Zam…The great undertaking.

ItsThatGuy

Well-Known Hunter
Maybe that title is the understatement of the year, but we (Aimee and I) are ready to begin.

That’s just it; Where do we begin?

Sorry – Almost forgot, this is my first post on TDH! Now for my introduction!

I’m Tony . Aimee and I live in Richmond, Virginia. We are both members of the 501st (Garrison Tyranus). I am a clean TK and she is a Jawa (DZ-1382). She’s always wanted to pursue a Zam, I always pushed for Boushh, but I lost! It seems thought the more and more I look into it, the more excited I am to get started on this with her!

So any help is greatly appreciated! (So far Cal has already been a big help. He’s the one who nudged me over here! Thanks for all your help!)
 
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Welcome to TDH! This is the place to start your Zam! My advice would be to start looking through the threads on this forum. There is lots of information available here and plenty of people who are happy to help! ZamIAm also has a great Zam site ( http://www.zamiam.com.

Congrats on your new project! :D
 
Thanks for the quick reply! I've read a lot of these threads already before I posted. It's a lot to take in, but I just have to learn to pace myself.

Should we try to buy the hard parts first and get those started first? Or maybe try our hand at the undersuit as a base and work our way out?

Also, for the hard parts, like the chest plate and gauntlets, Aimee is 5'0" tall and think 115lbs. Is size going to matter? I don't want the pieces to be too large on her and not be able to moddify them.
 
Aimee is 5'0" tall and think 115lbs.

Tony!
Glad to see you officially made it to TDH. You are much more of a man than I am! I would NEVER have the guts to post Jean's weight on a message board. You should be happy though - Aimee is a keeper. (and a looker too!)(y)

I'm very interested to see how the Zam turns out. Especially now that we have our own Dengar in Garrison Tyranus - and my own Boba Fett (ROTJ) is coming together. BOUNTY HUNTERS ROCK!
 
Should we try to buy the hard parts first and get those started first? Or maybe try our hand at the undersuit as a base and work our way out?

Some of the items are limited runs ... so if you want them, grab 'em while you can! Other parts are available more or less regularly. A lot of it, you just gotta do yourself! (As time and $$$ permit ) Since you already know MonCal (Our god of all things Zam! ;) ) - he's probably the best "resource" around.

Other than that, you just might want to find a part you're interested in starting with, and work your way down the list (and it's a loooooong list!!! :lol:!) Keep your eyes open on eBay or the Cargo Hold, etc. for things like the boots.
 
Thanks for all the input, folks! I am really excited to get this started!

Just get ready for some stupid questions, because I will be throwing a bunch at you folks later on down the road! :lol: Cal- that means you will be seeing less e-mails from me for questions, but more e-mails for orders! ;)

Also I will keep everyone up-to-date with our progress.

And BTW - John (TD-6829) stop eye-balling my wife! I know where you live! ;)
 
Good luck with your Zam!

It'll help that Aimee is so tiny...I haven't seen any overweight Zams on this site, but I have seen some very LARGE Zams on the internet, and I think it's really hard to get the costume to look right (and the skirt to hang right) on a very round person.

I'm speaking from experience...I was too fat to begin with and haven't worn my Zam since I gained even more weight...the anime cosplayers say that the first rule is to pick a costume totally unsuited to your body type (LOL, but so often true! who cares....).....I want to wear Zam with the local troopers for Free Comic Book day and part of the costume upgrades has to be losing 50 pounds. Seriously....time to work out before my Jenny Craig breakfast.

At her size, Aimee should look great in anything! And you won't have to buy as many yards of leather/fabric!
 
Welcome to the zam arena Tony! :)

I am sure you can make it fit her fine. Kathy is 5'1" and although she is a little short, it still looks great on her and I made everything to scale rather than to "fit" her.
 
Man, I am really excited about getting all of this together! The great thing (for me) is it isn't one huge kit that all comes our at once. I never know where to begin, and I always try to do everything at once. This way I can give each section it's own deserved attention!

OK guys and gals, I had this laying around and thought it might make a good "make-shift" Zam rifle. Obviously it will need a lot of work and is undersized, but it should make a good base.

Ok be critical (I can handle it!)

CIMG0848.jpg


We were going to use this as a Jawa Ion blaster, but never got around to it. My parents got her a real nice replica for her birthday instead.
CIMG0850.jpg


Here's one for size comparison: Oh yeah, my wife was already settled in for the night, so she was in her PJ's while watching Idol! :)
CIMG0852.jpg
 
That will definitely work. The original was a kentucky flintlock, which is pretty close and I am pretty sure you can still pick the replicas up .... but the barrel has to be cut up and lengthened anyway so yeah... that would definitely work!
 
Awesome, Thanks for the offer! Actually I do have a question, how long is the blaster overall?

I need to go get a new barrel for it first. Not sure where I am going to find a chrome one though.

Also, I wanted to show you guys what I just bought tonight from eBay!
c05a_1.jpg


Yep the real deal:
c37a_1.jpg


I was hoping for brown, but I can always have these dyed.

If anyone could post any images of thier completed boots it would be a big help!
 
Actually I do have a question, how long is the blaster overall?

I'm assuming you mean the rifle? Somewhere in these threads is a link to a full life-sized picture of the rifle, taken from the Visual Dictionary and blown-up to the correct size. Do a search and you should find it.

Yep... those be the boots you want! :D Congrats! I've only seen 1 set of brown ones (Langsuir666 has them... grrrr...) And nope... you can't dye them. Those boots will be forever black. I painted mine with leather paint and am pretty happy with how they turned out. I still don't have the purple pieces on them...those still have to be dyed and attached (somehow...).
 
Welcome to the Zammy fun!!!

Hehehehe sorry MaulMaus - i dunno how i managed to end up with those Brown Boots, just very very lucky (sounds the same as how i ended up with sl/tk8456 tho i didnt get him off Ebay LOL :lol: )

Your GF should look good in the pieces but even tho i am the same height as Zam was im still always looking at the pictures to see if my body proportions fit and ajusting the armor accordingly.

Perfect example is with the rifle, now if your GF is 5 feet tall and the screen rifle is for example 5 feet 5 long (i dont know the actual length off the top of me head) which when upright reaches the screen Zams head. If you make your rifle screen acurate it will be too big for your girlfriend. Its up to you but i would scale the big stuff down to fit the person.
 
If you make your rifle screen acurate it will be too big for your girlfriend. Its up to you but i would scale the big stuff down to fit the person.

Yeah what she said. Becky is around the same height as our heroine but if she wasn't I would have insisted on cutting it down.
TBH I don't know what Zam's movie rifle length is. I tend to look at photos and work out ratios of things. If you make it so the rifle extends about 6 inches or so above your GFs head it would look cool.

Remember that the rifle butt will have a silver plate extended about 0.5 of an inch, so take that into account when measuring her up.

The pipe we used was standard chrome plated copper plumbing pipe at 22mm. I need to check that though so hang on before you buy it. may have been 28mm? Whatever it was it just sat nicely in the flintlock stock

It's normally used in bathrooms, that kind of thing :)
Both pipes are bathroom plumbing actually. The lower one too

PS: no problem on the help dude, please ask if needed. I'd help anyway but seen as your a clean TK too, I'd help twice
 
The boots can't be dyed? :( ::in my Vader voice:: 'NOOOOO!!!'
Oh, well I can spray them or something...? I'll figure it out. If not no one but us will notice (I hope):rolleyes . I will keep my eyes out for brown ones though. It will bug the heck out of me if they aren't brown...

Ok so I did some measurements of the rifle toy that we have. I don't think it will work out.

The rifle that we have is 3 feet tall. We can add the butt piece which would add about half and inch. Moving our way up we could add about 6 inches in the first gap, the second gap would be 4 inches and the barrel would extend out another 4 inches at the end. Adding 14.5 inches overall to the rifle; making it only 4'2" overall. About 10 inches too short. I just don't want it to be too disproportionate.

Like I said it was more a make-shift kinda project, not shooting (no pun intended ;) ) for 100% accuracy. Maybe one of these days we will get the flintlock and go for the real deal.
 
I believe the original boots were also black and painted. The TK boots were the same you know? ;) .. black and painted white.

I've painted about a dozen pairs of leather boots. Our zam boots turned out THE BEST out of all of them as a matter of fact. You need some leather deglazer to remove the sheen. Then I use nu-life leather paint brown. Spray your boots in about a dozen super thin layers of paint, letting it dry between each layer. If you get overzealous and spray too much at one time, it will crack. We weathered our boots initiall with some steel wool, sandpaper etc. but after a year of trooping, they looked perfect!!!

As for the rifle, I have a bunch of reference pics from CIII. I didn't have a tape but I did have a duffel bag strap that I took a pic of with the rifle to figure the length.

I'll do some checking and I can tell you pretty much how long the rifle is :)
...... sheesh..... I can't believe I haven't built this yet...... I've passed up about a dozen replica flintlocks and one original one..........

here are a few teasers:

c3214smmp1.jpg

c3274smao8.jpg

c3276smol5.jpg

c3282smcy1.jpg

c3283smoj8.jpg

c3287smsn9.jpg
 
Well the "life-size" print out I'm working from is 5'0 (I think mine will end up being 5'1" once I get it all together - I'm okay with that). I've seen the replicas on eBay quite often, and for not too much money - so you might want to keep your eyes open if it's something you really want to work on right away.

MonCal is right about the boots ... the originals were painted as well. You could see the paint flaking off at the FIDM exhibit. I didn't even know brown ones existed until Langsuir666 showed hers off! ;)
 
There's a pair of brown ones on E-bay right now but they're too big for me...grrrrr. Size 40 European. I wrote to the seller and asked for the measurement of the sole toe-to-heel and the answer was 12 inches! Anyone out there with 12 inch feet?
 
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