Helmet
The helmet is probably one of the most important parts as it's what most people will focus on when talking to you. It's also that part that even when a suit is retired I'll keep that helmet as a display piece, so of course it deserves its own build post.
For starters I used the Cavallino model from SkookumProps found
here. I love that many of the smaller bits that are hard to sand when fully assembled. As mentioned in my previous post I ended up printing 2 as the first pass was going to be too small to fit electronics. This one may still be a tight fit when I add the audio since both sizes were printed before I ever added audio to a helmet.
Attempted something I haven't done on a print before and used UV resin to start with smoothing layer lines. I already had a
UV light so I picked up
this stuff and gave it a go. If you do the same, wear gloves and work in a well ventilated space or outside. I'd still recommend a respirator and glasses to be safe. I also protected my work area by covering it with builder's paper and a large silicone mat on top. Wish I'd taken photos during that process, but I wasn't exactly thinking about my build thread at that point. One thing I would change if I were to do this again is to have a few toothpicks and to spend more time focusing on all the little grooves in the model to ensure I don't lose them in the resin coat. A scribing tool managed to get a few back, but I definitely lost some details that filled with resin. From there I went to the same old sand, prime, and spot putty routine until I considered it good enough. Not going for perfect here; there's not enough time. When done silver coat and apply liquid mask to the areas I plan to have larger battle damage.
Paint time!
Given the colors for this suit, I made a plan to start with white and then add the other colors on top instead of my usual primary, secondary, tertiary, etc. process. 5 coats of white paint later I was ready to tape and move on. I'll touch on paint colors choices later, but 3 of the 5 colors are interior house paint from the hardware store, and 2 are hobby paints. I was waiting on a shipment with my bright red, but the dark red came from Lowe's, so I got those sections done and taped them off. Finish up airbrushing the bright red, and we're mostly done. I still need to touch up the small areas that wouldn't mask well with a paint brush.
Now for a challenge, I apparently wanted to suffer, so I chose to replicate the sweetsight visor. I'm sure if you look around long enough you could find a tint or something to provide the candy cane pattern, but I wasn't finding one in my search. Thankfully I do have a Silhouette Cameo that can cut the pattern for me, and I wasn't planning on buying a vacuumformed visor.
Start with some mini tests. Using leftover tint from my main Mk VII visor. Visibility wasn't bad and the Cameo could cut the tiny stripes at a small scale.
Larger test to get blade depth and force of cut then cut out a full sheet. I ended up being able to get 2 visors out of a full sheet of the visor material I used. Still don't know where I got that material from, but it's made visors for 3 suits for me now. One difference you'll notice between the small scale and large scale is instead of 3 small stripes I only have the 2 that were whitespace in the test piece. At the larger scale my Cameo had troubles making the 3 tiny stripes useable, so slight change. I doubt most anyone would notice if I didn't call it out. I will say carefully removing the whitespace stripes while not losing more red stripes was a slow process, and I have no idea how many small scale tests I did to figure out what my machine was capable of cutting.
Remaining on helmet
- Paint touch ups/details
- Weathering
- Electronics - audio, fans
- Padding
- Semi-permanently install the visor
