Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet (Cut Apart on Page 2!)

[Lord Ned]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Madosheet: Interesting... an idea I picked up from this youtube video would be to widen out extra space around where the edge needs to go and fill it in with some form of modeling clay and then carefully scrape it out. I don't think this would work very well however because of the drastically different density of materials - I'd scrape it up and dent it while working!

 

[Kryro]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Lord Ned and Madosheet

Does this seem like its the right thing, because apparently we british don't call it spot putty :l and I too am impatient so I aint ordering it online ahaa
Halfords | Holts Cataloy Knifing Putty 100g

Sounds like the right thing in the description. but need to be sure

 

[Madosheet]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Kryro that's the one I saw and was going to get as well, but I was in the same boat as you and wasn't sure if it's the same thing!

Is glazing putty what we call it in England? Or is that something else? :s

 

[Lord Ned]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Kryro: It looks like the equivalent... the 3M Bondo Spot Putty also has issues when it's thick, air dries, is used to fill pinholes in bodywork. Really you're just looking for a product that's thinner than the two-part normal body filler that sands easier too.

I found a few supplies/sections of info on the 405th.com to get supplies in the UK. Didn't read into them too much but probably worth a read!
UK Equivalent Products?
405th - United Kingdom
Uk Product Variants

(All three of those links were just picked up from the first one, so there may be more out there.)

 

[Kryro]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Lord Ned

Thank you, the last link is definitely the best out of the 3, especially for the casting stage I wanted to do ahaa
Thanks

 

[Crank729]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Great stuff. Very clean work!

 

[Lord Ned]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Day 11:

Great stuff. Very clean work!

Thanks!

I decided to mark out all of the lines to cut in both tape and pencil. The tape works out well for two reasons: It gives me a better visual separator to see the mask/jaw on their own (so it's easier to see if the measurement is super off), and it'll be easier when i actually cut it because I can still see the blue tape when there's dust flying everywhere (as opposed to trying to see a small grey pencil line).

Also! I broke a dremel cutting disc. I was lucky and it sort of just popped apart infront of my eyes and didn't throw anything anywhere, but this is why you should be wearing eye protection while dremeling! My guess for the reason it broke apart was that I bit into the material too fast and the disc was moving really slowly while the shaft was still applying a lot of torque, so the center piece just sort of twisted out of the rest.

Onwards, to high-powered dremel surgery!

 

[streetsoul]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Day 11:
http://i.imgur.com/kj8YwGq.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/sxQCuq3.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/KMYVAQJ.jpg



Thanks!

I decided to mark out all of the lines to cut in both tape and pencil. The tape works out well for two reasons: It gives me a better visual separator to see the mask/jaw on their own (so it's easier to see if the measurement is super off), and it'll be easier when i actually cut it because I can still see the blue tape when there's dust flying everywhere (as opposed to trying to see a small grey pencil line).

Also! I broke a dremel cutting disc. I was lucky and it sort of just popped apart infront of my eyes and didn't throw anything anywhere, but this is why you should be wearing eye protection while dremeling! My guess for the reason it broke apart was that I bit into the material too fast and the disc was moving really slowly while the shaft was still applying a lot of torque, so the center piece just sort of twisted out of the rest.

Onwards, to high-powered dremel surgery!

dude thats an awsome way to mark out the face plate buddy mite try that

 

[Lord Ned]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Day 11 (Part 2):

I was going to make you guys wait until tomorrow, but caved in and decided to post these tonight instead.

It took me several hours to cut the faceplate off (using the dremel disc in the previous post, and a few more once those broke) for a couple of reasons: The rondo slush casting was thicker in some parts than expected, with some parts actually ending up being almost 1/4" thick! This takes a really long time to cut through and was giving my Dremel a difficult time so half of my time was spent waiting for the dremel to cool down a little bit.

I started out with the lines on the side and just lightly cut into it (very shallow cut) in a very straight motion moving at the elbow to try and get the line as straight as possible. Then more passes were made over it, each one going deeper than the last. Having done the straight lines on the side, I went down to do the jaw and found that I couldn't get my dremel in there. Cue the drill! I drilled lots of small holes (similar to how I took out the eyes/lower cheeks) and sort of hack-n-slash-n-bashed my way through the jaw... Couldn't really recommend it but it seems to have come out fine, so... *shrug*

Finally, I tackled the last part: the top. I cut into these very diagonally because in the original references it looks like the faceplate is supposed to sit down ontop of the tongue that sticks out... wanting to save myself work later I decided to try and cut horizontally (instead of vertically further over and then sanding it down and patching it up), but decided on diagonal because the material was way too thick to do it horizontally. This is the area where I encountered 1/4" thick bondo, and I actually have a few drill holes (corners of the tape in the second image) where I was checking the depth since I couldn't get my blade through. This was mostly a slow process and it'll be fun come cleanup time, but in the mean time we're apart!

There's also a loose flap of rondo-covered fiberglass sticking out on the left side of the helmet... that was a goof earlier, make sure you get your fiberglass stuck all the way down, and make sure it butts all the way up into corners!

Progress is going to get a lot slower from here on out, just because it's a lot of finessing of each part that's hard to exemplify in photos

dude thats an awsome way to mark out the face plate buddy mite try that

Thanks! The only issue I came across with it is the edges can get a little fuzzy if you pass the dremel right next to it multiple times.

 

[xevanx]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Yea those discs break easily. Are you gonna cut out the back too?
Did you try the helmet on?

 

[Lord Ned]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Yea those discs break easily. Are you gonna cut out the back too?
Did you try the helmet on?

I tried it on without cutting the back out and discovered that my ears are too big to fit in that way! I don't think it'll be a problem in the end so I will end up cutting out the back and donning it over the top. I held off on cutting off the back because I want to get the edge that goes around the back (that the cut follows) cleaned up pretty good before I cut it apart, since I have an idea on how to remount it cleanly.

I'm afraid that I'll end up with a visible hairline seam where it crosses over to the ears and that's unfortunate, but there isn't an easy way to don it (especially once the jaw is re-attached) so it's something I'm afraid I'll have to live with.

 

[Lord Ned]

Re: Iron Man Mk. IV Helmet

Day 12:

Measuring is tough. Like really tough, because you don't have any thing that you're absolutely sure is correct when you build it this way. I'm relying on a lot of paper templates to trace out one side and then match it up the best on the other side, plus measuring from some locations that are based on measurements to multiple other locations. The corner right behind the 'eyebrow' is measured via the distance to the eye (both top and bottom)and also to the back edge which gives me a reasonable guess.

It's no where near as precise as I'd like it, but the only way to do this precise enough for my tastes would be through a 3D printer and unfortunately, I don't have one of those!

 

[Lord Ned]

Day 13:

I decided to jump the gun a little and put some bondo spot filler across most of the mask (even though that should probably wait until after primer) to get an idea of what it looked like since it was hard to tell with all of the patch-work ness. The eyebrow and inner eye sockets still need a lot of work, but beneath the cheeks was dremeled/filed down to match the drawn profile, and then the edges were built out some so that they would fit.

Right now there is currently a ~1/8" or less thick layer of bondo on the front of the faceplate (that isn't on the cheeks at all) that sticks up. This is somewhat visible visible in the last photo - I applied a thick coat across the entire faceplate (sometime after separating it) because I had sanded down and gotten near the paper and felt like I was losing the cirspness of the edge between the front of the faceplate and the cheeks, so I felt the easiest way to restore that would be to build up the front and then do the edge as a second pass to ensure that it didn't get sanded down nice and smooth.

 

[Lord Ned]

Day 14:

I scratched out some spaces where the filler putty was rather thick and just replaced them with regular bondo for fear of them chipping or flaking later... Probably could have gotten away with it, but I didn't want to find out the hard way.

Lines are traced using the template as to where the edges should be filed down to and then they get filed down with a rough file. Then a much finer file is used to make a nice edge (usually a while later so that the bondo has enough time to really harden) - by allowing the bondo to really harden it seems to chip much less and you spend less time re-creating the edges.

For the corners, a pile of bondo is blobbed on and let harden as is. Then it's painstakingly filed down to create a sharp edge. The bondo really has to be pressed onto the material and not touched until it's fully hardened or else it has a tendency to flake/peel off :/

The depth of the interior edge for the mask is marked out with my highly advanced, very technical line jig... which is a couple of popsical sticks taped togetehr and a piece of graphite from a mechanical pencil. This is hooked over the outside edge and run along it which creates a fairly-evenly depth line without the need to measure in from the sides multiple times and make the line.

It was cut down with the dremel in some places where it was thick and merely filed down with a rasp file in other places.

 

[Lord Ned]

Day 15:

To get this I simply took a blob of bondo and smeared it down well (to help it adhere to the surface) and then scraped it flat by placing my applicator between the two edges and dragging. It took two or three coats of bondo in the end. I'm not sure if I like this solution as it makes the cheeks pretty flat and (depending on the reference) it almost looks like they're concave in the real thing. Unfortunately my pep didn't preserve enough of that detail to tell, and I'm not sure how I would get the concaveness back in other than sanding by hand for a long time and pressing only in the center. Bleh, bleh bleh.

A lot of the finishing looks like this... blob a bunch on, let it harden, sand/file it off, do another coat to hit the spots you missed... etc.

 

[Lord Ned]

Day 16:

I've been tackling assorted edges and less obvious spots lately. To get a sharp inner corner crease I blob on some bondo, let it harden fully and then file down one side with a file that has filing edges on both the flat face and the side. This allows me to put the inner corner at the correct angle I want. Then the other side can (carefully!) be filed down to match that angle and you get a nice corner... at least that's the theory

More work on the brow. I found some really distorted sections on the brow that took me a few attempts to correct. They were only visible from a few particular angles, but they were there and that was a problem. When it's hard to see exactly what's wrong with it (other than it looks off), it's sometimes hard to figure out where you need to bulk up bondo/sand down bondo. This is further complicated sometimes by the fact that you have to add it in a way that doesn't create a bulge that is visible from other angles.

Next I get to tackle the jaw, which has just been a "I made up more bondo than I should have and I need someplace to put it" place. I like just layering on a < 1/8" thick layer of Bondo instead of doing a Rondo cast as previously mentioned for the front of the chin. It may look messy now but a little bit of time with my files and we should have a pretty well cleaned up surface.

 

[syph013]

Caught this thread and wondered what happened next?