World's Slowest Republic Commando Build

thorssoli

I've been working on this here and there for the past few months and figured now that I've got something to show, I should finally go ahead and write about it here. This build started back in November or December of 2009 while I was working as a navigator on a containership in the North Pacific. Not having access to my tools or my shop, it made sense at the time to get started on another pepakura-based build.

Here's the faceplate assembled:


And here's the complete helmet:



When I'd finished the pep build, I started noticing things I didn't like about the general shape of the helm. I cut the ears off and replaced them with a pair cut from sheet styrene, then cut off most of the dome and grafted the rest of the bucket onto a child-sized skateboard helmet. With all of the styrofoam removed, there's plenty of room inside the kid's helmet and it has a better profile.

Once the paper was backed up with a few layers of resin, the next step was start with the bondo to straighten out the shape:


After a few cycles of bondo-sand-repeat, I decided to spray the whole deal with black primer to see how it looks. Here's the current state of it as it sits in my workshop right now:


Hopefully I'll have this thing ready to mold sometime sooner than later. For now I still have a lot of smoothing to do before I score all of the seam lines into the surface and add all of the little fasteners and greeblies. I was really making progress today, but then my Dremel croaked (it's only ten or twelve years old, but it's had a hard life) and I turned to other projects for a while.

Comments welcome.

trekpropguy

Looking good.
Bondo-sand-repeat is always a fun step. If you don't like actual fun.
Good luck!

ed209

Off to a good start. I thought about picking up the armor for one of these. Still might.

thorssoli

When I titled this thread "World's Slowest" I guess I wasn't kidding. It's been a while since I've dusted off this project, but I've given it a bit more tweaking. I think it's time to call the prototype done at this point.

Here's 5,000 words worth of pictures:










I'll be molding this baby up over the next week or two. Stand by...

Atlanthia

Looks incredibly detailed! beautiful build!
Will you be posting during the moulding process, as I would love to see that. I am almost at the moulding stage now and have never done it before

Qui-Gonzalez

I was wondering what happened to you and this project. Great work as always!

thorssoli

I will be. I would've started this mold earlier this week, but I ran out of pourable catalyst for the silicone. The new batch should arrive today, so hopefully I'll have useful pics to post in a day or two.

Thanks for the compliments.

I've been working on all sorts of things. I've cranked out nine fully finished HALO Spartan costumes and a significant armory of weapons to go with them, then built eight UNSC marine costumes to follow them around, started on an Isaac Clarke helmet from Dead Space 2, finished a Space Marine Chaplain helmet from Warhammer 40,000, and built the M-3 Predator Heavy pistol from Mass Effect 2.

In the background of pictures of those projects, you can occasionally pick out this helmet hanging in the rafters with my other neglected projects like my kid-sized Predator bio helmet, my Mk8 Space Marine helmet sculpt, my HALO3 shotgun, and others. I guess this guy just hasn't been a priority.

Qui-Gonzalez

If it fits my big melon and you are offering up a few in a few months, I am sooo down.

thorssoli

It's pretty roomy and I'll be doing a Junkyard run as soon as I've finished the mold.

thorssoli

I was in a moldmaking mood today, so I got started on this thing:








It needs a couple more layers of goop, but it's coming along nicely. I'm confident I'll be pulling castings by the end of the week.

Qui-Gonzalez

Looks like you are doing quite a bit of molding there, aside from the RC!

thorssoli

Yeah, I like to line them up so I've got plenty of places to put extra silicone if I mix too much. In this picture you can see the dome and faceplate for my Isaac Clarke helmet from Dead Space 2. I'm also very near to making the mold for my Assault Rifle from Halo 3. After that, I'll start making vacforming bucks for some Warhammer 40k Space Marine armor.

There is very little sitting still in my workshop.

dkaniel

Very Impressive sir! Your skills are excellent and the World's Slowest Build is the one that NEVER gets started!

9Panzer

Agreed, this is really neat watching!

A Rabid Wombat

Love the Republic Commando armor.
Nice Job.

thorssoli

More pink goop today:


Then some plurple goop again:


Tomorrow I'll turn it upside-down again and layer the neck hole a little more to reinforce the thin areas there.

Stay tuned...

thorssoli

Yesterday I flipped the whole shebang upside-down:


Then I reinforced the neck hole as planned:


Today I'll be making the mother mold out of fiberglass. Stay tuned...

Qui-Gonzalez

Same Commando time, same Commando station!

DanielS

Helmet looks awesome. Well, before all the goo :P

thorssoli

Mothermold as promised.

Step one, make a clay wall and lay fiberglass on one side of the helmet:


Step two, turn the helmet around:


Step three, remove most of the clay wall. Leave enough to seal the gap between the fiberglass and the mothermold. Then grease the parting line with a liberal coat of vaseline:


Step four, lay up fiberglass on the other side:


Tomorrow I will drill the two halves of the mothermold so I can bolt them together. Then I'll clean up the edges, pull the whole thing apart, and peel the rubber jacket off of the pink prototype.

Then I'll rotocast one or two pulls of the helmet just to make sure the mold works. Once I've got pics of the pulls, I'll probably start an FS thread in the Junkyard to help pay for the rest of this project.

Stay tuned...

NAZGÛL

Very nice work!

dkaniel

Careful there you are dating yourself...from one old guy to another

Qui Sean Jinn

This is coming along really well! I wish I had a nice workshop like that to work on my projects!

dirty tusken

I'm loving this build. slow or not it'll look great in the end.

thorssoli

Slow it's been, but I'm building up momentum. Now that I've built my vacforming table I'm revisiting a lot of my backburner projects. This is one of many things I'll be dusting off in the coming months.

This morning I trimmed the excess fiberglass off the edges of the mothermold and pried the two halves apart:


It worked:


Then I cut a split up the back side of the rubber jacket mold:


Then peeled the jacket mold off of the prototype:


Since it had served its purpose, I no longer needed the prototype:


The next thing to do was to let the rubber jacket mold air out for a while:


Then turn it right side out again and reassemble the mothermold around it:


Rotocasting this helmet took five passes. The first two batches of resin had microballoons mixed in to increase the viscosity of the resin during the rotocasting and reduce the final weight of the finished cast. The third batch had 1/32" milled glassfiber mixed in in order to increase the strength of the casting. The fourth layer had microballoons again and was intended to keep glassfiber from rubbing against the wearer. That should've been all it took, but then I noticed that I'd neglected to coat the area around the neck hole, so I had to do one more batch.

All of this was done using black urethane casting resin:


Once it cured, it only took a minimal amount of cleanup around the neck before it was wearable:

Sexy, isn't it?

Here's the first casting lined up with the prototype (pink) an MR duplicate (left) and an RC helmet I picked up for cheap forever ago (right):

I don't remember who made the other RC helmet. I got it second hand.

I'll be out of the workshop for a couple of days, but I'll be casting a handful of these once I'm back. I'll be starting a sale thread soon.