Jester-19's ME3 rebreather helmet - First time builder DONE (pics within)

I'm updating this first post with a comparison shot of the helmet as it is currently with the pep when I first started it. I've seen a few folks do this and I think it lets people see what's going on quickly and then they can dive into the nitty gritty details...

Updated: 02/14/2014


Original post below

I've been interested in putting together a set of armor for a long time now and having found the 405th I've decided to finally give it a shot. The builds that you folks have done have been nothing short of astonishing and inspiring. If I can put some armor together that is a fraction as good as some of things I've seen I'll be pretty excited.

I've got a fair bit of experience building stuff but this will be my first time building something via pep. So I figure it makes sense to work out the kinks on some smaller stuff than a full set of armor. I've put together a couple of the high def hand plates to get a sense for how pep works and how resin goes. That went pretty smoothly. My end goal will be a set of Halo 4 armor but I'm going to run through the whole process on a less complicated piece: a helmet from Mass Effect - the N7 rebreather. I'm going to use this thread to document and trouble shoot the process.

At this point, I think I've scaled the helmet appropriately. I added two inches to the height of my head to get a size for the helmet. Printed it off and began assembling it. I've got more than half of it together and the pic below was from yesterday...



Its coming together pretty well - lots of detail in it. I'm hopeful that it will fit but I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to split it somewhere at the back to get my head into it. I'm starting to give some thought to where and how I'll accomplish that.

I expect to finish the pep soon and move into the resin process, hopefully life won't get in the way too much...

Thanks for checking out my first build!

Jester

Looking good! Love the fact that your using tweezers as well. i learned that from watching a few other guys builds.

What do you find the tweezers useful for?

Dorvack said:

What do you find the tweezers useful for?

Click to expand...

The tweezers come in handy for some of the tiny folds that some of the more complicated models have; it helps make for nice crisp folds. With most of the tabs, after I've scored them with a pen, they crease very cleanly over a sharp edge. Not so with the smaller ones, plus I use the tweezers to get in tight spaces and firmly seat the tabs...

Alrighty, last night I was able to finish the pep as you can see below; putting the pep together was surprisingly fun with all of the detail to it, but I am glad to be moving on to the next steps. Next up: a few well placed struts internally to push out a few problem areas and then resin time. Over the next few days I hope to get a few coats of resin on the exterior/interior followed by a combo of fiberglass and rondo on the interior. The rondo will be going into the nooks and crannies that getting the mat into would be a pain like the arms that sweep along the back...





Thinking beyond the bondo stage, which is going to entail more than a little sanding I think I'm still trying to figure how I'm going to get this thing on. Hinging still seems like a great idea in theory but there are no real clean places to break it like on some of the iron man helmets I've seen. Perhaps I'll be able to remove some of the unseen parts on the bottom enough to get it to fit. A bit more research needed on this point... And then I'll figure out some kind of visor and of course LED's!

Thanks for checking out the build!

Looks good so far, keep it up.

Over the past few days, I've managed to make a bit of forward progress with the helmet. Below is a pre-rondo picture; the helmet has two coats of resin on the outside and one coat on the inside. Also pictured are the normal cast of characters for this process: filler and resin, hardeners (both paste and liquid), pre-marked plastic measuring cups, mixing sticks, nitrile gloves and a respirator fitted with OV filters.



I did the rondo in three small batches, paying close attention to some of the areas that I felt required some extra stiffening. The mix was a 50/50 filler to resin ratio; 2 ounce resin to an approximate golf ball sized blob of filler with the recommended amounts of hardener added last. The process went okay, I'm not sure I'm satisfied with how stiff the back wings are but then again I'm not going to be playing football with this so I might just try it add see how it holds up. Here's a shot of the final finished process after most of the rondo had kicked:



Question for any of the rondo veterans out there: how thick should the layer of rondo be? It seems fairly thin, I can see the lines on the outside through it if I hold it up to the light. I have had years of experience working with bondo from a woodworker's perspective but I am new to the rondo perspective. Any insight would be appreciated.

Next steps: a little cleanup of the runaway rondo, cut away the interior bracing and then some fiberglass mats on the interior followed up with a final layer of rondo to smooth it all out and then onto exterior bondo!

Thanks for checking out my build!

A small step forward the other day, felt like a giant leap to me. I was cutting the supports out from inside the helmet in anticipation of fiberglass mat layering when I realized that the helmet was more than sturdy enough for a bit of surgery to open the bottom up to fit over my head (hopefully!) I made two passes at it, roughing out my cut with a sharpie each time. Below is a shot from before the second cut...



And lo and behold it worked like a charm!



Its a bit of a tight fit to get in at the moment, but a little more cutting will make it a real smooth fit. And there's plenty of space in there for padding, electronics and the like. So I managed to get my scaling right on the first shot. Even better, I won't have to get involved with any hinging or the like. So, yeah I'm a bit pleased with myself

Back to a bit more rondo and then on to fiberglass mat...

I've been able to make some progress on my ME3 helmet, over the past few days I finished reinforcing the interior of the helmet and today I began the "fun" process of bondo on the exterior. It actually is rather fun, oddly, because I can glimpse the final shape that I'm aiming for. But before I move into the update pictures I thought I'd share a few of the images I'm using for reference shots. They're mainly taken from screenshots from the game itself:



One of the things that I found interesting is the level of detail that's missing in the pep. Now the pep is a work of art. I still love its lines. But there are whole planes and surfaces missing from it, that if I want, I can add back through the bondo work. I won't be adding it all back. That's beyond my skill level. But there at least five areas that I'm going to try to mimic pretty closely. And then there are the textures. There are sections of the brighter silver that have a diamond plate effect that disappears depending on the lighting and angle. Still debating whether to try my hand at replicating those via paint.

On to the progress!



Interior received two overlapping layers of fiberglass. The first was mat and the second was cloth turned perpendicular to the first layer of mat. I had cut them up into little 2" x 5" strips to ease getting them in and found them both to be pretty similar in terms of handling. Added a final thin coat of rondo to cover all the sharp edges. And then found that the helmet didn't fit anymore! Now one of two things have happened: my head has gotten bigger or each successive layer fiberglass shrunk just a little, pulling the hole in just a bit. Nothing a bit of work with a dremel didn't fix either way.



Finally! The outside of the helmet is starting to take shape under countless layers of bondo and sanding. I'm going fairly slow with at least two or three thin layers to avoid losing the details that I'd like to keep while beginning to smooth out the curves and define the planes that need to be there. Big kudos to the other builders on the 405th for inspiration here, especially Cereal Kill3r for the idea of using a razor blade on the bondo while its still a bit soft to carve in the larger structure and edges. I suspect that this stage is going to take the most time for me as I am not able to get to it as often as I want and I am being fairly obsessive with detail here. I'm hopeful that it'll all come together....

In other news, I ordered a reasonably priced amber visor today and I picked up a bunch of red LED's and electronic components a few days back with the thought of trying a few things out before cutting it into the rebreather helmet.

That's it for now. Thanks for checking out my build and feel free to comment or ask any questions that come to mind!

looking awesome! wonderful bondo work so far. looking at your reference pics are you going to try and paint in the carbon fiber look on the helm or something else? I remember seeing at one of the hobby shops close to me that had like body stickers for r/c cars to give the carbon fiber look for the tuner drifter cars that might be an easy thing to do.

So far it's looking good. Glad to see you aren't just slapping bondo on willy-nilly. One thing you might want to try is to decrease the angular limit on the pep from 180 to down to somewhere near 165. This will decrease the amount of folding that you have to do and make things a little smoother.

Always happy to see mass effect builds, and this is no exception, I like the way it's coming out so far and the warping seems to be kept at a minimum. For the checker pattern on the helmet maybe you might want to look into plastic patterned window films or something like that to overlay on top of it. I don't know much about it, but it seems like a good avenue to explore as far as it goes. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the encouragement guys! I'm hoping to find a few more hours to continue sanding and bondo tomorrow.

Blorin said:

looking awesome! wonderful bondo work so far. looking at your reference pics are you going to try and paint in the carbon fiber look on the helm or something else? I remember seeing at one of the hobby shops close to me that had like body stickers for r/c cars to give the carbon fiber look for the tuner drifter cars that might be an easy thing to do.

Click to expand...

Thanks Blorin! I'd been puzzling over how I might get that look and those decals might be just the trick. I'm going to get a sheet and see how it looks. Keep up the great work on the sniper rifle, I'm excited to see how it comes out!

Brandon McClain said:

So far it's looking good. Glad to see you aren't just slapping bondo on willy-nilly. One thing you might want to try is to decrease the angular limit on the pep from 180 to down to somewhere near 165. This will decrease the amount of folding that you have to do and make things a little smoother.

Click to expand...

I've always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with bondo: I love being able to shape with it and hate having to work through it to get to where I want. Less is more they say... Thanks for the pep tip, I had seen that somewhere else and mean to incorporate it into the next piece I pep. That and I'm going to have pepakura print the mountain and valley lines in different colors. I saw that tip from someone, I think it was Carpathia, and it seems like a keen idea...

Triple A said:

Always happy to see mass effect builds, and this is no exception, I like the way it's coming out so far and the warping seems to be kept at a minimum. For the checker pattern on the helmet maybe you might want to look into plastic patterned window films or something like that to overlay on top of it. I don't know much about it, but it seems like a good avenue to explore as far as it goes. Keep up the good work!

Click to expand...

Thanks Triple A, I'm a big fan of the Mass Effect armors. I'd love to do a full suit at some point. I received a bit of a schooling on how pepakura doesn't take the dimension of paper into account about midway up on the left side and it introduced a fair bit of warping that I was able to pull out moving forward for the most part. I taught me to start the longer pieces in the middle and do every other tab until I got to both ends and then go back and finish the rest. The worst should disappear behind bondo hopefully. Your idea of the patterned window film reminds of something I had seen in a build log for a visor. The guy had a sign shop print off a grid that he overlaid on top of the gold visor to give that hex pattern. (It was Revo1: check it out here if you're interested.) I bet something similar might work here. I'll probably try them both to see which makes the best sense. Thanks for the idea!

Little update today: I've only been able to grab a few hours or so every other day so it feels like progress is a bit slow. Moving forward though. I'm continuing to build up and smooth out the areas I started earlier, like the top and front. I've also started smoothing out some of the other planes, like the jaw and the back. I also start defining the raised edges a bit. I've been cutting a template into playing cards and using it to rough shape the bondo before it sets. The picture below shows the template before I used it to define the edge between the back and the top.



I also began working on some of the areas that needed to be added to the helmet based on the reference images. The picture below shows one: there was an area in the reference that extended much farther down towards the ear cup. I began by taping off the edge where I wanted it to stop and then used a different card template to begin building the area up.



And an shot of where the helmet is now. I'm starting to feel like more of a sculptor than anything else at this point with all of the tiny shaping and filling I'm doing at the moment. I'm hoping to have most of the smoothing and shaping done by the end of the week so I can move towards adding some of the finer details and start thinking a bit more seriously about paint!



And my visor arrived today!! Its a pretty reasonable match for the amber in the game. Its also very flexible and big enough to give me two shots at cutting it to fit the helmet.



Thanks for checking out my build and, as always, feel free to comment!

This is looking so good! Your sculpting work is admirable and the effort really shows. Keep it up! Where did you get your visor, if you don't mind me asking.

Thanks Java! I got it through motorcycle-superstore.com. It's called a Vega 3-Snap Shorty Shield. They had them in a couple of different colors. This one cost $11...

My lofty plans for progress on my helmet project met head-on with the demands of everyday responsibility with predictable results: haven't gotten to the paint stage. But progress does continue! There's not too much additional bondo work to do at this point, maybe a day or two depending on how time goes. Another reason I haven't finished up the bondo yet...

I decided to fit the visor in place! I'm glad I did at this point too. Fitting the visor was a bit more of a challenge than I planned. My initial idea was to heat the rough cut visor with a heat gun and form it to the inside of the helmet. Luckily I tried this on a scrap of the visor. The heat gun did indeed let me reform the visor but it also distorted the clear plastic producing a wavy amber ripple through it. No good for seeing through without getting a headache. Plus the helmet has a compound curvature that wasn't lending itself to bending the visor in both directions. My second thought was to just screw the visor in place, but I don't think the rondo would be able to hold against the tension in the piece and I figured there was a good chance of cracking the visor too. So I went with a combo of ideas I'd seen in Cereal Killer's and Longshot's builds: anchor t-nuts in rondo inside, install visor and then seal the gap with expanding foam. That foam gets cut back when cured and skinned with a bit of bondo.

Below is a collage of the visor installation process:



To get the rough shape for the visor, I held a piece of cardstock inside the helmet and traced the opening on to it. I gave myself a healthy offset to mount the visor itself and there's my template for the cut. I taped off the visor with painter's tape and then traced my template on to it and cut it out with a jigsaw. Took a bit of a steady hand to brace it as the curved surface wanted to jump every so often but it cut pretty easily. I protected the visor by wrapping it with cling wrap and packing tape. Next up, I held the visor in the helmet where I wanted it and marked the centers for the t-nuts through pre-drilled holes. The t-nuts were hot-glued in place and I built a form for the rondo with cut up playing cards. I set a nylon screw in each nut before pouring to keep the hole clear.

Once both nuts had set, I installed the protected visor with the screws cut down to a reasonable length and filled the voids with some expanding foam insulation. The picture below shows the mostly cured foam cut away and the visor installed with the protection removed. The cling wrap, in addition to protecting the visor from scratches, let me remove the visor easily from the foam. That foam is sticky and tenacious. Once I snipped the edge of the cling wrap the visor popped right out letting me remove the stuck in cling wrap with a bit more force.




So that's where I'm at now. Tomorrow I hope to get a bit of bondo on this before sitting down to turkey dinner and what not and hopefully I'll be able to move along a bit more over the long weekend.

When I set out to build this awhile back, it was with the intention of using this as an opportunity to learn a bit before moving on to bigger, more involved, builds. And a learning process it has been. I'm not done with this yet and even at this point there's more than a handful of ways that I could've done this better. The thought of scrapping this and restarting even floated through my mind. But I'm going to see this through and see what the end result looks like. And then maybe build it again better

Thanks for checking out my build and feel free to comment or ask a question!

What an awesome build! I have to admit that I think you are a bit nuts for choosing such an intricate build for your first time, but you obviously have skills and patience! If you do end up scrapping this one out to make an even better one, might I suggest you use this as your guinea pig and attempt a shot at actual carbon fiber? It is not so difficult to work with and you obviously are competent with epoxy. Stickers are cool and all, but no sticker that I have come across gives the depth that true carbon fiber gives. Anyways, rock on and keep us posted!

Thanks!

Update time!

Since my last post, I finished up my bondo work (hooray!), did some spot glazing and shot a coat of primer on the helmet. That got me to here:



There's certainly some flaws to clean up that the primer showed but not too shabby in my opinion. From here I could move into planning and cutting in some of the detailing that I've wanted to added. First up, I'd tackle the top of the helmet and scale off the boundaries of the carbon fiber surfaces from one of my reference pics (I've also decided to give the carbon fiber decal method a shot but more on that later...)



Now, these reference pics have ALOT of detail in them. Enough so that I'm going to take a bit of creative license and keep the details that I think make the helmet and ditch the ones that clutter it up more than needed... I also laid out some relief lines along the side of the helmet as well as the detailing that makes up one of the "vent" areas along the jawline as shown below.



A couple of things here: I'm cutting different details in with different bits on my dremel and then depending on the effect I'm after, I plan on either painting or blackwashing some of the contrasting color into them. Also, I'll admit to a bit of a noobish mistake followed by something of a lazy short cut. Early on in the resin/rondo process, I thought the parts of the vent at the jawline looked like a likely part to break off, so I decided to give them a couple of coats of rondo. They were generous coats and as such the area at the front, where the red light should be going, is solid rondo. After contemplating some silly measures, I decided to be lazy and move the lights to the middle of the cheek where I might be able to get a piece of plexi and an LED...

After some careful work with the dremel and a few handy files, I'm here:



I figure I've got roughly half of the detailing cut in so far, now below I've started laying out some of the details for the faceplate. Still up are the details at the ears and along the backside of the helmet...



And another step forward: I think I've zeroed in on paint colors. In addition to the surfaces that will have the carbon fiber decal there are four other main colors - a flat black, an off-white, an aluminum and an anodized bronze. Plus the red detailing in the N7 logo.

Getting closer and closer to a finished project!

Thanks for checking out by build!

Update time! - Progress has been steady but slow. The holidays and their associated festivities have kept my time occupied, but I've managed to spend a few hours in the shop every so often. In today's update I finish cutting in the last of the details, fumble my way through some basic electronics, zero in on some carbon fiber goodness and not least of all PAINT!

Below you can see the helmet after I have cut in the last of the details and lights. There were certainly a lot of them to lay out and cut in. Most of them came out okay and cleaned up pretty well with some sandpaper and files. I do wish there were some way to fashion a jig for these operations. Making smooth lines on curved surfaces is challenging. And my insatiable coffee habit probably didn't help matters



Finally! I am able to begin painting in earnest. The collage below shows progress through tonight. A couple of coats of primer and some more sanding. Two coats of aluminum silver over the whole thing. Some parts will stay with the silver, but most of it will get covered up by the other colors or the carbon fiber decal. When the coats on top of the silver get a bit of sanding, the silver shows through like bare metal wearing through. It looks pretty sharp. After the silver, I started out masking for the Navajo white that the side vents, back and ear cups would get. Once the white was done and unmasked, I let it dry for a day or so. Then I masked off where I wanted the anodized bronze to be, mainly the face plate and the middle of the sides.



I just removed the masking and that brings me to the picture below, current as of a few minutes ago. I'm going to let the bronze dry for most of the day tomorrow because even with the heaters running constantly the temp is barely creeping over 60 in the shop (not surprising considering the weather station tells me its currently -2 outside). Once its dry, I'll mask out for the sections that get the flat black and make up the stencils for the N7 logo along the sides.



In addition to the painting progress, I tried my hand at soldering for the first time on some of the LED's and components I'm hoping to use for the lights...



Thankfully, I didn't burn anything too badly. However the 1000mcd red LED's I got from RadioShack aren't going to cut it for this. I'm going to order some 8000mcd LED's from SuperbrightLEDs. That should do the trick for edge illuminating the frosted plexi I'm installing at the cut outs for the lights...

Lastly, I was able to figure out the carbon fiber decal I want to use. The image below shows some of the things I was looking at. The sheet at the left was one I got at a local RC store. Too flat and fake looking. After a bunch of web searching, I found the samples at the right. The website I got them through didn't show me clearly how the colors looked so I ordered these. And the silver is the clear winner. The decals actually have some dimension to them and reflect light differently depending on the viewing angle. I think they'll replicate the in-game helmet pretty nicely. I plan on wrapping the top and part of the rear flange as well as the vent at the chin. That will probably be the last thing I do after all the paint work is done and before any weathering/clear coats.



And that's where I'm at now. Thanks for checking out my build and feel free to comment or question as you'd like!