't see print lines. You also need to make sure that most parts are at least 2-3mm thick for strength. You can however make parts stronger if you coat the insides (and outside if desired) in resin. The resin will fill most of the small cracks and print lines and leave you with a smooth paintable surface. You can also use several layers of primer filler to fill small imperfections but it will never fill as much as resin. And small pits or cuts can be filled with bondo or other filler material. If you resin the outside of your parts though you will lose a little bit of definition. 3D parts can look incredibly defined and sharp if done properly. Most of the time you'll want to print armor parts at 0.1-0.2mm layers with a 0.2-0.4 nozzle. Print time will be pretty long but you'll get a very smooth surface to start with before finish work. One downfall to PLA is if it doesn't have a protective resin or other surface covering layer is that it's susceptible to shrinking and warping in direct sunlight. The glass point of PLA is much lower that ABS and other plastics so it warps sooner, especially with darker PLA colors. ABS (3D print) - Roughly the same cost as PLA. ABS can be more of a pain to work with when 3D print as bed adhesion is more of a problem and higher printing temps can cause issues with some printers. Once it's completed though ABS is very easy to sand and finish to get smooth. You'll still want roughly the same thickness as PLA when printing armor, just for the sake of strength and resilience. You shouldn't need to coat anything in resin though unless you really want a super smooth surface. Just make sure the resins you use won't melt ABS. However ABS can be smoothed with a vapor bath but this takes little bit of knowhow. Follow the same basic layer height and nozzle size as PLA. Nylon (3D print) - If you're feeling up to it you can always print with Nylon or other specialty filaments such as Carbon Fiber infused nylon or flexible filaments such as TPU. Just a word of warning though, these filaments are very difficult to work with and take extra knowledge but can yield amazing results. As for finish work you can use normal spray paint with any 3D filaments just make sure you take your time and prime and sand between painting layers for best results. You can also take your parts to an auto body painting shop and have a professional take care of it for even better results. Here are a few parts I've recently finished painting after much finish work. These were printed in PLA, resin coated backsides and plenty of primer filler and multiple layers of paint and sanding. There are some small imperfections but I'm pretty happy with the results anyway.

Awesome. Thanks for this. I'm going to take a closer look and see what I can start.

Thanks boss.

Anyone going to Celebration, can you keep an eye open for any Mountain Trooper images, toys, etc. Any new pictures or info would be a great help to get this thing moving.

Looking forward to another year. Let's keep the ball rolling, it's got some steam built up already.

Welcome to the awesome club.

Agreed. I think the Tanker was the closest looking to the Scout it just had the wrong helmet. I dig this a lot.

Slightly better box art. It looks like the right side pouch is several pouches (like the shore).

The insides of the wrists look like FO TK, but the outside looks shore-like with aribbing instead of squares.The pouch might be attached to the belt above the thigh plates. Thos looks like modified shore biceps though with modified FO TK shoulders. Love that Scout snout.

What parts are different from the shore that I can start 3D modeling? Let's get out of the gate quickly.

It's is still happening actually. It just got sidelined while I build a 74z Speeder Bike for our local Garrison (Southern California). The bike is nearing completion in the next month or so and then I can finally get back to work on this. I'll post an update soon.

I decided to create a CRL checklist which should make it easier to track your progress when building a Scout or Lancer Scout. The spreadsheet also calculates your completion percentages for both Basic and Lancer. This was originally created for our local ART (Scout Team Six) but I figured that I would share it in case anyone wanted to take a look and use it for themselves. * Just remember to always reference the official CRL as the listings here are shortened to be readable within a spreadsheet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Yz5xkv-7bi9dtaeqC0fwqPtAy1m5ZUeCTEugP2rU2O8/edit?usp=sharing

That should bell looks slick. Nice work.

I'm very jealous, sounds like a very nice printer. I'm quite happy with my Prusa i3 MK2.5S print quality but it can be a bit noisy at times.

This is fun but it doesn't come with the terribly annoying 3D printer sounds buzzing behind my head while I work all day. I guess I'll have to supply my own soundtrack.

It's super easy and takes less than 10 minutes to do both shoulders.

Manning your printer seems like a full time job right now. It's coming along nicely and quickly.

Thanks. You're not going to get docked for using the original ones they're just not the same as screen-used. There's a bit of room for approval when it comes to fine detail. Nobody but us ever sees this stuff either even though we take huge amounts of time and energy to get everything as perfect as possible. Which ever T-bits you decide to use will be great.

I adjusted my T-Bits for future printing so they more reflect the screen-used ones. I'm always open to adjusting to make things as screen-accurate as possible. Thanks for the photo. Do these look more like the ones in the photo now.

I like this friendly competition between you both. The more Scouts the better.

As long as it looks similar to screen used armor and has a smooth white finish (paint) it'll be approvable. Armor has been made with ABS, fiberglass and resin, and many of our ShoreTroopers have 3D printed parts. You guys are just the "Tip of the Lance" for something new for Scouts. Just keep plugging away and I very confident all will be well.

So it'll be all my fault when it goes terribly wrong. I can except that.

What are you using for filler, Bondo? How's that Carbon Fiber PETG? I've only every used Carbon Fiber Nylon and while it's a little tricky to print with it pretty amazing once it's done. Not totally stiff but incredibly strong. It's also really expensive at about $75 for a 0.5kg spool.