Reach for the Front!

Katsu · Apr 15, 2012

LilTyrant said:
Helmet is looking pretty freakin' awesome!

I know you're still working on that buck (so you may already be planning on doing this), but there are a few things you may want to do to the box part to make your life easier before you make your first pull. I'm no expert, but I have done my share of vacuum forming for work and there are some things I've learned along the way.

It looks like you've got some massive undercuts going on where the bottom of the visor overhangs the box...which means you will not be able to get your formed plastic off easily once it's pulled. Since you're planning on pulling multiple visors, you'll want to be especially sure that the buck slides out easily from the formed plastic...otherwise you'll be wrestling with it after every pull and may even damage your buck trying to get the plastic off (not fun). Removing all undercuts and adding a gentle draft angle to all sides of your buck will definitely help with that. You should also probably add another 1"-ish to the bottom of your box to get your visor off the table. It's generally not recommended to have your desired shape extend all the way to the bottom of the buck...the pulled plastic can sometimes do some funky things around the bottom edges of a pull. Just my 2 cents.

Anyway, keep up the good work and sorry for my blabbin' if you already know all this

I was planning on filling in the gaps by sealing it partially with fiberglass or MDF board, and then filling with rondo (for strength) and smoothing with bondo (for pulling), I forgot to mention that the above image is just the beginning of the work on the buck, but I'd rather be warned of things than not, I tend to flake out about lots of things for instance...

I did not know about the extra 1" thing, I'll be sure to extend it when I work on smoothing out the box part. Your insight is greatly appreciated, I'm sort of flying by the seat of my pants, so any tips are awesome.

It will be tinting and detailing that are gonna kill me I think. I want it to be totally opaque from the outside, but still well visible from the inside, most spray-on tints I've seen here end up with a foggy interior. Going to experiment with stick-on tint, mylar, and I dunno what else... bleh.

p bro · Apr 16, 2012

Pretty awesome so far, I'm keen to see how this goes.

LilTyrant · Apr 17, 2012

I hope my comments wind up being useful

. From what I've experienced, there's some trial and error. Vacuum forming isn't an exact science...it depends a lot on the particular shape you're forming, the thickness of the material you're pulling, and the specific machine you're using. I've worked on 2 different machines that yield quite different results due to their personal quirks. I'm sure you'll figure it out though.

The tinting sounds like a tough one. Hopefully one of your experiments works out!

Katsu · Apr 17, 2012

Haha yeah, your tips are very helpful actually, I'm at the shop now building the extensions and fillers. But I may end up being lazy and just gluing a slab of wood to act as the extension foot, maybe add something cleaner once I get the hang of vacuum forming.
Luckily, Tap Plastics sells scrap acrylic sheets for about 1$/ft, which is like 90% off, so I grabbed a ton and am going to butcher them to test various thicknesses, and tint applications and detailing.

I am not very optimistic about the tinting... I realized it wasn't stretch on, instead it has a sticky side, and there's no way it's going to lay down flat. But I will be testing to see how it takes heat, if that goes well I'll stick it on the acrylic while it's flat, and then vacuum it, but I am sure it will just bubble instead. Whatever happens I REALLY don't want to use a spray tint, it seems like those ruin the visibility out of the visor.

Cereal Killl3r · Apr 18, 2012

Helm looks great!
Good luck on vac'ing the buck.
Interested to see how it comes out!

Cereal.

thorn696 · Apr 19, 2012

You're helmet looks awesome. Just wondering, were you able to fix you're paper problem? If not give me a IM. Other than that, I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for you're next update.

ZoidianKings · Apr 19, 2012

Your helmet is turning out really well.

Katsu · Apr 20, 2012

Thanks guys, this week's been keeping me away from the shop. I've only managed to clean up the visor, and have cleaned up the left ear thing on the helmet. I took some super high grit sandpaper to those ridges and it just made them rounded, so I think I am not having good luck with them yet, but since I've been reworking some of the stuff, I don't want to lay down a final layer of paint or go too hard-core on cleaning it up until the ears and brow are done.

In the meantime though, I slapped together the next step in the project (I need to have two things go at the same time to keep me from getting bored/frustrated) I try not to post small/incremental updates, so I waited until this was done.

My all time favorite gun in halo. Another Satchmo III file, I increased the size to the game dimensions, and that thing is gigantic! I have big hands, so it ends up fitting my hand just right. Going to have fun with this one, though I am bummed the needles aren't all the same dimensions, probably will just change the holes so that they are.

LilTyrant · Apr 20, 2012

Sweet. Totally getting ahead of the game, but...any plans to make it light up?

Katsu · Apr 21, 2012

Hahaha, I got ahead of myself too. I plan to make some acrylic needles and run leds inside the needler so they glow when plugged in (removable for transportation purposes)

Any tips on how I'd make those crystals would be appreciated!

Edit: Where the heck do the needles come out of?!

Annanymous · Apr 21, 2012

needler.so.beautiful.

my god. Glowing, LED needles. That would be SO cool.
I don't have any ideas for the needles yet except maybe taking some clear, semi hard plastic and cutting them / gluing them together into hollow crystal-shapes that would allow you to run purple/pink LEDs through them.

I'll keep an eye out for any other options though, keep it up!

Cereal Killl3r · Apr 21, 2012

Pepping for the Needler looks great!
Can't wait to see it come together!

Cereal.

Sangheilioz · Apr 22, 2012

Annanymous said:
needler.so.beautiful.

my god. Glowing, LED needles. That would be SO cool.
I don't have any ideas for the needles yet except maybe taking some clear, semi hard plastic and cutting them / gluing them together into hollow crystal-shapes that would allow you to run purple/pink LEDs through them.

I'll keep an eye out for any other options though, keep it up!

EL wire might give it a more uniform glow, with LEDs you'd see a series of bright points. Great idea!

LilTyrant · Apr 22, 2012

Katsu said:
Any tips on how I'd make those crystals would be appreciated!

If it were me, I'd probably go with a similar tactic to what CyberBen has planned for his Needler: sculpt them, mold them, then cast them. You can get clear casting material that can be tinted different colors. Or, you could mold them clear and just paint them with a tint. I think Tamiya has quite a few different colors of rattle can tint.

If you're worried about getting hot spots with the LEDs, you can get a more even glow by diffusing the light a bit with some frost. You can get spray frost in a rattle can that can be used to make clear materials more translucent, instead of totally transparent. Play around with it enough, and you can get LEDs to light pipe really with just a single light.

Can't wait to see how this turns out

Katsu · Apr 23, 2012

Big time update time!

I... don't know if I should make a seperate thread for the needler, so I will keep it here now. If I do make another thread I'll just edit out this stuff...

First, the helmet!

I've been very slowly working on it, slowed down by work, school, and the needler. But today I got the visor to a point where I could vacuum form it. I got the draft lines down close, and this is my test run with PETG, to check for any gripping it may do. It did grip in two spots, so I will be poking those angles out further for the final Acrylic vacuum forming. I tried PETG's fit and it's too floppy for my needs.

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The work for the needler is pretty hefty, so I will be putting it in its own seperate thread here:

A Spoonful of Blamite Helps the Ownage Go Down!

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tac2002 · Apr 25, 2012

dude this build is looking awesome...cant say the say about mine. after putting one together it looks horrible. i've gone through 2 makes and its not right. any tips katsu??? printed the link you posted and turn out to be huge..."bobble head" huge. and tried the other size but it is small, should of read on when you put you had change the size arrrhg stupid me. anyway ill try another one... so any tips would be helpful

Katsu · Apr 26, 2012

tac2002 said:
dude this build is looking awesome...cant say the say about mine. after putting one together it looks horrible. i've gone through 2 makes and its not right. any tips katsu??? printed the link you posted and turn out to be huge..."bobble head" huge. and tried the other size but it is small, should of read on when you put you had change the size arrrhg stupid me. anyway ill try another one... so any tips would be helpful

I did warn that I have a big head. It fits me pretty well as you can see in the pictures (my head takes up a lot of room in there)

My best suggestion is that you measure your own head's diameter (NOT circumference) from nose to back of skull, and from ear to ear. And then add one some extra for the padding and blank space (the ear boxes and the front of the helmet) You can get super math and engineer about it and print out a screencap of the bottom, and figure out what percentage of it you need to have your head be... and do multiplication and stuff on that number! Just remember that the neckhole needs to be not-pepped or cut out as shown in my most frequently used diagram:

Katsu · May 1, 2012

I've been lagging in my progress on my helmet. This is half due to the needler, half due to school, and three quarters due to my total and utter hatred of difficult sanding. The ear pieces on the Mk. V are a nightmare! Trying to make a perfectly round 1/4 dome is nigh impossible for me, especially with my short temper. When I sanded a hole into the helmet, I decide "Bollocks to this!" and went all engineer on it. I cut the darn ear things out, modeled them in Autodesk Inventor, and printed one out. Then vacuum formed copies of it in PETG (I try to never destroy a master copy, in this case I won't glue the master printed copy into the helmet which would ruin it)

The 3d printed master copy. My helmet ended up being EXACTLY twice the size of the reference photos I'd printed out, so I just took careful caliper measurements of the pictures and doubled those numbers.

The "raft" the 3d printer slaps on the bottom of pieces, this is meant to hold the piece off the surface of the printer, so as to reduce the chance of it warping from temperature differences, and so it doesn't get destroyed when wedging it off the surface, as you can see a lot of damage was done to the raft, but the earpiece was spared.

Smoothed out since PETG picks up darn near every detail.

The first test was actually with polystyrene, because it was opaque and more chemically reactive, and more porous so it'd take paint or bondo a lot better...

But it just didn't pick up enough detail, and if I'm going to mold this thing, it will lose even more detail, which would just result in an unacceptable level of detail loss! So I went with PETG, it picked up a ton of detail, you can see the mesh vacuum table was more clearly defined in PETG than polystyrene.

So here it is installed. I oriented the horizontal bars with the top of the visor because it looked the most right when worn, it looks tilted when laying down though. I filled in the gaps after taking this picture but forgot to take a picture then.

Next is to do the other side, then cut the vent and cheek details, and... smooth it out and it's done?

kahnah · May 9, 2012

Wow, well done. This is pure genius. From one engineer to another what printer did you use to print from auto cad.

Katsu · May 10, 2012

kahnah said:
Wow, well done. This is pure genius. From one engineer to another what printer did you use to print from auto cad.

We use this exact one:
http://pp3dp.com/
It prints in moderately high quality ABS that takes paint well, and sanding okay (it is half hollow, soooo you eventually break through)

Baby update! The plastic hooks on the shop's orbital sander for the velcro melted, so it wasn't taking sandpaper. I figured I'd get a detail sander to hold me over until the replacement, and allow me to sand harder to reach areas:

I did a hideously failed test at mirroring my PETG visor, the cheap crap I used wouldn't tint right. I actually tried two ways of vacuum forming it too, first trying to vacuum form just the mirroring, and then trying to vacuum form PETG with the mirroring already stuck on. The first test had the mirror not melt at all, so the vacuum just sucked on it and nothing happened. The second test saw the mirroring melt the PETG completely, and then tear in half.
This is just trying to heat gun it on:

I got the second ear hole cut out, here are the pair:

The holes have some disparities, but I am fixing those in bondo.

Doing a test fit because of all the talk of bobble heads. While it looks a smidge big on me without any other armor on, I knick my nose taking it on and off, and my chin would hang out the boottom if I went much smaller, so I think I just have a natural bobble head.

I got the vent bases modeled and printed out:

Test fit:

Cut out the spots for them:

Aaaaand installed. I started building them up with bondo, since I basically only printed the vent parts of the vent boxes.

It's coming together. Next is to install the ear vents, carve out the last detail indents (upper cheek, nose, the dimples in the back of the head, maybe the trim on the bottom rim), and then smooth out all the frayed paper. The ear vents will only be in for casting. My casted copy will probably put microphones or speakers in those spots so I don't sound like a mummy, and can hear inside it.

Reach for the Front!

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