Making Rank

The official detachment for Stormtroopers, FISD, has programs for members to increase the accuracy of their suits, to make them as screen accurate as possible.

There are certain criteria each and every suit have to fulfill in order to be approved, but there are additional criteria to be met in order to recieve the rank of Expert Infantry, a higher degree of accuracy. Then there is the rank of Centurion, denoting highest degree of accuracy.

Here is a list of the requirements necessary for each rank.

I built my suit to be in compliance with Centurion standard from the beginning.
So as soon as I was an approved member I sent in my application for Expert Infantry, got approved, then sent in my application for Centurion, all in one single evening, becoming the nineteenth Centurion in the Legion, the third one in the Nordic Garrison and the first one in Norway. As a comparison, there are currently 2341 approved Stormtroopers world wide.

Very happy!

Approved! TK-3664 reporting for duty.

A week after the application was sent I recieved a very happy mail telling me that I now was a member of the 501st Legion:

Hello Imperial Citizen!

Due to the work you have done for the Empire, along with your correspondence of your Garrison Membership Liaison (GML)  and the Legion Membership Officer, your application to join the 501st has been approved!

Your new TKID is: 3664

My profile over at 501st.com

Build finished - Application sent

Late october, I was finally finished with my build and ready to send an application to the local Garrison Membership Liaison. I had to send full figure pictures from the front, back, both sides and without helmet.

Then the waiting begun...

Everything but armor

There are lots of other pieces that goes into a Stromtrooper suit except the white ABS, all of which I ordered and tried to recieve before and during the build, here comes a small list:

Shoes. White chelseaboots without any visible seams:

Black lycra undersuit:

A neckseal:

A holster for the blaster:

Rubber chemicalgloves with white rubber or latex handguards:

Not essential, but it makes wearing the helmet a lot more comfortable, MICH pads:

I also recieved a great canvas belt from Troopermaster that I affixed the holster and ABS belt to.

Other things that aren't essential but makes trooping a lot more fun and comfortable are: installing fans in the helmet to increase airflow (it gets hot in there) and prevent the lens from fogging up, and getting a soundsystem with static bursts, so you sound like a Stormtrooper when you talk.

All those are acquired and will be installed!

Bits and pieces

Here comes a few snaps of the general assembly process. You have to keep in mind that all this took close to three months of building on and off in evenings between work and school.

Cutting cover strips to go over the seams on the arms and legs:

Glueing coverstrip to shin:

Trimming the forearm:

Glueing the thermaldetonator that goes on the belt:

Elastic glued to the inside og the shoulderbells:

Preparing snap-plates:

Installing snaps on small plates to be glued on the inside of the armor:

Glueing snap-plates to the butt-piece:

Found a cheap mannequin to put the suit on!

A little something to keep the spirits up:

 A preliminary test:

 Strapping the torso together using elastics and snaps:

Fitting ammo belt to right thigh:

Recieving The Armor!

One happy day in July I recieved a big brown box, containing all the plastic parts for my Stormtrooper armor, expertly crafted by Troopermaster in 2mm acrylic capped ABS. Super shiny and sweet.
I was anxious to say the least, I had quite a build ahead of me!
Thankfully Troopermaster is one of the most knowledgeful people concerning Stormtroopers and original Star Wars props, and he was only a message away if there was a detail that needed clarification.

The kit laid out:

I sadly did not take many pictures during the build, but I will post a few of those I have to give you the jist of it.
The build was long and sometimes tedious, using E6000 industrial glue with a cure-time of 24-72 hours to glue parts together, holding them in place with clamps and strong neodymiun magnets while the glue cured.
Trimming and cutting parts to fit.
First out was the helmet, which I decided to start with and finish before the rest to give me something to look at and inspire me to finish the rest of the build.
Again TK-8505 helped me out at his workshop, to drill the initial four holes to attach the faceplate to the cap'n'back of the helmet, after finding the best possible alignment of the two (which can be a bit tricky and also a big personal preference). I'm really happy with the way it came out.
All details are hand painted, as the original helmets were. The tubestripes were painted by fellow legionmember and friend TD-6237, which also works as a cartoonist, drawing the great cartoon M.

Blastech E-11

The standard sidearm for the Stormtrooper is a Blastech E-11.
In the original film A New Hope the prop department made the E-11 using the Sterling sub-machinegun as a base and attaching a lot of "greeblies" (a word apparently coined by the production team meaning bits and pieces glued on other stuff), making it look like something out of another universe.

An original Sterling before anything was added:

I recieved my blaster as a kit with all the pieces molded in resin from an actual blaster, something that made me have to assemble it myself and paint it afterwards, but having it look extremely accurate once finished.

Considering blasters (and all things proprelated) people have the opportunity to make them as screen-accurate as they want, for example in the one hand we have people buying toy blasters that are similar to the screen-used ones, but lack much of the detail and require a lot of modification to be accepted as a sidearm in the 501st Legion, On the other hand though, we have individuals opting to track down real Sterling machine guns that have been demilled (can't be fired) and affixing them with the real parts that the prop team did, using miscellaneous military parts, as a M38 scope used on a tank, a Hengstler counter and other parts. Stuff the prop team in 1976 most likely found lots of and cheaply, but nowadays is extremely expensive (most likely because you have dedicated propmakers outbidding eachother and inflating the price of said items).

Good thing there is a great community of propmakers that make resin casts of original parts and sell them to others striving for accuracy, but don't want to ruin themselves in the process!
I started out my build to get a feel for glueing and building stuff again, all the while documenting my build over at FISD.

Here is my kit laid out:

A few weeks of glueing, tinkering, drilling, filing, sanding, tweaking and building an inner bolt 

(note my helmet in progress behind it):

Primed and ready for paint and subsequent weathering, to make it look used:

Voila, it's finished!

I now have a screen-accurate E-11 blaster at a fraction of the cost of a real one, but it has taken some time and couldn't have been done without the help of the FISD, lot's of reference photos (like this awesome blog: Sterlingblasterconversion), and last but not least the opportunity to attend TK-8505s armor workshops with loads of tools and materials.

A Short Introduction

This blog is started to document my path in acquiring a high quality Stormtrooper armor and becoming a member of the world wide organization The 501st Legion.

The blog was started a while ago, but I never got around to writing anything, so these first posts will be backtracking and bringing myself and you the reader up to speed of where I am right now.

About a year ago, I decided I had to have a New Years resolution, (despite never caring much for the concept before...) and the resolution was to realize a childhood dream of becoming a Stormtrooper from the Star Wars movies.

I contacted the local garrison, the Nordic Garrison to inquire where and how one acquires a Stormtrooper armor, and I recieved a warm welcome and was given just enough information from TK-8224, Lisa that I could start researching on my own.

I joined the forum of the First Imperial Stormtrooper Detachment, reading a lot and researching different armor-makers and armor types eventually settling on the Stormtrooper from A New Hope (1977), in my eyes the classic and best looking Stormtrooper.

"But aren't the Stormtroopers in all the movies the same?" you might ask. Nope, there are actually a lot of small details making them differ from movie to movie. And there were also small differences in detail between the Stormtroopers used for close-up shots (Hero) and those in the background (Stunt).
I won't go into the details here, but I can say I opted for the 'Stunt' version, which is the Stormtrooper most people have chosen to acquire themselves.

After about six months of  working two jobs and researching diligently on the forums, I had decided on an armormaker, namely Troopermaster from England, a highly regarded propmaker and justly so, as he makes the most accurate reproduction Stormtrooper armor there is. I got in contact with him and to no surprise he was a busy man, and I had to wait a while for a kit, which wasn't a problem as that would give me time to order and recieve all other things required for a complete Stormtrooper costume.

One of the first things I ordered and recieved was a kit to build the Blastech E-11 Stormtrooper rifle.