I use resin shin tools. They are light enough, and since they're down by your ankles, I never really cared I don't have original Paterson tools, etc.
A tip on your armor painting if you want to be authentic to ROTJ: When masking off your bigger damage areas on the green torso armor as well as the shoulders and knees, Lucasfilm did not layer all three layers like you are planning to do (silver, then light yellow, then green....for example). They layered silver straight into green (or yellow if you are doing shoulders and knees), and then brush painted the light yellow around the bigger damage spots that they had masked off. They only masked one layer, not two. That's how I did my own armor, because that's how the real suits were.
