Welp, now that I'm pretty much finished with my buy'ce (at least.. on the outside!) I suppose maybe I should update this thread, eh? Lol. As it turns out, buying a house, moving into said house, followed by Thanksgiving and Christmas tends to eat away at your free time, who knew?
Anyways, I'll go ahead and make a massive one-post update for everything I took pictures of from the last update until now
So the next thing I decided to do was go ahead and make the visor. I'm not 100% satisfied with the color (I wanted gold but could only find orange acrylic paper
) so I might end up redoing it in the near future. Either way, here it is:
Materials involved:
Orange (grr) acrylic paper from Blick
http://www.dickblick.com/Gila Mirror Tint (stuff ain't cheap, so if anyone else wants to make a custom mirror visor, hit me up, I have a WHOLE ROLL of this!)
Gila tint adhesive (basically seemed like it was pretty much just water)
El-cheapo protective plastic mask from Harbor Freight
To get the sizing right I just pushed a piece of paper up inside my helmet and traced about a quarter inch larger than the T-visor slot then traced that over onto the plastic face guard
Cutting out the visor shape from the mirror tint and acrylic paper
Visibility isn't bad - it's actually a lot better than shown in this photo (there was an extra layer of plastic film on the face guard that I didn't notice and peel off until afterwards - d'oh)
Looks good
After getting that out of the way, finishing the bondo/sanding and then painting was next up on the list...
Cut a thin strip out of Sintra to use as the brow ridge, since the App Team and several others advised me that it would be necessary to pass muster
It was a lot more difficult to get it straight and even all the way around than I thought it would be. Ultimately, I ended up having to cut the strip into a series of ~3-inch segments and place them around the helmet in series.
Of course, more bondo and sanding........
Once it was sufficiently smooth, I hit it with Rub'n'Buff - Love that shiny metal look!
Used toothpaste for weathering, super easy to work with. I put the toothpaste onto the Rub'n'Buff layer and then sprayed primer over the whole thing
My blue metallic paint, unfortunately, was NOT happy with being applied to this primer (protip: use paint and primer from the same brand! Might have had something to do with the glitter flecks in the paint also, but either way I ended up sanding and re-weathering/priming/painting 3 TIMES. On the 3rd try I used the same brand paint as the primer and it went on smooth, but the color isn't exactly what I wanted. Oh well)
Tragic-
After peeling off my painters tape, I was quite disappointed to find that the painter's tape left lines and tiny little specks of peeled off paint. I was pretty certain that I'd have to sand and repaint for a 4th time...
Fortunately, after some awesome advice on my Master Planning Thread, a light sanding and blackwash did wonders and salvaged it
Followed much the same process for the rest of the helmet. You'll notice here that I've put earcaps on also. I basically just measured out the size that they needed to be on the helmet with measuring tape and used a ruler+freehand to draw them out on the Sintra. I cut out 2 layers of Sintra with the same shape (accursed 3mm Sintra, lol), heated them individually and molded them to the side of the helmet. I had to shave a bit off the top of the inner layer in order to get it to lay flush with the brow ridge. I used E6000 adhesive to laminate the two layers together once they were shaped, did a SLIGHT amount of reshaping once they finished curing, then sanded the bevel into the edges and carved the center trench/hole/thing into it freehand with my Dremel. I attached them to the helmet with the same E6000+some light clamps to hold them on while it cured. Hopefully that's enough explanation on those, sorry for no pics there!
After the painting, weathering, blackwash, and sealing was done, I think it turned out really nicely!
Also for everyone that I'm sure notices, I intentionally carved the key vents "upside down." I like the way it looks better than the standard. To carve them I measured it out with measuring tape, drew them on, then cut them out with the Dremel.
Back view:
Rockin it - I attached the visor to only the faceplate with hot glue. I may attach some metal brackets or something to the inside of the bucket to help hold the visor flush to the top, but it looks fine without it IMO.
I made a Shae Vizla-inspired RF to go on the side. I'm thinking I may just stick to having one instead of going for one on each side, and I'm not 100% sold on the look either. I may end up redoing it. You'll probably notice that I wore it along with the upper torso bits of my armor to the Ep7 opening. I didn't feel right not wearing something and figured that it was probably close enough to be presentable at least! Anyway, as this is the helmet thread, I've cut the pic down to just the helmet
Technical details!
Ok so, if you're wondering how the faceplate attaches to the helmet and such, here's how I got it all together--
I used Hard Drive magnets attached by hot glue in 4 locations each on the faceplate and bucket. These things were easy to remove from the hard drives (with the right tools!) but a pain to remove from their metal brackets. Basically, I set something heavy on one end of it with the other end hanging over the edge of the concrete sidewalk then beat on it with a hammer until the magnet split into two pieces from the metal brace flexing behind it. Keeping the polarities facing the right directions was annoying, but otherwise not too big of a deal
To attach the RF, I just drilled a hole through the earcap and side of the helmet and attached it with a screw from the inside that went into the little stem of the RF. Don't really have a pic of this one, hopefully it's self explanatory enough.
I used some simple strips of foam cut from a larger square that I bought from Joann's for the padding. Works great!
PHEW, that's a huge update, if anyone has any questions for me feel free! I'll try my best to keep up with answers. Hopefully I'll be finishing up the entire kit soon enough
-Thanks!
-A'nu Biss