silverBoyd's RotJ Guard WIP

[silverBoyd]

Finally! I have progress on my velvet robes. After having the velvet in my possession for months and months, we were finally able to begin sewing the robes now that we knew the mock-up robes fit great. It's nice to see it coming together.


You can see in the above picture that the patterns had to be extended / modified to fit my build and height. Seeing that this is a women's pattern that it is based on, I had to get my wife to customize it to accommodate my 6'-2" frame.

[Sascha_Wilsing]

This looksvery good. I like the velvet and its colour. Great.

[silverBoyd]

Thanks. Can't believe I'm in the final stretch of this Royal Guard finally. I started this back in September with a month or so off here and there. Helmet is being picked up today to be color-matched and painted

[silverBoyd]

Getting closer and closer to being finished. Tonight, my wife continued work on the "Obi-style" belt. The CRL states it is to be between 3-4" wide. Mine comes in just under 4" wide.

I wanted the belt to keep a uniform shape when wearing it so my wife came up with the idea to add batting material on the inside of the belt in order to help give the belt some shape. We still need to add the belt centerpiece and also add Velcro to fasten the ends together.

[silverBoyd]

Well, I'm getting closer and closer. All that's left is for my wife to hem the robes around the entire bottom and to add a button to the outer robe to clasp it together. I should also be picking up my helmet from the painters sometime this week. Fingers crossed it will be ready. He's had it for 2 weeks now. If my helmet is indeed ready for pick-up, I will be 100% finished and ready for approval photos by this upcoming weekend. I have an event on July 16 and I'm looking to debut my Royal Guard at the event with my Garrison.

Here are some "prelim" photos of me wearing the robes and belt just before I had to stand on some chairs for my wife to pin around the bottom of the Inner / Outer robes and the Outer Robe lining. I must say, it is very comfortable to wear.

(The length of the outer robe was made longer to make sure we had enough material to be able to give the final length once I was wearing the boots. The final robe won't be dragging the floor as shown)

[haplotk114]

This build is so helpful. Thank you so much for sharing it.

[silverBoyd]

update on my helmet. it has been primed 3-4x with some slight filling and here and there more than the filling that I did. My shoulders needed some light smoothing out to make it look better. Also, while adding multiple layers of primer, we noticed that the outer seams between the two halves had a flaw where the lines on the side of the helmet weren't as smooth of a transition as they could've been. We also noticed some flexing in the ABS helmet at the seem in the center.

Since the painter of the helmet is a friend of mine, I trust him doing some custom body work as needed. He's been in the professional auto body / custom audio field for years and he is great at repairs and customizing.

We ended up cutting out a small section of the sides of the helmet in order to fix the problem. It was re-filled and sealed with a new auto body filler that he uses and says is 100% better than anything you can find in a retail store. This setback has added 2-3 days to the final paint job but I don't mind because I want it to look as perfect as can be

Here are some pictures of the work done...

[Sascha_Wilsing]

Again a great Job done and i am really looking forward to see it finished.

[cooldevo]

As Sascha said, it's looking great!

Are you still doing the fans as per what you drew up? I ended up getting two portable fans and I velcro them to each inner leg just below the knee. It's hard to hide the tubes if you take the helmet off, but I don't in public. I'd be interested to hear how the air flow is, as I find the air sitting near the ground (especially indoors) to be nice and cool. Even on a relatively warm day outside, with both fans running, I'm sweating but mostly comfortable and no visor fog ups yet.

[silverBoyd]

They guys....I'm in the final stretch

I did wire up my fans but they're not strong enough. Gotta come up with another method