A key part of dressing like the bounty hunter Boba Fett is putting on his signature jetpack. Kyle Gilbert made the rest of the character’s costume a couple of years ago and recently spent about five weeks building the jetpack. He primarily used Sintra foam PVC in 1/8″ and 1/4″ sheets (he got them from a sign company) and a couple of cardboard tubes he got from a tapestry shop. Those materials were given to him for free. He also used dowel rods, Bondo, masking tape, PVC glue, and paint. Though it’s okay to pay someone else $350 or so dollars to make a jetpack for you, this option is clearly much cheaper.
After he constructed the jetpack – which you can read about at Instructables – he was ready to paint:
In my opinion, the most fun part was painting, but the most tedious was masking. I began with primer on each piece, then aluminum paint, then masking and painting each color. I used trash bags and grocery sacks to cover large areas so that everything wouldn’t have to be taped.
For the areas where I wanted the silver to show through, I used a liquid mask that I painted onto each of these detail areas. Once the mask was dry, I would paint the color, and after 20-30 minutes of paint drying, I would peel off the masked areas. You may be tempted to skip this step (like I did with my original armor), but you’ll probably regret it if you do. The liquid mask is a little hard to find, but I found a bottle at Michael’s, and it’s probably the coolest part of the whole project. It just makes the worn areas look so nice. I promise, you won’t regret it.
Since the angle of my original missile wasn’t quite right, I ended up rebuilding the bottom half to get it right. It was a pain because it required me to cut into the dowel quite a bit to get to the right size, but I’m glad I took the time to do this.
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