Hi,
I am a noob to fiberglassing and using bondo in general. I have previously made a mk 6 helmet about a year ago and for that I used AquaResin. Now I have a pepakura ODST helmet and I am looking for the easiest way to harden and make it look smooth, could anyone suggest a good method for me to use? (Also cheap is prefereable)
Well, I was pretty happy with the durability and smoothness you can get from "rondo", that is, mixing rondo with enough fiberglass resin (and then, of course, bondo hardener). It isn't exactly cheap, BUT, if you're only doing one helmet, you certainly shouldn't need that much of either material. Walmart is the cheapest source I've found here locally. They beat out Lowe's for prices.
And I'd recommend watching Ben Streeper's videos here on how to do it. Just add enough resin to make the bondo fairly runny.... like slightly-runny pudding or thick paint. It's SOLID when it hardens and you can paint it over your pep (which, of course, you'd be coating with resin first anyways, to make it hold its shape enough for that inside rondo pour)... and sand it smoothly.
Now, if you end up doing an entire suit of armor with it, as I just finished doing last week, now THAT can get EXPENSIVE.
(But I've learned to do thinner coats of rondo in areas where I'm probably not going to sand too deeply in or carve any details in. I could probably use fiberglass resin and fibercloth instead. Haven't tried that stuff alone / without rondo. But instead what happened was, I saw that the edges of my pieces that were coated with a thin layer of rondo weren't holding up too well when they'd brush against other parts or solid objects, so I gave the edges of those piece a strip of fibercloth and resin. After that, they were REALLY, REALLY durable! So, I may experiment with just fibercloth and resin alone. But I'd certainly be quick to go back to rondo backed by fibercloth and resin... if I were building something that I wanted to LAST.)
