Nothing here arrived finished. Every helmet, every strap, every blaster started as a box of raw parts, a roll of filament and a lot of sanding. This is where that happens.
A screen-accurate costume is far less about the moment you put it on and far more about the months before. Parts get trimmed, glued, masked, painted, and taken apart again when a detail sits two millimetres off. The photos on this page are not a portfolio — they are the messy middle: unpainted shells on a workbench, tape everywhere, half a blaster in pieces next to the printer that made it.
Almost everything shown here was built by hand in this room. The props are 3D-printed on my own machine, finished with filler, primer and paint. What follows is grouped by trade rather than by date — helmet, blaster, armor, boots — because that is how the work actually splits up.
A Stormtrooper helmet arrives as separate pieces, all oversized and untrimmed. Nothing lines up yet. The first job is cutting each part back to its true edge, which decides everything that follows: get the trim line wrong and the halves will never close properly.
This stage is slow and unglamorous. Mostly it is measuring against reference photos, cutting a millimetre, and checking again.
The tube stripes have their own specific design and color. For this one I decided to cut a mask rather than paint them entirely by hand. The CRL is precise about it: tube stripes are medium blue, numbering between 9 and 16 per side, with the curved bends extending backwards.
Masking takes longer than painting. That ratio never changes.
The blaster comes off my own printer in bare filament, with visible layer lines across every surface. Getting from there to the photo on the right means filler, sanding, primer, more sanding, and only then paint. The print is maybe a fifth of the work.
The last check is not how it looks on the bench but whether it sits right in the holster and can be drawn without snagging — a prop that photographs well but fouls on the armor is not finished.
The serial number on the receiver, the checkering on the grip, the selector markings — all of it is moulded into the print and then picked out by hand. None of it reads from across a room, and all of it is the difference between a prop that holds up in a close photo and one that does not.
All weapons shown on this site are non-functional replica props, 3D-printed from plastic filament. They fire no projectiles, contain no firing or propulsion mechanism, and are decorative costume accessories only.
Armor is held together by adhesive and by strapping, and both are invisible once the costume is on. They are also the two things that decide whether it can be worn for six hours at a convention or only for a photo.
White boots that match the armor either do not exist off the shelf in the right shape, or are very expensive. The answer is to start with the right last and change the color yourself — several thin coats, flexing the leather between each one so the finish does not crack the first time you walk in them.
Somewhere between a hobby room and a hangar bay. Wall panels built to match an Imperial corridor, a lit display case, the 3D printer that produced most of the props on this page, and a workbench that is never quite tidy. It is not a studio — it is where the sanding dust ends up.
