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costumes, toys and tech.


Mar 26
2010

Ah blog, we need to spend more time together.

I’ve been busy as usual. So busy in fact that I need to slow down a bit. I get crazily excited when I’m working on something new. I end up spending WAY to much time on it and driving myself (and Jodi!) nuts.

So what’s been going on since last we talked?

The vac table is finished and I’ve been retooling the molds for the clone armor accordingly. My originals were geared very much for the equipment I was using, and so on the new machine I’ve encountered some issues. Nothing big, but everything is getting a good sanding / filling session, then getting coated in a layer of polyester resin to help seal and protect the MDF base.

Last night Sean the Supah Troopah and I spent the evening making resin stuff. We perfected the art of a hollow barreled DC15-s with a hollow spot for electronics. VERY excited about that!!

I cast up a clone helmet to use as the base for Still More Revisions. I’m hoping this will be the last, but I wouldn’t swear to that!

The Deathwatch Mandalorian helmet is coming along nicely. I think it would have been easier to start from scratch than using a very accurate Boba as the base. I’ve been working to correct much of the “accuracy”, which comes in the form of asymmetry all around.

This morning I went out to Billerica before work to pick up the latest plastic order. So much of the stuff that the rear end of my truck compressed by a good 1 1/2″ – 2″ when the fork lift lowered it in.

This afternoon I got a call from one of my NEG-mates. I’m trading a CT member a clone suit for a lathe. He needed to get the lathe out of the house, so he sent it up today. I now have a lathe! I know nothing about using them, but thankfully my father-in-law is a reformed machinist, and has offered to school me in the thing. Woot! This is one of those “raising the bar on my own craftsmanship” type tools.

In between all of that, I’ve been working on a web project for the first time in ages.

I use flickr for my photo hosting and youtube for videos. That’s great and all, but I’d like the content to at least LOOK like it lives here.

Using the flickr API and the phpFlickr classes, I’m building my own wrapper for flickr. I’ve got a lot left to do, but the basic functionality is here:

http://www.stormtrooperguy.com/photos/

It’s not SEO friendly, and is mostly tables. But, I’ve done a decent job separating application functionality and styling. For the most part the PHP doesn’t spit out the HTML like I usually do. The exception being in cases like collectionSetsAsTable() which returns a table. Of sets. In a collection.

I’m picking up this awful camelCase habit too, which makes me sad.

Next will be the youtube version, then finally combining them into 1 section of the site.

A nice side effect of this is that flickr doesn’t provide bbcode sharing links in their UI, so I’ve had to take their HTML and convert it for forums. Since I’m writing the interface, I can make the bbcode.

Jodi’s going out for dinner tonight, so I’m on my own. I see plastic in my future!

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Jan 17
2010

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…

photo

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.

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Oct 30
2009

So tonight I’ll be attending my first basketball game. I’ve never seen the sport played by professionals.

Of course, as with all things I do, I’ll be seeing it through the dark tinted lenses of a clone trooper helmet.

Cartoon Network is doing a promotion at the game tonight for Clone Wars. I’ll be there along with several of my strikingly similar looking friends doing… whatever it is Cartoon Network wants us to do.

Should be a fun time. There’s a chance we may go out on the court at some point. It’s only standing in the middle of 20,000+ people… nothing to be nervous about, right? ;)

I hear that there will be a green screen photo op area set up for kids to get pics with us.

In other news, the 501st was on the Today Show again this morning! I did not attend this event, mostly due to the previously mentioned Celtics game. Plus they already have a Rex, and it would have been too much work to whip up a plain white suit for the occasion.

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Oct 12
2009

i’ve been so bad about posting. stupid facebook and twitter… microblogging takes so little effort. the lure of the dark side is hard to resist!

at work i’ve been interviewing people for a helpdesk job. it’s going less than impressively thus far. i have 4 interviews this week i believe. yay. i’ve got high hopes for a couple of them. at some point, once i have someone, i’ll be doing a “how not to get a job in IT” post. for now, a sample:

  • send the hiring manager your resume with no subject, text in the message or attached cover letter.
  • send the manager an email asking how to get him/her a copy of your resume. you are applying for a tech job. if email attachments are beyond you…
  • tell the manager that the job looks boring and beneath you, but times are hard and you’ll take what you can get.

on the nerd front, the clone army is going well. we’re at 9 completed kits (myself excluded, so 10 total if you count me), and we have 3 more that are more than 75% finished. the next armor session should finish those three up.

it takes about 3.5 – 4 hours per suit, so do the math ;)

this is just the raw plastic. each person then has to put in the hours to trim / fit / assemble.

we are getting close to our big halloween parade, which is always fun. i’ve got a bit to do yet for it, but nothing big. i’ve got the minimums done for my own stuff, so anything new i make / do is gravy.

october 25, woburn ma. parade kicks off at 1. you should go. yes you. i know, it’s a long flight, but still… it’s fun. it’s worth it.

this time of year is always super trooping. i did a dk/lego promotion at the natick mall on saturday. this coming sunday is the boston autism walk. after that is the parade and a boston celtics game appearance (yes, mr. nosports will be trooping a celtics game!). i think there’s a week off, then it’s megafest in framingham. then it’s thanksgiving, with a parade that weekend.

oy. nerding is pretty hard core. you certainly don’t get bored…

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Jul 6
2009

So, life’s been busy for a while.

Let’s go back in time to June 17, the last substantial update I made.

I took some time off between jobs to hang out, relax, and get refreshed. I did a ton of work on Clone and Fett stuff. The sculpt for the codpiece and butt plate are almost done, the Cody/Fox visor is done, and my Fett gauntlets are done.

On the gauntlet note, I negotiated a deal with a prominent machinist to let me recast his gauntlet rocket, which will allow me to make complete gauntlet kits.

Starting at the new job was, of course, a Big Deal. My first few days I just soaked in information. By the end of week 1 I started to feel more well oriented.

The long weekend at the end of the first week was nice. I ate WAY too much on the 4th, resulting in spending the 5th in crippling stomach pain. I got a lot of reading done.

Today I felt good, but had the sense to not go to the gym. I was pretty dehydrated and ate less than 1 meal on the 5th, so no working out first thing in the morning. Tomorrow I should be on track there. Did I mention the free gym at my new office? :)

I got the shins finished for my Rex suit, and put the whole contraption on for some photos…

rexedit20090704-1

I’ve also just about finished the Cody helmet.

photo

Related to all of that, I finally set up the Watch City Armory web site (which is just stormtrooperguy.com, but whatever ;) )

I also made a silly little movie about weathering armor:

It’s cheesy, but fun. Doing something like that with a real video camera would be good… that was recorded with my iPhone.

What else have I been up to?

I made some kick-ass coffee ice cream for Jodi’s birthday.

I haven’t seen Transformers 2 yet, but despite the terrible reviews, I’m going on Friday. Big Robots and Megan Fox. It can’t be worse than Megashark vs. Giant Octopus.

I’ve got tickets to see Alegria in August.

I’m going camping this weekend. In a friend’s back yard. Should be fun :)

Trooping on the 18th (maybe) and the 26th (definitely). Both baseball games. I don’t even like baseball.

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Jun 26
2009

yes, i’m alive.

not being in front of a computer all day makes me less posty.

let’s see… tomorrow ends my 2 weeks off (for those who may have missed it, i got a new job and was laid off on my way in to quit. no, really, i went in to tell my boss that i was leaving and he greeted me with my exit package!)

over the last 2 weeks i’ve done a ton of sculpting, painting, etc…

i finished the sculpt for the clone visor, made the mold, cast one up and painted a cody helmet.

photo

i’ve almost got the codpiece and butt plates done on the clone sculpt, which pushes me well over the 1/2 way point and into “almost done”.

got http://www.watchcityarmory.com/ up and running at last. it’s all in mediawiki. technically it’s stormtrooperguy.com rebranded. it just seemed easier that way. gotta get email set up for it… google apps rocks!

cleaned up the basement quite a bit, including rearranging it.

i got an iphone 3gs on release day. yay video! yay better camera! boo on at&t for not having mms ready yet. jodi now has my gen1 iphone and seems quite happy. speaking of, boo on the fact that the 3gs gets worse battery life and requires a different power supply than the gen1, meaning my clock radio is no longer a charger. boo indeed.

i start my new job on monday. 2 weeks of loafing has been fun, but i’m ready to get back to it, and excited about something new. it’s in waltham too, so the commute is VASTLY improved, and i suspect that i won’t encounter junkies shooting up on the street at the new place.

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Mar 31
2009

I hadn’t really thought this through, but the macports install of Drivel has been going for hours. It’s got to install all of the GTK+ / Gnome stuff with all of the dependencies that brings.

All to try out an X11 blog client on a Mac. An experiment that I’m almost surely not going to be happy with in the end.

Ah well.

In non-computing news, I think I’m going to head downstairs, clean up a bit, and make a clone helmet or two.


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Mar 24
2009

So looking at the chain of plugins and feeds, I’ve disabled the Wordpress facebook plugin. There’s no point to it really, since Facebook pulls in my LJ posts anyway.

No need to post everything twice!

I’ve been working on the wiki a fair bit, so things there are shaping up. I’m getting more familiar with the software, which is good considering that we’re installing it on a much bigger site Real Soon Now.

As a random aside: I think it would be neat if Dreamhost provided a shared memcache server for clients. I should suggest that…

I’m still debating whether or not to work Twitter into all of this. I don’t really think there’s a need for it, but it’s still out there as an option.

I need to get cracking on the Watch City Armory logo, but that’s not likely to happen any time soon. Maybe I’ll do that on the plane to New Orleans.

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Mar 23
2009

photo

It looks a bit odd laying on the floor, but I’m happy. The chest needs to go, but I’ll get there :)

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Mar 23
2009

For a while now my big project has been sculpting my own clone trooper armor, based on the Clone Wars animated series. As of 3/21/2009, I feel that I’m at the 1/2 way mark.

I’ve now completed the helmet, arms and middle torso, along with holsters for those commander types that use them.

I’ve been retrofitting an Attack of the Clones style suit with Clone Wars parts as I go. The most recent change was the abdominal armor. I finished up the first pass sculpt and pulled a copy this weekend. Fitting that to my suit involved cutting a big round hole in the front of my chest armor. Pretty scary… there’s no going back after that! But I did it, and I think it’s going to look good.

I ran out of velcro, elastic, and all sorts of other staple items, so I wasn’t able to put it all back together. But I’ll get it in the next day or two.

Related to this, we’ve settled on a name for this little production: Watch City Armory. Watch City is the nickname of the city we live in, it’s simple, and it lends itself well to a logo design I’ve wanted to do.

There you have it. Pictures coming soon of the latest step in the Watch City Armory clone build!!

The work in progress is being documented here:

http://www.stormtrooperguy.com/workshop/Clone_Armor

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