zediyeti Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 Howdy! Just dropping by to start a thread to document upgrades and repairs I have made on my kit since being approved. There are a lot of small things I didn't document, which were mostly quality of life type stuff. Lots of velcro added to keep things in place, and touching up to fix damage from 1. Shoulders trimmed to be more narrow, and further rounded the corners. They were colliding with the front and back armor, and I didn't like how it looked. I don't think it was accurate to the source 2. Drilled out the rivet from the tank topper and replaced it to be shorter. Original rivet here Drilled out bits (it was a FIGHT) New topper! 3. Made new flight suit pants. The fabric on both of these is twill, but I switched from Joann's sportswear cotton twill to Eddie Bauer cotton twill. The quality difference is insane, as you can likely see. They feel much more like the coverall material now, and I am very happy Luckily I had enough extra suede to redo the patches. I ripped the old ones off to use as a basic pattern because I lost my paper pattern for it. switched from an elastic waistband to a zip/button 4. Switched the helmet visor from the acrylic that came with it to a hobart shield. It is so much darker! 5. My mother found some elastic at a garage sale that she thought might be useful to me. Imagine my delight to discover it is the vintage woven style of white 3/4" elastic, and not the modern stuff that has the vertical lines running down it! Here is the difference in the two (garage sale on left, original store bought on right). It was a small change, but makes me happy. 6. I was gifted the accurate bolts for my birthday from my friends. I had to modify them to work with the resin helmet, but this was the deciding factor for me that I would finally try for lancer 7. I took an several rounds of lancer photos to get to one I was happy with, only to reference it against the CRLs and realize my helmet had the wrong number of indents on the back. I don't know how I never noticed! When I was originally building this costume, I checked off a paper list the level 2 certifications I was able to make and had checked that one off. Whoops. As you can see, it has 9 indents where the CRLs say 7-8. I decided to fill in the innermost one with plasticweld, based off reference photos that seemed the one that needed to go. As it is here it aligned with the middle point between the trapezoids, and other helmets I see do not have the indents going all the way to the middle. PlasticWeld filled Dremelled and sanded smooth Badly applied filler primer to even out the surface (can was almost empty... most of it got sanded off anyway) Freshly applied white paint And now the helmet all cleaned up and re-sealed. Only 8 indents! 8. I added a new and more comfortable liner to the helmet, vs the upholstery foam padding I was using before. The helmet now sits higher up on my head and does not interfere with hitting my chest armor, and is much more comfortable! More updates to come, particularly regarding my weapon and any changes that are given back to me on my lancer app soon to be submitted! (edit: submitted 2.28.24) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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