Another Cylon joins the ranks !!!

[Cylon-Knight]

Back pack looks great Mr Fett - chrome finish looks good all over on your suit.

What Star Wars suits do you have / have you had? I would guess Fett (der!) and probably a Stormtrooper and maybe Vader???

[Mr Fett]

My own Star Wars costumes have been a Boba Fett, Tusken Raider, Imperial Seatrooper (from the old RPG Imperial Sourcebook.....only one of its kind). I've also helped build a female Tusken Raider and Imperial Sandtrooper for my wife, and a Dengar for my friend, as well as a few more Tusken Raider costumes for other people.

Boba Fett takes a ridiculous amount of time to construct to the point where it looks good, but people love seeing it. The jetpack alone from starting to build to finishing painting was easily 100 hours of work. Granted that's the biggest piece so I did all the armor first and saved that for last. I had a cd of some high res pics of one of the real suits on museum exhibit, and I had to sit in front of the computer with a paintbrush for hours and try and match up the weathering on all the armor parts as close to accurate as possible. It came out good, so all the time was worth it.

[GoldCylon]

Awesome looking suit, just amazing.

[Cylon-Knight]

I just recently read that Boba Fett is probably the most intense costume to get right. Yours is spot on! EXCELLENT WORK

Do you have a motorized "range finder" on your helmet? And a voice changer/speaker system (with a boom mic in side the helmet, etc.)?

The weathering on yours is wonderful - even the blaster is weathered to match. Glad to know you will bring a lot of GOOD info to ByYourCommand.net. With you, Dale, and all the other fine members here - THIS Is the place to be for classic Cylons!

[Mr Fett]

I don't have the motorized range finder.....yet. A friend of mine who loves to tinker with electronics wants to make one up for me.

I used to have the voice amp in my costume, and the speaker was in one of my side saddle bags. I'd like to eventually get one figured out all self contained in the helmet so I wouldn't have to run wires. That's a future project as well.

The weathering is a combination of layered and topical painting methods. On the real suit, what they did was paint all the armor silver first, then mask off the larger sections of "dings" (I used liquid latex to do so), then paint the green on top of that. After that, pull off the masking latex and the larger silver spots show through underneath. After that you go back in with the yellow color that shows around the edges of the dings and paint it on topically with a paintbrush. You also then topically paint on any extra smaller silver damage areas.

So basically, mainly using the masking layered method for the larger silver sections, then brush paint the silver on for all the smaller sections. Then to finish it off, you mist black in spots to dull down, and cover with Testors Dullcote. Even the stickers on the chest and shoulder bell get weathered down to blend in. The suits also naturally pick up scratches and such while doing costuming events, so natural weathering blends into the whole scheme and that fits this particular character's costume just fine.

On the real suit only the green armor sections had the extra yellow paint around the edges of the battle damage. The gauntlets and helmet and jetpack went straight from silver to the top color typically. The shoulder bells and knee armor have a different color around the edges of the battle damage than the green armor parts do. Lots of colors involved. One of the guys on the Fett board researched all the paint colors used on the movie suit a number of years ago, so my suit is painted with the screen accurate shades of paint.

The reason these Boba Fett suits are so complex is there's a ton of different components to them, some small but still important. Much more pieces than other Star Wars costumes.

[GoldCylon]

Boba has a small calculator on his arm doesn't he? Do you have that piece on the arm also?

[Mr Fett]

The calc pad is shown in the picture above. It's at the front of the left arm gauntlet by the wrist.

[Cylon-Knight]

Very cool... next how about a working jet-pack? K? SUPER!

[Mr Fett]

I know one guy out of all the Boba Fett costumers I've seen who has made his jetpack shoot off airbursts out of his jetpack thrusters, and he happens to live an hour from me actually. He's an engineer by trade and modified a paintball air cannister with whatever he did inside the thing to shoot compressed air out the thrusters. It's loud and gets your attention, but adds a few more pounds to the weight of the pack.

Dale, more on my mystery armor. I remember I saw a set that was unpainted white styrene on Ebay a few months ago that was exactly identical to all the parts I have. It was in crappy condition with some of the parts having a partial paintjob, but every one of the pieces themselves exactly matched my pieces, and the seller said they had those parts since the 1980s. Did some costume company produce Cylons back then? I figure vacformed armor would be considered "high end" type of costuming back in the '80s. Any clue? I know for a fact Krop wasn't around in the '80s.

[GoldCylon]

To my knowledge no one has sold a complete Cylon replica to the open market till recent years. I am sure a few people sold copies now and then to friends, and others known in the loop, but never in public till eBay hit it big in the late 90's