Re: Thorssoli's Episode VII Builds (Flametrooper Progress Continues on P12)
How exactly did you form the lens's for the Flametrooper, I saw the 'lens box' photo mentioned in passing how do you use/make it?
I didn't make a lens box for the flametroopers. Instead, I just cooked a strip of tinted acrylic in a toaster oven until it was soft and flexible, then I laid it in place inside the helmet so that it could cool and harden in place. In hindsight, it might have been better to just cover the inside of the eye slit with black mesh fabric. That way I wouldn't have to worry about the acrylic fogging up.
UPDATE (finally)...
I apologize for being absent from the forum for the past six or seven weeks. I had a rushed commission job come up and it ended up sucking the life out of me for the 39 long, grueling days I spent building it. If you were at San Diego Comic Con, you may have seen this sharp-looking guy out and about helping promote the new Schick Hydro razor:
Once that was finished, I came back to find my shop in a bit of disarray:
To the untrained eye, it probably looks like my standard workshop disaster scene, but with the mad rush build just finished, it took me a couple of days to sort out where my helpers had misplaced much of my tools and take stock in all of my materials so I could place some orders and get back into the swing of things.
Then I started fiberglassing things again:
I'd already glassed the first half of the chest mold for the Flametrooper some weeks ago, but it wasn't until a couple of days ago that I finally got around to the bottom half:
So that's done. I still need to mold the shins and the upper arms. That, and get started on the backpack tanks and flamethrower. Soon...
In the meantime, my molds for the TIE Pilot chest boxes decided to fail. That's the bad news. The good news is that it finally gave me a chance to address a few minor inaccuracies I had on my original prototypes. After smoothing out a set of the cast parts, they looked about like so:
Most of the changes are pretty subtle. I decided to make the latch for the middle box as a separate casting. Same goes for the square buttons on the left box. The biggest change was moving the fork on top of the right box so that it would be (correctly) off-center.
Then they were boxed up for molding:
The detail bits were molded separately:
The molds came out much better this time:
The castings came out pretty good:
They should look great once they're painted and assembled:
I'm about to be on the road again for the next week or so, but once I get back I'll be painting up a few sets of TIE pilot parts as well as (finally) finishing up a complete Captain Phasma. Then it's on to the Flametrooper while I try to talk myself out of building a bunch of Rogue One stuff...