UPDATE!!!
First thanks to everyone for the positive feedback and support. I am glad you guys are digging my build its been a blast so far.
Ok so I finally finished the fiber glassing. It started out pretty rough (talk more about it later), but it turned out great and it was quite a learning experience. So I wanted to show everyone how it turned out. (I am really glad nothing warped)
Here you go:
I still need to clean it up a bit but it is really awesome to see my "K1 ODST Variant" come to life. It feels pretty sold now, like how an actual helmet should. Its so AWESOME! Lol
Note: I used crackhead's fiberglassing technique. Here is a
link
Any who I ran into some snags along the way and so I'll share with you all what I picked up while glassing. Hope this helps anyone looking into fiberglassing.
First:
When you cut your cloth make sure you cut the strips in fairly long and wide pieces.
Basically you want the pieces to be about 2 to 3 inches wide and about 5in long for short pieces and about 10in long for your larger pieces.
The reason is because if you try to use a bunch of short pieces they frail really easily. So when you place one down and try to add another one and smooth it out, they tend to stick to each other and warp. Nothing ends up smooth and you get a bunch of bubbles and a mess of random fibers. Thankfully when I saw this happening to me, I pulled the cloth out. I didn't let it dry that way so nothing was ruined.
With larger pieces you can cover a large area, smooth it out and overlap another piece fairly easily. I laid the strips parallel to each other which helped when smoothing cause it was all in one direction. Also slightly overlapping the strips gives you a stronger structure a keeps the sides of the previous strip you place from flaring up.
I ended up using a total 3 modest batches of resin total. Also I let each section dry before I added more fiberglass cloth to the helmet. This worked out very well because I could accidentally move or mess up the previous section once it was dry.
Second:
If you are using the cross pattern fiberglass cloth, cut along a single strand all the way through.
The first time a cut the fiberglass cloth,I did it pretty mindlessly so I ended up with a mess of frails and random fibers. This made the actual glassing mush more of a pain because the little random fiber were sticking to everything. Not good. So I restated with the second half of the cloth and took my time cutting right along a single edge. This minimized frials significantly and in turn made it much easier to glass and smooth everything out.
This is after I has gathered them up a bit. These where sticky and all over the place.
So those were the couple of things I ran into.
Now I am off the gather materials for detailing. I have the bondo already. Now I just need some sand paper and a couple of tools. I have a couple of days of work(Score!) so I'll be working on this all today and all tomorrow. I'll post update as soon as I can. See you guys.
Like always any advice, questions, critiques, or comments are welcomed.