Learn every step in the process of making a full size 3D Printed Star Wars Stormtrooper armor suit / costume. You can learn more about the armor that we used by visiting https://www.armormax.com/.
Important Links:
- Free Stormtrooper 3D Printer Files: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2731328
- High Quality Stormtrooper 3D Printer Files: http://bit.ly/2MPMtdN
- Nikko Industries: https://www.nikkoindustries.com/
- Nikko Industries YouTube: http://bit.ly/35mHnvK
- 3D Printed Armor and Weapon Props: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2038943233057281/
Hi there. My name is Nils with the 3d printing zone. And in this video, we’re going to be showing you the build process of how we created the 3d printed Bulletproof Stormtrooper.
So we came up with this idea a while back of, would it be possible to actually 3d print the full stormtrooper armor suit, all the pieces and parts just off of a 3d printer. And we quickly realized that that was a possibility. It would take some time and a lot of assembly and a lot of figuring out, but we could do that. And then we had the thought, could we actually make that Bulletproof you see in the movies, every time a Stormtrooper gets shot, they get blasted typically right in the chest and they’re gone with one shot and that’s it. So we thought, could we actually make a real life Bulletproof Stormtrooper armor suit? So that’s what we set out to do. So what I’ll be focusing largely on in this video is the 3d printing process. The assembly. If you want to make a 3d printed Stormtrooper yourself, the bulletproofing, I’m not going to get into great detail on that.
We actually worked with our friends over at armor max to make that happen. And you can click on the link in the description to below to learn about more of their services and what they do. There are DIY ways to make something Bulletproof. I have not tried that out myself, but I’d love to hear in the comments, if you’ve experimented with that or learn some things about that. Now in the last two to four years, the 3d printers have really come a long way. They’ve gotten less expensive, they’ve become larger in their build volumes. They’ve become more accurate. They’ve become easier to use and they help produce more successful prints more of the time. If you haven’t checked it out. I have another video called 13 things. I wish I knew before I started 3d printing. And I cover a lot of the tips and tricks that I’ve learned along the way.
And so many of those things have gotten better and better and better as time has gone on. The first thing we had to do once we decided to get started was to find 3d printing files that we could use for the Stormtrooper armor. So I did a quick search on Thingiverse, as well as my mini factory and some other sites and look for this armor and to see if it was out there. And sure enough, I was able to find some, it did point out that it was not true to the actual film apparel that was used in the movies themselves, but it was pretty close and somebody had modeled all of this up. So I did not model any of the stuff that you’re seeing on the Stormtrooper here. You can find all of this out there for free, and there are also paid versions, which in most cases are a higher quality.
So they come in, what’s called an STL file and it’s a 3d file that your slicing software can understand. And then you can tell your slicing software how to cut it up for your 3d printers, how to actually make it run layer by layer and coordinate everything and make it actually print the way that you desire it to be printed. So there’s a lot of settings. We won’t get into all of the details, but I do want to cover some of the basics that will help you print this successfully. So if you check out the description below, you’re going to want to see that because there’s all kinds of resources that I will link to or write down in that description for the different files, the websites and different things that we’ll talk about in this video. But one of the things you’ll find in there are links to the pages where the STL for this armor exists.
And most of this came from files off of Thingiverse. So you can check those out. And then I also more recently actually, before we finished everything, I didn’t like a couple of the files. So I went ahead and paid $150 for a set of files that were done a lot more professionally and they’re more screen accurate. Now, one of the reasons I decided to pay for the model files was I was having trouble getting a good fit with the free versions that I found out there on a few parts in particular, number one, the chest plate here, I thought looked a lot better, wraps around better, and just fits better with the paid files that I purchased. Same with the shoulders and same with the gloves, the hands here. So these are all from the paid file, really the rest of it, the helmet and everything else here is from the free files.
So I’ll put a link to both the free and the paid files. You can take a look at both and decide what you think is better for you. Now, one of the big questions I get asked a lot is what kind of printer did you print this on? And the truth is I have several printers and I would do a lot of 3d printing. So I didn’t just do this on one printer. The main printers that I used for doing this are a couple of flash forge printers that I have. So I have the flash forge guide or two S which is a larger printer. It’s fully enclosed. It’s got built in cameras online software to print remotely, all kinds of great features. And so that’s a little bit larger one as far as its volume. So I was able to do a lot of the parts on that.
The other one I used was for a smaller parts, was the flash forwards adventure, all the same features, just a smaller build volume later on. I actually acquired two more printers by alpha wise. So there’s the alpha wise U 20, which you can see here. Now with this printer, it will handle a larger volume. This one does 300 by 300 by 400 millimeters. And that equates to roughly 12 inches by 12 inches by 15 inches. And so you can do a lot of bigger parts with that, but it wasn’t big enough for example, to do the whole helmet all at once. And I had already finished the helmet at that point. Anyway, after the Alphawise U20, I picked up its big brother, the Alphawise U20 plus. And that one actually has a 400 x 400 x 500 print volume. So that can do really large items, including the helmet, all in one piece, which is really convenient.
But if you’ve got a medium sized printer and ranging up even to the larger printers, of course, then you can really print this in multiple pieces and put them together. And I’ll show you a little bit more about some techniques I used for doing that. The helmet that I printed, for example, because I didn’t use a really large printer on this. I printed that in actually 19 different pieces. That’s the way the model comes so that you can assemble each of those. And none of the parts are more than about this big. I mean, you can print those. If you have a printer that can print about that large, then you should be able to print this helmet. This one, you can see there’s some lines on it where as it got shot, it started to come apart a little bit at the joints. And that shows exactly where all the pieces and parts are.
So it’s definitely a multi-part thing. Again, if you have a larger printer, it’s really nice to be able to just print the whole thing at once, but you can do this with nearly any printer. Now, as for the slicer software that you use, that’s really up to you. I used Cura for almost everything that you see behind me here and for this as well. I’ve also toyed around with idea maker as well as simplified 3d. And I’m still learning, simplify 3d, but Cura is really a very competitive software. It’s frequently updated and it’s free of charge. Now, one of the important things I learned while building this was that the angle that you place your model at it makes a big difference as far as what supports you do or do not need. So this is a broken chest plate that I had tried out.
And if you imagine these things are still on there, you can see why they broke off. I’ll show you in just a moment here. But if you imagine it printing like this, you’re going to need supports under here where my fingers are. And so that’s not going to be, it’s going to be a lot of wasted material, essentially. But if you were to rotate this more like, so then you really don’t need supports for angles like that. You’re going to need some down here at these angles right here, and then maybe down here as well. And coming up under here, but then the rest of the material will not need to be supported, which is really nice. So just be very considerate about what angle you choose, what rotation you do. If I were to print this thing like this, for example, the whole inside would need support here.
And that doesn’t help us out very much. Now, as far as settings that I used on this, one of the reasons this plate didn’t work, for example, this chest plate is if you look here, the infill that I use was decent. I’m not sure what exact number that is. Let’s say it’s probably around 20% and that’s not bad. And, but the shells you can actually see right through some of this outside wall because the shells were not enough. The shell is really just how many outside perimeter walls, you print on a model. And on this one, I just didn’t do enough. It looks like it may have had two or three, yeah. Between two and three in there, which just wasn’t enough for keeping this thing strong. There’s some pressure on that. And it needs to be a little bit, a little bit stronger, a little bit tougher.
And this just wasn’t enough. I had similar issues with the original shoulders that I tried out. These are from the free model and on that model, a, the design of it is okay at best, but it’s kind of just a cone. Didn’t really love that design very much. And also the Stripe on the outside is very thin. And then I just didn’t do a good job printing it. You can see that I printed this in a couple of parts. I used white PLA right here, and then I used black for the rest of it. And I glued those together. And that actually didn’t break at the joint. So that wasn’t the issue. It broke just above that because I printed it so thin. I printed these with probably two shells on the outside, which is not enough. And it looks like I only use 10 or 15% infill.
So on any piece, that’s going to require anything hanging off or it off of it, or it hanging off something else I’d recommend doing at least about four shells, if not more. And then your infill maybe crank that up to 30 or more 30% or more. And as far as for the pattern, I don’t find that it matters all that much, at least in my experience. If you know, otherwise and have done some testing on that, we’d love to hear about that in the comments. So the layer height really is up to you. The finer you do it, the less post-processing work you’re going to have to do, but you really have to decide how perfect and mirror smooth. Do you want those outsides or how much does it matter as an example, you probably can’t tell on the camera here. This is a 0.3 millimeter layer height, and there’s nothing on it.
This is just the PLA straight off the printer, no enhancements, no sanding, no post-processing whatsoever. Didn’t even have to do. I think I had to remove some support if I’m not mistaken from the inside, but you can’t see those. So that’s really just how it came out. So that’s an example of kind of determining what your needs are for the look that you’re going for. Now, another important thing to consider when you’re 3d printing armor is scale. You want to make sure that you’re scaling it appropriately for the person that you’re going, that’s going to be wearing the material. So in my case, I was printing this for myself and I’m six feet tall and wanted to make sure that everything had the right scale. I noticed that one of the models that I was using actually was scaled for someone who is five foot nine or five foot 10, I can’t remember.
And so I did have to lengthen some of the parts a little bit for a better fit. So one of the easiest ways I’ve found to scale things is to do small samples. So for example on the chest plate, you can actually go into your slicing software, take a piece like this, and then just have it, let’s say right here, for example, it would print this whole cross section right here. So I have it print right across here like this, and then you can sink it down below the actual build plate in your, in your slicing software to be able to see, just have it start printing right here and then see what that looks like. If you print, let’s say three, four or five layers, then you can stop the print, pull off those three, four, five layers, and then hold it up to yourself and see how it fits and see if that works out.
Okay, you can do the same thing with a helmet. For example, you can take it right at its narrowest point where your head would enter and then just print that part and see if that’s going to fit okay for you. And if you have to print several parts to make that happen, you’re really using very little filament or material to make that happen just by doing a few layers at a time, and then putting them together and testing it for fit. You can do the same thing with forearms. A couple that you’re going to want to watch out for is fitting your hand through the end of the forearm piece right here that can really get you. So this one barely fits my hand. For example, I didn’t test fit it. And I just lucked out that it barely fits my hand. If I kind of scrunched my hand as small as I can go and fit that through on this mannequin, for example we’ve got a dummy under here and his hands don’t have individual fingers.
So we had to cut his fingers apart and then squish it as best we can to try to cram that thing in there. And you can actually see the line over here where it broke when we did that on one of the times we put this thing on this, this mannequin here. So you want to make sure that you’re testing all of those things for a good fit. Now I showed you earlier this chest plate, and this was my first attempt. I don’t know how well you can see, but there is glue all over this thing. And this one I never got to the stage of actually finishing it with actual primer or paint or Bondo or anything like that. But that is an option. I didn’t do it because this one didn’t come together very well. I’ve got a gap in the joint. The plate itself was too small, so it wasn’t the right size.
So those are all things you’re going to have to consider. But when I glued it, it held up really well and it still holds up really well. It actually broke in the layers themselves as opposed to in the joints, which is a good thing. So this is still pretty strong and has done really well. And there’s a couple of options I would recommend for gluing your parts together. The first one is just regular superglue. In fact, I keep bunches of this stuff. You can buy these at the dollar store and I’ve got just these packs of them. I think this was a dollar for the whole pack. And you can just use quite a bit of this, wear some gloves when you’re doing this. I’ve glued my fingers together multiple times. Well, many, many times actually. So wear some gloves when you’re doing this, it helps out a lot and this can actually do the job really well.
So you just apply the glue, hold it in place for a good 10, 20, 30 seconds. Until you, it doesn’t feel like it’s loose at all anymore. And then let that sit for a while and move on to the next piece. So that’s one option. Another option you can check out is to use a hot glue gun, and I recommend getting a bigger, hot glue gun that can handle a little bit more. And then I use these gorilla glue, hot glue sticks. They mentioned they’re five times more durable for projects that last cures in about 45 seconds. And they really do a nice job. I actually use these for a lot of the different parts that I have to put together when I’m building suits like this or anything that needs to be adhere together. I also use this for failed prints. So that’s the other option that you have for gluing.
There are probably another dozen options out there. One of them is to use what’s called cyanoacrylate, which is basically super glue and an accelerator. So that’s where you put the super glue or the, the CA glue on one piece. And then you spray the accelerator on the other piece, put them together. And with that, they, they cure almost instantly. You’ve got seconds before that will cure. And if you kind of need to line things up easily, or that’s not difficult to line those things up, that’s a great option. And it allows you to work very quickly. Now, an important topic that we haven’t covered just yet is the material that you print with. As I mentioned before, I did use PLA for pretty much every part on the Stormtrooper here for a few reasons. Number one, PLA is one of the easiest materials to work with and results in less failures, less warping on the bed, less working at higher levels and things like that.
And it’s just really easy to work with. It’s accessible, it’s mostly inexpensive and it doesn’t require any sort of enclosure for your printer in order to print successfully. Now, I did some experimenting with abs because I have these Flashforge printers that are fully enclosed and they prevent drafts. They keep it really warm and consistent temperature while it’s printing. So I have the option to very easily do abs with those in their heated beds as well. But if you’ve worked with abs before, you will probably have the experience that once you get everything dialed in perfectly, it’s actually pretty easy to work with. But if, until you get that dialed in, it is frustrating. There are a lot of things that are difficult about it. It actually is a slightly more flexible, slightly less rigid than PLA. And so it does have that going for it.
And it has a higher melting point which is also an advantage. But again, in general, I find it a little bit more difficult to work with, and maybe that’s just me and my lack of experience with abs. But I found the PLA worked pretty well for all of this now TPU or Ninja flex or any flexible filament is something that I really want to experiment with. I have not tried it with armor itself. I’ve tried it with other products, other projects, things like that, but not with the Stormtrooper armor or other armor before. One of the big advantages is if you can get a good print off of that, especially let’s say on your forearm piece where you have to squeeze your hand through, you could just squeeze the end of the wrist, opening here to allow your hand to S to fit through you don’t have that really strong, rigid frame around it that makes it so that you have to bend your hand instead of the actual material that you’ve printed.
So definitely something I want to consider or play around with, but I have not tried that just yet. So let’s talk about assembling the parts. Let’s say you’ve got a piece like this chess piece, that’s got multiple different parts to it, and you want to put them all together and make one hole. The first thing that you want to do is make sure that your edges are clean. You want to deeper any support material that’s around the edges or anything like that. I would actually often take some of these over to my belt sander, and then just sand them off. Nice and smooth like that. And just, just touch it just to make sure you’ve got a nice flat surface on there. Not necessarily required, but at least dry fit everything before you glue it, to make sure that it looks like it’s going to fit nice and tight together.
Now, one little tip, if you do end up with some different gaps, either at the joints where you glued them together, or something went wrong in the print itself, and you have some little gaps in your print, then a 3d printing pen like this as a lifesaver, you can use the exact same filament if you want to, that you printed with or something else that usually doesn’t matter as long as it’s the same type. And then you can fill in those little gaps, it’s going to melt that PLA or material, whatever you’re using right into that gap and leave you with a, hopefully at least a solid or more structurally sound piece. And then you can send that off or cut some of that off. Another thing that I like to use is actually the hot glue gun that I mentioned before. I’ll get that to full temperature and I’ll use that to kind of melt down and smooth down the joints and cracks and things like that after I’ve filled them in with the 3d pen.
One last tip for you around assembling those multi-part pieces is using some fabric or some material to actually in hot, gluing it in there to just add a little bit more support. I did have a couple of cases, for example, on the butt plate here, the back part here, where it actually was printed in two parts. And so you’ve got a seam right in the middle. And if you try to sit down or if you move wrong, then those can start to come apart. And so putting a piece of fabric over that and then gluing it all together, it makes it so that if something does start to come apart, it’s actually still going to stay together because that fabric piece, you’re basically creating a hinge in there just as a fallback in case something goes wrong. And we want to make sure that the butt cracks remain on the inside of the suit, not on the outside.
Now, a big question you likely have is how do you get everything nice and smooth after you’ve printed it, especially if you’re printing at a 0.3 or higher layer height, then you’re going to want to smooth things out. Most likely, again, you don’t have to, I’ve got some cases where it actually still came out, really smooth, even at 0.3, but if you do want a nice, shiny glossy finish on there, here’s a couple of options that I would recommend. So you’ve got your fiberglass resin here made by Bondo. This, you can actually buy it usually at your local department store. Like I bought this at Walmart, for example, and I think it was about $8. It’s a, two-part, there’s a little tube in there that you mixed together with the resin underneath here in the bigger container. And this is just an accelerator or a curing agent.
And when you mix those together, you’ve got a limited amount of time to work with, but you can brush this on and actually get a really nice finish. And it’s going to fill in those little gaps and try to create a nice, smooth surface for you. You can do multiple coats. One thing that’s super important when you’re working either with this or with the XTC, is that you use a heavy duty respirator, not one of these little, you know, white mask type of things, but the kind with the filters on both sides. And that completely covers your face and make sure that you’re not breathing in any of these fumes. And that you’re definitely doing this in a well ventilated area. Now, another option is XTC. You’ve probably heard of this. If you’ve looked into smoothing 3d prints and this tends to do a really nice job, it’s the same concept you brush it on.
And it’s going to do a little bit of, it has a little bit of a chemical reaction with the material, and it’s going to help melt that a little bit. If you have areas where you want really fine detail to remain that neither of these are really good options, you’re going to want to stay on that by hand. And one last option that’s definitely worth taking a look at when you want to smooth everything over is just applying Bondo to it just like you would with a car. So I actually used this Bondo putty that you can see here and same kind of thing. You mix the accelerator with the Bondo material itself. You’ve got a limited work time window before it starts to really thicken and harden up. And then you can’t really work with it. It’s not malleable anymore at that point, but while you’re working with it, you can just smooth a thin layer over whatever you’re doing.
And then it cures in a very short amount of time within minutes, really. And then within about a half hour, probably you could go ahead and sand it down and just get that nice smooth finish. So that’s one option and that allows you to use power tools. You can use a random orbital sander, for example, or even a high grid on a belt sander to get that smooth finish that you want, although a belt sander is usually pretty aggressive. So I don’t know if I’d recommend that. So I actually use the Bondo putty on quite a few parts on this. You can see that I actually put it all over the helmet and then use that to smooth everything down with 19 different parts in there. It’s kind of cool that you can use that Bondo smooth over everything. And then you can’t really tell that there are any joints or were any joints underneath all of that.
I also used it on the biceps and I used it on some of the other parts throughout the armor suit here. And it really just helps to cover up those gaps and also even smooth out areas where the model itself is a little bit angled or a little bit simplified, I guess. So definitely something to consider if you want that nice, smooth glossy look. Now when it comes to sanding, if you’re just sanding the material itself, especially for a PLA or abs, you’re probably going to want to avoid using power tools. If you do use an orbital sander, make sure you use one with a variable speed and put it at the lowest speed. The faster your sandpaper is moving. The more likely it is to generate friction and to generate heat and then melt the materials. And you’re going to end up with gummy stuff all over and rather than actually sanding it, you’re just creating these little balls of gum all over the place that you have to clean up manually afterward.
So not something I recommend using a, a power sander or something like that. So a few options to help you avoid a lot of sanding are to use a chemical treatment like the fiberglass resin or the XTC. And that will actually a lot of times make it so that you don’t really have to do any sanding whatsoever or very minimal sanding with it. So that’s a great option. If you do have to sand, I would recommend that you use a hand sander, whether it’s just a piece of sandpaper with your hand maybe a block and then one of the best options that are the sponge sanding blocks, they’re soft. They don’t, they don’t wear your hands down and then they can contour around the different shapes that you’ve got, get into cracks and crevices, all that kind of stuff. So they cost a little bit more.
But if you’re going to be doing a lot of sanding, it will save you a lot of hassle. Now, if you’re printing everything in the color that you want it to end up being, you may have very little need to actually paint these things afterward, especially like on the shoulder, for example, where I printed it in all white and it needs to be all white. There’s no black marks on this or anything like that. I don’t need colors on there. I can just treat this with the XTC or the fiberglass resin and be done with it. So that’s a great option, but let’s say like me, you’ve got a bunch of different filaments here and you want to use some of those filaments and you don’t want to use, you don’t want to buy like 20 rolls of white. For example, if you don’t have to, as you saw in some of the earlier things, some of these parts are gray.
Some of these parts are black, actually underneath them. And then a lot of them are white. You can really do anything that you want to, as long as you’re willing to paint it afterwards. So for painting, I highly recommend using a primer filler. This is a spray can that you can buy at most hardware stores, it’s a gray primer and you pray spray it on there. And it’s got some, some viscosity to it, some thickness to it, and it will actually help fill in those little ridges that you get from your layer lines. So it will do a good job helping with that, especially if you sanded it and treated it beforehand, it will just help smooth everything over before you put your final coats of paint on it. Now, as for the paint itself, I found that most decent quality paints work, anything that you’re going to pay a few dollars or more per can for tends to work.
If you buy the 99 cent cans, you’re going to get what you pay for. They’re light, they’re dusty. They, they’re just not very thick as far as making a coat. At least that’s been my experience. So I just use the primer and paint in one. And it, even though I’ve already primed it, it just gives it a nice solid coat. And then you can move quickly and move along and get a nice finish and a really solid color on your 3d print. Now, if you want to, it’s really not a bad idea to put a clear coat over top of it. You can buy some clear coat cans. You can buy some lacquer, you can buy whatever type of coating or finish spray that you want to put on there. If you’re going for matte, they have that. If you’re going for a high gloss, they have that typically a Stormtrooper is going to have a high gloss finish.
And that’s a really good look for it. That’s what you see in the films. So it’s nice to do a high gloss coat over everything that will also protect anything that you’ve painted specifically and give that, you know, one more layer of protection against getting rubbed, bumped off chipped, things like that. Now the last topic for finishing the parts themselves is painting the details. So the helmet, for example, I actually had this helmet sitting here for months. It was just all white and I wasn’t sure how to actually put in the colors. I thought about masking everything off and using spray paint. And I actually went out and bought all of the different colored spray paints to do that. I just never got around to. I didn’t feel like I felt like I was just, that was too much work. I just didn’t want to do it.
And then I realized one of my daughters is a great artist and has all these kind of high-end markers and pens and things like that. And some of them are just like paint pens, essentially. So I spent about 45 minutes with her help and we went through and we painted the whole mask with markers and that actually worked out really well. I did use masking tape and that made a big difference to keep things in the line. Now this is not an amazing and perfect job. If I wanted to this to look its very best, I probably would actually mask everything off and just spray it and then put a clear coat over top of that. So those are a couple of options, but this is one of the ways that I found to kind of get me over that mental hurdle of having to deal with all of the details that go on the helmet itself.
And it just helped a ton. Now that we’ve got all the parts ready, the next thing we need to do is put them in a place or in a way that we can wear them. That’s really kind of a challenge. I looked out on the internet for a long time, trying to find ways that people were accomplishing this and I did not find much at all. So I will show you exactly what I did to actually assemble all of these. And really it’s a simple recipe. I tried a few different things and what I ended up liking the most was a simple setup of using hook and loop, otherwise known as Velcro as well as some elastic bands. And then I use that same gorilla glue, hot glue sticks that I mentioned earlier to apply everything and get it to stick to the different parts.
And you may be wondering what this weirdness is that you’re seeing on the table here. So here’s the Stormtrooper and I’ve got the mannequin that is inside here, but I wanted to show you how, how all of the pieces actually come together. So we’re going to take the gloves off and again, just really simple, not much to it,
A plastic piece glued onto the gloves themselves. And then on the forearms, these are typically just being held on by the hand itself and the glove. But I did put a little strap in here, which I’ll show you. So I’ve got a strap right here. And then on the inside of the forearm, you can kind of see it in there. There’s a black Velcro piece. So that’s, what’s used to hold that together and it just keeps the things I’m in the right place. I have attached it kind of to the back of the elbow or the outside of the elbow, at least. And then I have the same thing going on in here. The bicep, actually this one, I don’t think I Velcroed. This one’s just attached. So the bicep and the shoulder are just attached by this, by the springy material, the elastic loop here, this stuff here.
So again, I will put links in the description to this elastic, which worked out really well. It conceals really well also. And then a roll of the hook and loop the Velcro, which just has hooks on one side loops on the other. So you can just glue whichever side you want to, the piece that you need. So, so far we’ve got the glove by itself. We’ve got the forearm, which is Velcroed to the bicep. The bicep is strapped via the elastic bands to the shoulder piece. And then the shoulder piece has a little hook around it. I can take this off.
Okay.
So the shoulder piece just has this little piece, this little part here that hooks up and have Velcro on the inside like that to make a nice little loop. And that loop hooks around the elastic band that goes between the chest plate and the back plate. I’m going to take off this other shoulder so I can show you this whole assembly. So really the shoulder pieces are just hanging on by the strap on the shoulder here. And that seems to work out really nicely. I think that’s similar to how they actually do them in the films as well. Now, if I take this whole back, play off, keep in mind, this is a lot of the part that got shot up and I’ve kind of disassembled a lot of the inside of it, this aramid material.
All right. So I just have,
I have the two straps together, got one right here and then one right here. So those are, what’s holding on the chest plate to the back plate on the inside.
I’ve
Got two more straps holding things on here, just like you see. And they, they have a nice little elastic, so you can move things around as needed. And also inside here, know how well I can catch this in the frame here, but I’ve got some elastics or some Velcro right here.
And that’s what I use to hook onto these guys. So right here on the, on these ones, I have these with some hook and loop on them as well. And they hook onto the inside of these ones over here. And then again, same set up, just got some elastic bands in between the back plate and the upper back plate. Again, those last two that I showed you are the bands that go across the hips. Here are the waist and can tighten the back plate to the top plate or to the add plate. Now for the, the pelvis section here. I did the same kind of thing. I’ve got some, I’ve got some Velcro, I’ve got two straps. So this is all one big piece. And I’ve got two straps of Velcro right here that connect to the inside of this. So I’ve got the two straps and I’ve just got them glued
Directly onto one piece and
Then Velcroed onto the other same thing here glued directly under here. And then they Velcro on over here. So you can just put them on like this and you get your full assembly here. And then here on the waist, I basically took some hook and loop on the thighs like this. Okay. So I’ve got those two, those two pieces right next to each other. They come up and they go through the belt loop and they just connect on using Velcro. And that actually has done a really good job. And so your chest, sorry, your thigh plates are really just hanging on to the belt loop here. And that’s why it’s important that you do have a belt on when you’re doing this. Now, lastly, the calves after you’ve put your thigh plates on your thigh pieces on, you can just slip these up your calves and then this front part will just rest on your foot. We actually had to do some major surgery on our mannequin here to get the feet to bend so that he could slide into this opening right here, but it worked out and I, I suspect you’ll forgive us one day, the nice flexible material here. These things are very, very squishy and they worked really well. They’re just soft. They’re comfortable.
You’ve got all of the parts assembled in a way that you can wear them. It’s important that you have the right undergarments for the suit, because if you’re wearing blue jeans and a red shirt, it’s going to be obvious. It’s going to look bad. You can see on our mannequin here, we’ve got just a black, long sleeve t-shirt that he’s wearing under here. Now for the gloves, you can really use whatever black gloves that you want to use. I thought about just buying those $1 knit kind of cottony gloves, but I thought those really didn’t look very quality, high quality. So I went with some black leather gloves, just use the cheapest ones I could find on Amazon. And again, I’ll link to those in the description below. And those worked out really well. So that’s these ones here. And then I just printed the part and hot glued it right to the glove.
It’s worked out really well now for the pants. I just bought some really inexpensive black jeans online. They’re kind of this flexible fabric. They have the belt loops, which are really important. In fact, I use the belt loops to connect. Yeah, right here, I hook the thigh pieces onto the front belt loops using some Velcro. And so that ended up helping out quite a bit. And then other than that, they’re just regular jeans, regular black jeans. If you’ve already got some, you can use those. I’ll again, put a Lincoln description to these specific pair that I bought because they worked out really well and they’re comfortable as well. And lastly, the boots and I bought some just shoes, some white shoes, and the way I’ve got this suit built and set up is that the cath actually sit on the top of the foot and the top of the foot is what keeps them in place.
So you want to make sure that there’s something, there was some padding and that’s a little bit comfortable there. These shoes do a nice job of that. And then again, I’ll put a link to those and that’s really it for the clothing underneath. You can go with different things. I know on some of the first order stormtroopers, for example, they have sort of a ribbed material that you can see on the elbows and, and other places haven’t looked into that too much because I did the Imperial Stormtrooper instead, but you may want to check that out, to see what works best for you. Now, one of the last and probably most important pieces, as far as getting things to fit, right. And what you put inside the armor and the suit itself is the helmet. The helmet is going to be really large, probably on your head without anything in it.
And it might be like a little bit of a bobblehead going on there. And so to secure that, I recommend just putting some foam inside. There’s some soft squishy foam and it really does make all of the difference. So in my case, it’s Bulletproof. So that actually condense the size of it quite a bit. So that added probably three quarters of an inch or so on around the whole inside of it. So that made it a lot smaller. And then I added the padding on there cause there was still a little wiggle room, especially side to side. And so I added these padding bars on there just with some black spongy, styrofoam, put some on the top of the head. So I’m not having something hard sitting right on the top of my skull and then put some around the sides. So when I put it on, it’s really pretty snug.
And as with everything else, I just hot glued all of that in there. And it did a good job now for the eyes I wanted to make sure I basically, I just wanted some sunglasses to put in there. You’re not likely going to be able to find some exact fit for the sunglasses or a lens that will fit in there just right. So I purchased this right here. This is a welding shield. This is a shade number three, it’s called Hobart face shield replacement, shade number three. Again, I’ll put a link in the description to that, but this I was it’s flimsy enough that you can actually just cut it with scissors or with a knife. And then I just carefully cut out the shape of the lenses. And then right now they’re just pressure fit in there. But I would recommend gluing them when we take this to the shooting range.
The first thing we did was shoot it in the back. And even just that jolt from being shot in the back actually caused the lenses to pop right out. So you’ll definitely want to glue those in. And if you can, I would recommend doing that from the inside so that you don’t see anything on the outside. All right. So hopefully you found a lot of these tips helpful and kind of saw how this whole thing came together. Now I’ve got a couple of resources that I think will be very valuable to you. If you are interested in making your own Stormtrooper armor or other suits, different things like that. First one is Nico industries. This is I’ll put a link again in the description below, but Nico industries is where you can find a lot of the different 3d models that you can download for different helmets.
And lots of iron man suits, for example. And there’s some star Wars stuff on there, but just a whole variety of different, cool armor pieces and things like that. Now, along with that, there is a whole Facebook group that you can check out. It’s actually started by the same guy and it’s called 3d printed armor and weapon props. And you can check that out. I’ll put a link in the description below to that. I also highly recommend you check out the Nico industries, YouTube channel. He actually goes through and gives you all of these really cool instructions on how to finish things, how to size things, all kinds of stuff. This is a guy who’s really done his homework and knows this stuff and can really show you from experience not only from modeling it and creating these, these models from scratch, but also printing them and getting them to fit well.
So definitely a great resource to check out. I think those will be some great resources to help you get started and answer the questions that you may have along the way as always feel free to leave comments here below as well. Now, if you haven’t seen my other video on, when we actually take this guy and we shoot them up and see where all these holes and things come from, then take a look over here. You can see that you can also see where we took the helmet and we cut it in half on a waterjet to see exactly what the bulletproofing looks like. We were even able to manage to cut one of the bullets right out of it. So you can see that over on the water jet channel. So please take a look at that. You can see my other channelLRN2DIY where I’ve got all kinds of home improvement projects and things like that. And hopefully you enjoy those. So again, my name is Nils with the 3d printing zone. Thanks for watching.