Jetpack: v2

After being so impressed with the armor and service from MinuteFett I asked about purchasing a jetpack from him but he told me he does not do that. He recommended I contact Seven Cat Studios and purchase a jetpack from him, which I did.

It took about a month to arrive. It was pretty raw but I loved that the big missile, tank tops and bottoms, middle rocket collar, “piano keys” and thrusters were all separate pieces.

Painting the trunk:

And then everything came together…

…until I realized (was told) that the base of the jetpack is NOT silver, like the rest of the armor but it is white.

Figuring it will not be so difficult to fill in the silver with white I tried it. And it looked like crap. So out comes the razor blades, lacquer thinner and sandpaper and a nice, fresh coat of white paint.

All that time, during January (when it stopped raining for all of an hour), I was wishing I had a nice climate-controlled indoor place I could paint or at least cure the painted stuff.

I recalled that we had several leftover L-shaped pieces of aluminum duct from when we had our air conditioner replaced a couple of years ago. After connecting 3 of the pieces (with gaffer’s tape; not duct tape, sorry!) I put a small garage utility heater in front of it and a makeshift aluminum “hood” on the top to keep the air in. And it works! It stays a nice 95º-100ºF and helps paint cure in no time!

I then added the Maskol to the areas that should be exposed:

Then the other layers:

Then there came another problem:

Speaking with Darth Voorhees (who runs Seven Cat Studios) he remarked that the glyphs on the top of the tanks are the wrong color and they should be black. This is the image from the Boba Fett ROTJ CRL I followed when painting:

Note that the glyphs at the top are the same color as the tops of the tanks. I used a digital color meter to confirm this.

Darth Voorhees pointed this out which caused a bit of discussion in the costuming community. There were a few rounds of discussion when the decision was finally made that the glyphs are black so I will eventually mark them in.

A few other things I did:

• The rocket and thrusters came ready to be screwed in so I added some neoprene rubber washers to protect the wing nut inside from pressing too hard on the fiberglass.
• Added long screws with washers, lock washers and wing nuts to attach the piano keys, tank tops/bottoms and center tank collar.
• Using the information at The Dented Helmet (I can’t find it now) I fashioned the hooks out of steel with an aluminum backing. The previous pack had mounts using rivets which worried me drilling into fiberglass with no ability to access the backing.

And here is the pack just after getting a new coat of matte clear coat: