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| Belt Boxes |
| Belt Boxes |
| I'm not going to get into any arguments over what exactly these boxes do. If you want to go with what Shane Johnson says in the Technical Journal, that's fine. If you want to make up your own purpose for them, that's fine, too. All I know is that they are a pretty cool looking part of his costume and you'll want to make them. |
| Vader sustained tremendous bodily injuries during a battle with his former master, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Along with a few replacment limbs, he is required to wear body armor and a complex computerized respirator. The belt boxes Vader wears are part of his life support system...... |
| I started by picking up a couple of pine trinket boxes form a craft store for ~ $5 a piece..(Don't bother with the more expensive oak boxes at $15 a whack.) I found a nice direct head-on shot of Vader's belt box and scanned it on my compter. I adjusted the size of the photo to match the size of my belt box, printed the picture and used that as a template for marking the holes. |
| Next I measured all of the little pieces that were going to be attached to the box and chose the corresponding sized drill bit. The larger squarish holes were started with a large drill bit, and finished with a sanding tip on my Rotary Tool. (aka Dremel). The slots for the piece of white tubing were made with a cut-off wheel, then widened and fine tuned with sand paper.. |
| 12 Cap Screws These form the six silver buttons on each belt box. They can be found at you local hardware/DIY store. The size depends on the size of your belt box. Pick up corresponding nuts for the cap screws while you are there. Place the cap screws into their holes and thread the nuts on from the inside of the box. I could only find them in black, so I painted them silver and filled in the hex slot with silver Sculpey. |
| 2 Red Bezel lamps with housings I had no trouble finding these at Radio Shack. I believe the catalog number for this item is 272-340. $1.99 for a 2-pack. This item comes apart so that the light and housing can go on from the front, and the nut that comes with it will secure it on the inside of the box. You won't need the bulb that may come with it. I'll cover this in the belt box lighting section. |
| 4 Square green lights I wish that these were as easy to find. I could have purchased from a McMaster-Carr catalog, but it would have cost me more that I wanted to spend. I'm still looking for something good but cheap. If my current design doesn't suit you, Vader Maker Australia has wonderful instructions on making the green squares on his site. Perhaps both of our ideas will spark a new idea for you..(and you can fill us in!). Well, here's how I made mine: I picked up four tubes of very cheap lipstick from Wal-Mart (99 cents each.) I hacksawed the clear squarish caps down to about a 1 inch length and made holes in my wooden box for them to slip into. I painted the insides of the lipstick tube covers with transparent green stained glass window color found at the craft store. Once they were finished, I glued them into place and slipped the housings on over them. I created the housings out of Sculpey and glued into place after baking and fine tuning with an Exacto knife. A piece of rubber or placemat would have worked just as well for this housing, I think. |
| The Little Pieces: |
| A piece of reinforced hose. This is a hardware store item and will probably found in the plumbing section +/or the tubing/hose section. It is a piece of hose that is used for washing machine hook ups, sink aerator sprayer thingys, tonic machines in restaurants, medical gas hook-ups for ventilators, etc....Buy a foot or so, incase you make a mistake. Cut off sections of tubing that match the length of the parallel slots cut into the belt boxes. Next, slice the small bit of tubing lengthwise and slip into the slots. Secure the hose with glue on the inside of the belt box. |
| The Finished Product |
| The dimensions for full sized belt boxes based on those made by the now-defunct Galaxy Trader were given to me as being: 4 3/4" x 31/2" x ~2" deep. |
| The Box |
| Whatever you can find that is the right size and will be easy to work with will do. Some people use metal or plastic "hobby boxes" from an electronics store, while others are using heavy grade paper mache boxes. I wanted something very durable, yet easy to work with. The hobby boxes were all too big for my proportions, so I had to do a little thinking........ |
| Well....It's never finished. I plan to do the green lights over again. They look crappy in this photo..but awesome when lit up at night. The reason why they look a little too blue, is because the "green" LEDs are more of lemon-lime color. Bascially, they are too "yellowy" and the bluer lens counteracts this, thus creating the desired teal green color. |
| The Box |
| The Little Pieces: |
| The Finished Product |
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