Eli Jinn's 3D Printed & Spray Painted ESB Build

[Eli Jinn]

Hello again.

First things first, I’m a sophomore in high school. Gonna turn 16 in July. Please go easy on me. I’m not 100% sure if revealing that will get me banned, so inside voices on that one please... This is my first official build thread in terms of a full costume. I have made a Boba Fett before, you may have seen it here on TDH, but I never made a full build thread on it. Here’s a picture to jog your memory.

I was quite happy with this costume, and I still am, but I know I can do better if I had more time and more experience. Well, I have more experience, so I might as well get started now before I run out of time. I’m giving myself until Halloween of this year to complete my ESB Boba Fett 2.0 using similar materials and methods as the first. That means spray paint and 3D printing! If you haven’t clicked off yet, thank you! Let’s lay out some ground rules, or rather, priorities for this costume…

Priorities

1. Comfort
I was extremely surprised when I put on the full costume for the first time just how uncomfortable it was. It was partly my fault, and partly time constraints’ fault, that I had never tried on the costume parts for more than like 15 minutes before committing. This time, I want comfort to be a huge priority.
2. “The Look”
I’m not Ord Mantell. Neither am I looking for 501st approval, since I can’t even legally be in the 501st. I think that goes without saying. I will be compromising aspects of screen accuracy for the sake of time, money, sanity, “the look”, and comfort. This includes not wearing the accurate jetpack harness, if I decide to wear one at all. Remember I’m 3D printing all of the parts, so I imagine my jetpack will be significantly lighter than most of yours. I will be trying my hardest to make it screen accurate though, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be basing my costume off of the Executor Bridge scene.
3. Completion
Due to limitations previously mentioned, my original costume was missing a few parts, mainly the boots, the sidearm + holster, the EE-3, and the jetpack. It also had no electronics, but it did have functional ammo belt pouches! Like last time I’ll be wearing this costume to school, so the EE-3 and sidearm will be at the bottom of the priority list and will not be brought with me to school, lest I be banished and sent to become like those of the galleys again, but I definitely intend to make them at some point. I also really want to make the jetpack and boots this time around though. And yes, I did say MAKE the boots. This will be an interesting build.
4. Durability
The second thing I was surprised by when I wore the suit was how quickly it fell apart. Again, I had no time and no money and no experience to make it better. I had no metal parts or even epoxy. The best thing I had was E6000, which was great, except that it took 24 hours to cure, and I didn’t even have that. Most of the stuff on the suit was hastily super or hot glued on at the last minute. The gauntlet switches and dental files were the first to go. Then the flaps on the ammo belt pouches. Then the flamethrower tips, then the velcro at the back of the ammo belt. It was a mess, but I had fun. Anyway, I learned from my mistakes, so I'm not doing that again.
5. Salvaging (or rather the lack thereof)
As much as I hate to let it go, I have to face the fact that the original costume just isn't up to my standards anymore, and there’s not much I can salvage from the first. I have new armor files for every hard part on the costume, which also means the flak vest will need to be replaced. The wookie trophies are pretty bad, and the girth belt is as well. The gloves were hastily sewed together with no experience in glove-making, so they sprung a hole almost instantly. That leaves the only things on the original costume that weren’t half bad being the ammo belt, the flight suit, and the shoulder cape. The ammo belt is great, but I’ve since found more accurate measurements which made me doubt its salvage value. Besides inaccuracy, The sewing wasn’t great since we didn’t have the right tools and it is kind of falling apart. The weathering and general color of the flight suit isn’t exactly to my liking, and I’m a growing boy so there’s not a great chance it will still fit 9 months from now. The shoulder cape was made from a tan fleece blanket I found at a thrift store for 2 dollars. I don’t even care that the accurate material was a Khaki Army Tent or whatever, this blanket was TWO DOLLARS. I think I’m just a little too attached to it.

What I have now

If you’re following my other thread with a similar title to this one on the Helmet, first off, thanks! Second, you’ll know I already have some progress done on the helmet.

Technically I started this costume about 3 months ago when I started a new helmet, but now I’m starting to look into, y’know, everything else. Besides half a helmet, I have pretty much nothing else except a lot of hope and high spirits. Not actual spirits though, I’m still underage.

Notable Upgrades

Pretty much everything on this new costume will be an upgrade, so I’ll list a few big ones that I have planned and aren’t super obvious. (ex: the paint job will be better)

• Adding Helmet + Chest Electronics (maybe gauntlet electronics???)
• Using MinuteFett’s armor + gauntlet 3D models. (this one is kind of obvious that it’s better but the fact that I get to use a little bit of some of the best armor available is so freaking cool)
• Synthetic Hair Wookie Trophies following RafalFett’s templates
• Real Mohair Girth Belt (If I had known the real deal was like 20-30 bucks I would have never made that yarn girth belt)
• Elastic Girth Belt straps like PP2 (for comfort and ease of use)
• Hand-Made Boots (no pressure!)
• Literally Anything Other Than Glued-On VelcroTM to attach the armor
• Zip up Flak Vest
• Actually looking at real reference images like a good boy instead of blindly following RafalFett’s templates. Absolutely nothing against Mr. Rafal, but his stencils can only get you about 97% of the way to perfection.
• I’ll try my best this time to not haphazardly hot glue everything together at the last minute. I’ll do that 2 minutes before the deadline instead.
• When I take the costume to school, I’ll take my stuff in a much more carry-able bag rather than just my backpack full of random junk. I made the deadly mistake last time of naively assuming I could carry my BACKpack in my HANDS for the entire day, while making no effort to lighten the load at all.
• Metal Parts???? I think the most necessary ones to get would be toe spikes, gauntlet switches, and a flamethrower, since those things got caught on everything I touched and fell apart instantly.

Hmm… I think that’s everything. I’ll go get to work on this thing, if I have any more time after writing this monster of a post.

The next update may not be for a while. I’m still putting pretty much all of my effort into the helmet at this point, and that isn’t really all that much since I’m still in school.

 

[thatdecade]

You got this! Looking good

 

[Eli Jinn]

Alright, I'm back with the first update.
The first things came off the printer last night:

It's two-tone because I was getting rid of some old filament.
These MinuteFett files are incredible! The first thing I noticed is the curvature. The ab plate specifically almost perfectly wraps around the torso in the way you would actually expect armor to. I've seen many sets of armor that take the term "plate" very literally
Now, I didn't print these at a very high quality. I believe it was a layer height of 0.20 mm, which was on purpose. When I made the armor for my last costume, I realized near the end that I didn't have time to print the last few pieces at the higher quality I usually worked in, so I increased the layer height and speed to save time. After the parts came off the printer, I noticed large, relatively smooth parts like Boba's armor can be printed at double the speed, half the quality, and look nearly identical. If you really take quality time to smooth out the layer lines with bondo and filler primer and sandpaper (or whatever method you find works for you) it will be worth it in the end. For reference, I logged my hours when working on my helmet that I printed at the same 0.20 mm layer height, and it took 22 total hours of smoothing to get it to a point I was happy with. While that may sound like a long time, but it took over 3 days straight to print the helmet. So for large parts, you'll almost never spend as much time smoothing the part than it took to make.
All of that to say this: Print at lower quality, then spend more quality time smoothing.

 

[Eli Jinn]

Next parts came off the bed early due to a filament feeding error. The kidney plate was able to bypass the failure due to its shortness.

Really sucks that the knees were so close to finishing but I think it's okay because they were a little big on me. You can't win them all, folks.

 

[Eli Jinn]

Ok, I've been busy with a lot of digital stuff.
I altered a few of the MF files, so I first tweaked the size and shape of the knees to fit my legs better and enlarged the dart holes to fit my knee darts.

Then, I changed the dent on the codpiece to better match what I believe the ESB codpiece looks like.

I don't know if I'm just stupid or blind, but I'm like 99% sure that the ESB codpiece has this triangular looking dent, and this is the best looking picture of it if you don't know what I'm talking about.

I also separated the flamethrower parts so they would fit a 5mm metal rod down the center to reinforce the flamer.

I have a neat idea for attaching the flamethrower so stay tuned for that.
In the real world, the only thing I've done is print the knees, which I royally screwed up. For some reason I decided to print them WAY too close together, and they were actually clipping into one another, so the right knee has a scar and the left has a big chunk taken out of it.

I think I must have disabled the setting to keep parts from clipping into each other. I also cracked the right knee while taking the supports off, just to add insult to injury.
Even though I'm making a big deal out of this stuff, it's not really serious enough to make new ones. These are just minor inconveniences that can be fixed. Even if they can't be fixed, nobody will notice.

 

[BudaFett]

That’s a great change in the cod piece.

 

[Eli Jinn]

That’s a great change in the cod piece.

Thanks! I have a little experience with sculpting in Blender, and I think it could have been better, but that's just what happens when you make something yourself. Nobody will ever have higher expectations than yourself.

 

[Eli Jinn]

Codpiece came off the printer today and it didn't fit quite right. That was my fault for not doing any measurements. I know better than to not take measurements before printing. It was too tight on the hips and too loose "front and back" if you will. It's easy to squash and stretch it to fit me, but I'm wondering if the details like the dents and those weird little square thingies on the upper left will look too obviously distorted...

 

[spicy fett]

The changes especially in the knees makes them less accurate same with the cod. It does look good though!

 

[spicy fett]

Also Luis aka minutefett is the king of accuracy!

 

[Eli Jinn]

The changes especially in the knees makes them less accurate same with the cod. It does look good though!

I understand the knees but are you sure about the codpiece?

 

[spicy fett]

I understand the knees but are you sure about the codpiece?

It might be similar to what you got but not exact but this is how great things are made keep up the good work!

 

[Eli Jinn]

Over spring break, I visited a friend of my dad who does sand casting. He helped me to make aluminum studs and a rangefinder stalk, although the stalk didn't come out well. Also, just for fun and because it looked cool, we casted the center diamond from aluminum as well.

Oh yeah, he also made me a pair of steel toe spikes, and they are glorious. We didn't do any polishing to them, so they are beautifully disgusting. They're already starting to rust too, so I'll seal that in eventually and I won't even have to weather them.
So yeah, sand casting probably wasn't the best option for tiny pieces like these, but it was an enjoyable experience, and with a bit of extra work, I'll have some nice metal parts.
Sorry I just have to look at these toe spikes again!

So beautiful.

 

[Eli Jinn]

Ethiopian gauntlets???

Yet again, all I had on hand were tiny rolls of filament and I wasn't about to wait for new rolls to come in before I printed these out. Well now I have the most festive gauntlets on the forums.
Again, props to MinuteFett for making these fit actual humans so well. It's a mystery why we put up with Popeye arms for so many years. Here's how my gauntlets fit on my arms:

Very nice. By the way, I'm wearing my old flightsuit in these pictures, which is why the weathering is so awful lol. The print for all the bits that go on the gauntlets failed miserably though, but it is what it is. I really need a resin printer for all those tiny parts, cause an FDM printer can only do so much.

 

[Eli Jinn]

Finally getting around to working on the armor.
I've put down the first layer of bondo on the chest armor, shoulders, and knees and sanded them. I'm only just now realizing that I forgot the center diamond. I don’t know if I'll paint that one just yet for this suit.

In the meantime, just when I finally got around to printing something again, I made the stupid, dumb, idiotic, smooth-brain, -52 IQ, overall unintelligent move to start a print after not calibrating it for a while, then LEFT WITHOUT WATCHING THE FIRST LAYER. I don’t know what compelled me to do something so blatantly stupid and obviously detrimental. It's not like I was in a rush or anything. Anyways, the printhead DESTROYED my build plate, and it's so mangled that I can't even flip it over and use the other side. Whatever though, I'll just buy another build plate! No! Why would it ever be that simple!? All the places that sell print sheets for my printer are oh so conveniently sold out! How lucky of me! There's no kind of projected time for them to be restocked, or if they even ever will be restocked, so for all I know this might as well be the end.

Anyways, in other news, I'll have to wait after I finish these armor pieces to paint them, since Jurassic_Fett is working on incredible new armor stencils. I'd recommend you follow him on Instagram so you can see them progress.

 

[Eli Jinn]

Hear ye! Hear ye!
I managed to fix my mangled build plate by ripping off the outer sheet and using some Goo Gone to remove the adhesive, but now I can only print on one side of the plate. In accordance with one of the laws of the universe, the build plates conveniently decided to be restocked the day after I fixed the plate. The only things I can see wrong with the printer now is that the proximity sensor seems to not work right anymore, which was probably the thing that did it in to begin with. Oh well. I just turned off automatic leveling and now I have to level it manually whenever I calibrate the machine.
TL : DR, I got the printer up and running, did some tests to make sure it wasn't about to explode in a firey ball of flames, and then started a huge print, which this thing has always been better at than small detailed prints. This mess of parts and tree supports will eventually become 3/4ths of the jetpack!

I really need a new printer. I would absolutely love a fancy new Bambu to death, but they're kinda small for Boba Fett stuff. Their plates can't fit a helmet in one piece, which kinda sucks.

 

[Eli Jinn]

In terms of news regarding the rest of the armor, I've sprayed on the first coat of filler primer.

Yet again I forgot the little old center diamond. I also tried my best attempt at fixing that big crack on the right knee. Not perfect but it will get there.
Huge news for the future paintjob though! My Jurassic_Fett stencils arrived in the mail and I could not be happier!

I'm so excited to use them, but I have to wait for JF to finish the rest of the armor stencils. Again, give him a follow on Instagram! ...you could also give me a follow but I mean you don't have to if you don't want to that's fine like I don't even care you know like...
*ahem* So yeah. Stuff is still happening.

 

[Jurassic_Fett]

Great work so far dude! Prints look great. Can't wait to see the stencils on there!

 

[Eli Jinn]

Whoops, forgot to post about my jetpack! Here is the body of it. I've been trying some different settings to try and get a little more consistency from my printer, one of them being increasing the build plate temperature. On the first three quarters of the body, I had it a little too hot, so the edges warped a bit and you can see there's some big seams to work with.

The last quarter that's blue and green turned out perfect though. Also its just thrown together with duct tape at the moment so nothing is official. I'm thinking for the huge seams I might use some heavier-duty putty instead of the glazing and spot putty that I normally use because that stuff is pretty thin going down and quite brittle.
In terms of attaching the jetpack I've got a lot to say...
Referring back to my goals for this project; I want to prioritize comfort as much as possible for this costume. I also need to take into consideration the fact that I will eventually be wearing this costume to school, which means getting up and sitting down repeatedly throughout the day. Last year that was no problem because I didn't have a jetpack. This year I fear that me and my JP won't be able to fit in the chair lol. So I need to be able to take the JP off and put it back on, very preferably by myself so I don't have to worry about some nerd dropping it on the floor. I couldn't even trust my mom to be careful with my armor, so I certainly can't trust a random high schooler. I'm such a hypocrit lol.
ANYWAYS I'm getting off topic. I need a way to secure the JP in a way that I can still attach and remove it conveniently and by myself. The solution I "came up with" is "inspired" (copied) from PinkFlamingos6 Post-Sarlacc build. What he did was used pegs protruding from the backplate and some goofy shaped holes cut into the jetpack.
(All these pictures are his, btw)

The idea is that the pegs slip into the larger hole and then the jetpack comes down to lock it in place. As long as the pegs get aligned generally with those holes (which can practically be about as big as you want) the jetpack just falls right into place. Then, with a push from the bottom, the JP easily comes off. Perfect. I will do my best to recreate this, and hopefully everything works out and nothing breaks! (watch this be foreshadowing)

 

[PinkFlamingos6]

Looking really good so far! Just be sure to reinforce the areas around the pegs and holes and you should be fine. Getting the holes and slots to line up is a little tricky but it's not too bad. I plan on having those pegs mounted to some kind of strapping/harness and slide the backplate over them. That way the weight of the JP isn't pulling the backplate off. Unless you find a way to securely attach the backplate to your costume.