Star Wars Clone armor help

Hi all,

I’m looking for any 501st or other costume makers
I am trying to get a 501st approved clone trooper and I am looking for advice/assistance in making an ABS molded plate that looks like the gray piece in the attached picture. It needs to stack on top of the white piece. I don’t have any experience molding/sculpting, and this will be the only piece I have to make myself. Everything else I already have sourced from the Clone Detachment Forums. I can get the white chest piece to use as the base to form the outer gray piece.

Some previous discussions suggested maybe using the CNC router, using clay, and using some rigid light foam from Smooth-on to make a mold. The end goal is to have a buck to form the gray chest piece in a vacuum forming machine out of ABS.

Please let me know if you or someone you know might be able to help.

Ben

If you could find the 3D model or scan it, you could actually 3D print the whole thing in sections and glue together then fill gaps and paint.

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We had an active group that used to come in to build armor - have they dropped off a bit? @maxk68?

I can get the white piece to scan, but not the gray piece. I was in the same line of thinking Mitch as you suggested. Since the gray piece has to fit over the white piece I could 3d scan it and then modify the scanned file to resemble the gray piece. The other thing I was considering was making a mold of the white piece with some clay on top of it to resemble the finished gray piece, then recasting that in something like hydrocal or something hard and heat resilient to use as a buck to vacuum form a new piece. I just don’t know what would be the easiest to do.

Could you vacuform it?

Do you have access to a vacuformer? Ours has been moved to offsite storage and I do not know whether we even have it now.

That’s the end goal, but vacuum forming over the white piece wouldn’t get me the right shape I need without making some modifications. Also, due to the heat I would like to know if the preformed piece would be damaged before trying to use it to form over?

I know someone who knows someone that is building one. I was told as of 6/25/16 that there have been 2 vacuum forming machines at Makerspace, and both have been sold off due to near zero use.