Alright, finally a few minutes for a proper update.
First, a few details about the final scramble to finish this project. One of the long-distance participants in this project was Erin, one of the only skilled seamstresses we had on board. She arrived just a couple of days before we drove down to Anaheim and was instantly relegated to spending her days chained to the industrial sewing machine:
My friend Alex spent a solid day in the sewing room helping out by transferring patterns to the vinyl and cutting out the pieces for her to sew:
The resulting vests looked a bit weird on a mannequin:
But better on me:
Here's Matt trying his on:
And another embarrassing snapshot of Marie, Alex's wife:
So while 18 flak vests were being churned out in the sewing room, the rest of us continued to work on the armor parts. Here's some of the backplates being painted:
And Matt doing final assembly on a jetpack:
At this point, since parts were starting to pile up and get in the way again, we started stacking things against the retaining wall outside the workshop:
Here's Daniella after she'd finished painting all of the knee dart launchers:
Somewhere along the way I finished the paintjob for the first jetpack. Then it got blackwashed:
We also finished assembling and painting kneepads:
By this time, final weathering on the parts had become a non-stop process. There was always at least one person blackwashing grime onto the pieces, and often it was two or three people:
Here's most of the knees done:
At this point, Matt was doing the final masking and painting the secondary colors onto the jetpacks:
There were a lot of them:
And Trevor picked out the red bits on the gauntlets:
And there was more blackwashing:
At some point, late one night after everyone else had gone home, Trevor and I vacformed a bunch of toe armor. The only photo I have is this one showing a couple pairs after they'd been glued onto some of the boots and primed:
But while I was taking that photo, there were at least 20 more pairs of toe caps in primer on the bench behind me.
With the mad scramble of the last day or so, there weren't a lot of photos taken. Mostly the Wednesday before the convention was spent counting everything up, loading tools and painted costume parts into Matt's truck, and jamming as much Mandalorian as I could get into my passenger seat:
The drive south was pretty uneventful:
I checked into the hotel a little before midnight. Since I was still all hopped up on energy drinks and road trip junkfood, I couldn't sleep. Instead, I walked around the convention center for a bit:
When I'd finally wore myself out, I went back to the room and passed out. A few hours later, I woke up to this:
I ended up spending most of Thursday stuck in the hotel room adding straps to things and doing final tweaks. On Friday, I broke out some of my Old Republic stuff:
Saturday morning everybody converged on my hotel room to get strapped into their gear. In the midst of the pandemonium, it was tough to get a photo of all of the activity. Here's my sister and my girlfriend doing the final assembly on the gauntlets while my niece and nephew get into their jumpsuits:
Outside the room the first two people I'd strapped together were all ready and waiting to head out while just to the left of the frame were four more folks that I was strapping parts onto.
Here's one of the guys waiting in the hallway:
It was a very busy morning, but there was fun to be had as well:
Matt had taken the parts for his suit and his wife's suit to his room for final assembly. He stopped by for a couple of minutes before disappearing. I didn't see them at all for the rest of the day.
In any case, before too long we'd gotten all seventeen of the Deathwatch Mandalorians put together by mid-day. On the way down stairs, someone snapped a photo of us crammed into one of the service elevators:
Here's thirteen of us hitting the lobby:
The one photo op I was really looking forward to was a snapshot with all of us in front of Roxy the Rancor. With Matt, his wife, and their friend Colin wandering off on their own, the best I could do was getting the remaining fourteen of us together at once:
After the original few "family portrait" photos, we had to get a few action shots as well:
But this one's still my favorite:
I'm the dead guy in this picture.
After we'd finished there, we went on to stop by all of the big photo-op setups. This one was fun:
But many of them were simply not large enough to fit us all:
Still, we had fun wandering around the hall for a bit and stopping for photos. Unfortunately, we didn't have a designated photographer, so I'm still scouring the internet in the hopes of finding better pictures of the lot of us.
Of course, keeping a group that size together is a lot like herding cats, so after a couple of hours, we started peeling off and going our separate ways. The last group snapshot we got was eight of us in front of the entrance before we'd completely scattered:
Once the show had closed down, we loaded up most of the gear with the two guys who'd brought pickup trucks. I stayed behind so I could spend a couple of days in Southern California with my girlfriend and got to come home to find the project explosion piled up in the workshop:
Fortunately, Trevor came by and the two of us made quick work of getting everything put away. The shop is a lot sexier now:
Time for the next project...
cool:cool
