When the Clone Wars movie came out, I decided I wanted to do a Captain Rex costume. The more I looked at things, the more I realized that an AotC suit with Rex markings wasn’t going to do it for me… I wanted the stylized CG look from the movie.
Since no-one was making the armor at the time, I set about doing it myself.
It took about a year to finish the sculpt and get a prototype suit up and wearable.
Once it was done, we decided to do a big group project. At cost armor run! We kept the orders open on our garrison board for 2 weeks, and got 23 people! Way more than I was expecting!! Add to that 2 oddball kits that weren’t really part of the run, and we got a nice round 25 animated clones.
The idea was that we’d all chip in time, money, tools, food, etc… do it as a big team effort.
One member of the garrison, Mike Brunco, took on the project manager role. He took the orders, found the plastic supplier, ordered materials, etc… I did the easy part: make the bucks. I say that’s the easy part because by the time we started this, I was already 99% done!
The project kicked off officially on September 28, when we got a LOT of plastic!
My first thought on seeing that picture was: all that has to turn into armor?!?!?!
I admit, when I saw the pile, I cried. Just a bit. That’s a split of 0.125 HIPS for the trunk of the body and 0.080 HIPS for the limbs. Roughly 500 squares of it.
Today, Jan 17, we finished up the run!
Between then and now we had Halloween (where we built 2 full sized battle droids, Yoda, an Ewok village float and a bunch of Ewoks), Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and 20+ trooping events.
Meanwhile, along side the armor building, bucket-maker extraordinaire Sean made all those helmets, in addition to the runs he did here for other areas. It’s a good think that there is a Smooth-On retailer nearby! Needless to say they know us very well!
In some cases people went to his house and slush them with him acting as teacher and supervisor, and in others he made them himself.
Think about that. That’s a LOT of work. Hundreds of hours.
There’s still a lot to go… there are tons of kits that need assembly, and we still need to arm the troops! The pistols and DC15S rifles are ready for silicone, hopefully this week.
Here is is… the last pull of the run…
What a crazy, frustrating, exhausting and awesome project!
The reason I posted this here is to get people thinking about what is possible if people pool their efforts to work on things like this together. For the helmet and armor, these suits were under $200 each.
That was made possible by teams of people spending their nights and weekends together in a literal sweat shop (the forming shop was usually around 90 – 105 degrees after a few hours!). There were many nights where I was driving home from the shop at 1AM dreading the coming work day, but in the end it was worth it.
For me, this is the best part of the 501st… people of all walks of life, all experiences, all skill levels… coming together to do something that no one person could do alone.
Tags: 501st, clone, clone wars, costuming, geek, star wars, watch city armory
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