We all know it, we all love it:
This is actually something I've been working on and off for the past couple of months. I haven't seen anyone do it and I always thought it was a very cool prop. Starting out I did a search on here and could only find one thread on it, someone else searching for the respirator that was used. No replies in the thread so that was a dead end. I looked around at a bunch of different respirators, but couldn't find anything that wouldn't need some work to get it right, so at that point I figured why not just start from scratch. That's what I did.
The first thing was to get a master made for the respirator body. Took some scrap mdf and bondo and started shaping. After a certain point in the sanding, I started hitting some of the mdf that I had used for filler material under the bondo. It sanded a lot slower than the bondo, so things where getting uneven. Here's where I stopped on the master:
I vacuum formed it, to get a quick cheap mold. In this I poured some plaster as I knew it would be easy to sand and shape quickly. It worked good, very easy to work with and I got it shaped quickly. However, after a second look at reference pics, I realized on the sides of the body weren't smooth, they had a raised area for the inhalation valves to sit. So I cut a washer in half, epoxied it on, and started trying to shape with it. Same problem though, the plaster was sanding extremely fast and the filler on the washers much slower. Here's where I stopped with it (pretty ugly, but I wasn't concerned as this would get taken care of on the next step):
From this stage, I made a quick cheap latex mold of it. Simple to do and other than taking a couple of days to layer the latex, pretty quick. Also made a quick mother mold out of plaster to help the latex hold it's shape. In the latex mold I used fiberglass to make a body. The body came out fine, but destroyed the mold as I forgot to use any release (no concern though, as I never intended to use that mold again). I started work on the seats for the inhalation valves using some bondo. Got a nice flat surface for it, so shot it with some primer and ended up with this (still needs some light filling and smoothing):
As for the inhalation and exhalation valves, I went ahead and built them from scratch as well. The exhalation was pretty easy. Started with a CPVC union, filled it with bonded, sanded the ridges on the edges down and took a little off the bottom as it was too tall. Drilled 4 holes into it and here it is:
Molded it and poured it in smoothcast 300, parts came out pretty clean, but don't have a pic of one unpainted.
For the inhalation valves, they were a bit more work. Couldn't find anything with the right shape so I cut a bunch of rings out of carstock, glued them together, applied resin over top, then filled and smoothed. For the bars I just layered two toothpicks, and the center used a 6 sided pencil:
Molded the master and was pretty happy with how the cast came out:
I painted the valves this morning. The only green I had was some lawn marking paint, so I sprayed them with that (will use some other cast for a final paint, but this worked for a color test) Ignore the severe orange peel, it is lawn marking paint afterall:
For the metal discs on the valves, I found some button covers at an upholstery shop and used those:
So here's what I'm at with it (just a dab of glue on the parts to hold it together for the pic):
So... Still got to smooth the body, sand down the backside of the inhalation valves to thin them up, put a good paint job on everything, design a template for the box and build it, then finally make a bow and the cards (honestly the bow worries me more than anything, as I've never even attempted one, haha).
