Vossie
New Member
Still only on the helmet as of posting this but honestly should have made this thread a long time ago and if I did maybe I would've been more consistent in my progress. I started this build in April of 2025 and procrastinated for months, It's been sat on top of my printer the whole time gathering dust, but I've regained my motivation and I will see this thing complete.
Here's my spartan I used MCC to design which is what my finished armour will (hopefully) eventually look like.
So obviously this is early stages, I only had 2 parts printed and held them together by frog tape just to see how It'd look with the visor, which I bought off of etsy for more than I probably should've spent but I didn't, and still don't, have access to a vacuum former so it was my only option at the time.
What I didn't realise until later was the visor didn't actually fit because the buck used to make it was a slightly different model to what mine is. In hindsight this should've been obvious and I definitely should've have invested in making/buying a vacuum former but I was too eager to get it done, which is funny considering it's taken me several months to pick this back up again.
A this point I had all the parts printed ready to fill and sand once I had glued the pieces together. I chose to get a soldering iron and go along the seams on the inside melting the pieces together rather than using a glue and glue activator. A method I didn't know existed until a few months back but oh well too late now. I do wish I could've done it this way instead because I melted the seams a tiny bit haphazardly and cause it to be slightly misaligned but it doesn't affect the print that seriously. I also used said soldering iron to cut away at the visor trim so the visor could actually fit but actually made it look kinda wonky and so I spent a sh*t ton of time trying to sand that to make it somewhat nice to look at. It's not perfect but I don't think it's very noticeable unless I point it out.
Because I didn't originally plan on making any kind of thread detailing my journey, there's no picture of how it was between this image and the last, but luckily nothing eventful happened in-between. This point in the image above is roughly when I picked this project back up and went back to do some more sanding in areas I might've missed before and re-prime it for paint.
To fill in all the print lines I used something called "modeling paste" which isn't typically used for this sort of stuff but I saw a guy on YouTube use it and he said it was good so I said f*ck it and bought it. However something I knew about this stuff and didn't realise it was be a pain the arse later on, is 2 things, A) it's water soluble meaning no wet sanding and B)I slathered this stuff on with and old paint brush and it got into every little crevice and because I don't have any sanding pens for small corners, it made the print look awful. So then I had to painstakingly sand what I could with regular sheets of sand paper. Again, you'll only notice it if you go looking for it.
Another jump cut here to recently when I painted the dark/light greys and did the orange accents today. The in game model doesn't actually make anything on the JFO helmet orange when you select it as a secondary colour. The stripes were originally red so I changed them to orange so that it'll match my other armour pieces when I make them. (The orange looks much more neon in the photos than in person).
And here is the most recent progress, I added the upper stripe I forgot to do before (which is white in game but I wanted more orange on the helmet) and painted the neckline black, I haven't done the neckline on the front of the helmet because I ran out of daylight. Probably won't be able to do that for a few days, as I'm working. So yeah that's my progress so far and I'll be posting updates to this thread as I go along. My only enemy right now is the bad weather here in wales and my own procrastination (which I'm managing to fight off!).
Here's my spartan I used MCC to design which is what my finished armour will (hopefully) eventually look like.
So obviously this is early stages, I only had 2 parts printed and held them together by frog tape just to see how It'd look with the visor, which I bought off of etsy for more than I probably should've spent but I didn't, and still don't, have access to a vacuum former so it was my only option at the time.
What I didn't realise until later was the visor didn't actually fit because the buck used to make it was a slightly different model to what mine is. In hindsight this should've been obvious and I definitely should've have invested in making/buying a vacuum former but I was too eager to get it done, which is funny considering it's taken me several months to pick this back up again.
A this point I had all the parts printed ready to fill and sand once I had glued the pieces together. I chose to get a soldering iron and go along the seams on the inside melting the pieces together rather than using a glue and glue activator. A method I didn't know existed until a few months back but oh well too late now. I do wish I could've done it this way instead because I melted the seams a tiny bit haphazardly and cause it to be slightly misaligned but it doesn't affect the print that seriously. I also used said soldering iron to cut away at the visor trim so the visor could actually fit but actually made it look kinda wonky and so I spent a sh*t ton of time trying to sand that to make it somewhat nice to look at. It's not perfect but I don't think it's very noticeable unless I point it out.
Because I didn't originally plan on making any kind of thread detailing my journey, there's no picture of how it was between this image and the last, but luckily nothing eventful happened in-between. This point in the image above is roughly when I picked this project back up and went back to do some more sanding in areas I might've missed before and re-prime it for paint.
To fill in all the print lines I used something called "modeling paste" which isn't typically used for this sort of stuff but I saw a guy on YouTube use it and he said it was good so I said f*ck it and bought it. However something I knew about this stuff and didn't realise it was be a pain the arse later on, is 2 things, A) it's water soluble meaning no wet sanding and B)I slathered this stuff on with and old paint brush and it got into every little crevice and because I don't have any sanding pens for small corners, it made the print look awful. So then I had to painstakingly sand what I could with regular sheets of sand paper. Again, you'll only notice it if you go looking for it.
Another jump cut here to recently when I painted the dark/light greys and did the orange accents today. The in game model doesn't actually make anything on the JFO helmet orange when you select it as a secondary colour. The stripes were originally red so I changed them to orange so that it'll match my other armour pieces when I make them. (The orange looks much more neon in the photos than in person).
And here is the most recent progress, I added the upper stripe I forgot to do before (which is white in game but I wanted more orange on the helmet) and painted the neckline black, I haven't done the neckline on the front of the helmet because I ran out of daylight. Probably won't be able to do that for a few days, as I'm working. So yeah that's my progress so far and I'll be posting updates to this thread as I go along. My only enemy right now is the bad weather here in wales and my own procrastination (which I'm managing to fight off!).
