We will start with the chest, back and bottom plates as the principles are the same. when the chest, back and bottom came they were all clean and new.  I wanted to dirty them just like the sandtrooper. The method I used was to sporadically spray a can of textured paint and then apply boot polish. The first thing I did was to cover the plates and dirty them all over. I then scrubbed them down to make them more effective and weathered.

As you can see Andrew has signed my chest plate for me.

Next I started on the arms. The arms come in three pieces. shoulder bell, bicep and forearm.  I have used the same weathering principle through out the armour process.

The armour is held in place with industrial Velcro.

Bottom & Back	Chest Plate

The next bit was to weather the legs and change the knee plate from a Stormtrooper to a Sandtrooper.

If you look more carefully at the left knee plate you will see that the sandtrooper has a diamond plate as appose to the stormtrooper who has a flat plate.

Stormtrooper

Sandtrooper

One of the biggest giveaways for a sandtrooper is the abdominal plate. When I first got my armour it came with a stormtrooper's abdominal plate. I changed this for the sandtrooper plate.  If you look more closely you can see the black buttons are not present in the sandtrooper plate.

My Sandtrooper abdominal plate.

ANH Sandtrooper's abdominal plate.

In this shot of a stormtrooper it is more clear.

One of the other Sandtrooper and Stormtrooper giveaways are the shoulder straps. If you look closely at the Sandtrooper and the Stormtrooper you will see the difference.

These are my straps. I used leather strips left over from my ammo belt.

I did the gloves and ammo belt last.

Notice I have the leather belt.  This is much easier to wear than the ABS one.  My sandtrooper armour is 100% AA SDS, and I am very proud of that, as he is the man that did the originals in 1976 for George Lucas.

This is the complete armour in it's full glory.

You can see from the ANH check point scene how close and good my armour is.

I have done a bit of cutting and pasting and added myself to one of the ANH move along scenes.