Want To Make Sure I'm Starting This Correctly, Help Please (Iron Man Helmet)

[hkt0214]

UPDATE 2/12: Need help with bondo detailing. Added more pictures.
UPDATE 1/22: Resined, fiberglassed, and started bondo. Added questions on last post.

Just pepped the helmet, want to make sure I have the correct process down before I make any major mistakes.

I know you guys like pictures (I do too), so here it is so far:

It's not pretty, but it's pretty much an experimentation piece since it's much too large and not the right file (it's originally a foam file that I "converted" for cardstock).

I have some questions, though, to make sure I'm on the right track:
1. The pep file I used (and even the new one I'm using for a new helmet) don't have the faceplate or jaw piece connecting to the rest of the helmet using the pep flaps or anything. Should I just simply connect the pieces where the seams fit?

2. How necessary are the intricate "teeth" and "eye-socket" details? Do I even really need to leave them on the helmet / add them to future helmets?

3. What's the general consensus for dealing with pep edges that are generated "under" a piece? Picture of what I'm talking about:

4. My understanding of resining/reinforcing the helmet is to resin the helmet inside and out, fiberglass the inside, then resin the whole thing again, correct?

A. How many coats of resin (inside and outside the helmet) should I apply before the fiberglass mat/cloth?
B. Fiberglass cloth goes only in the inside of the helmet, correct?
C. How many coats of resin do I apply after the fiberglass mat/cloth has been applied, and do I apply the resin inside and/or outside again?
​

Thanks in advance.

 

[streetsoul]

it looks good but if your finding this model hard you can use the cutting tool on pep designer to make it easier for your self thats what i did , i find it hard aswell when the model has been unfolded like that so i make it easier for me

 

[Kolin86]

My general rule for peping a lot of the smaller areas, if its 1mm or under, forget it. If it is a bigger gap than 1mm however, do it.

Remember, the further off you are on that one peice, double to triple that at the last piece at the end.

If your off an inch in the begining, you'll be off by a mile at the end.

Also, the sides of the forhead are concaving in, You'll want to pop those back out before you resin (after studying builds, this is going to be my big fear as well for my pepped helm, hell my first foam helmet did the same. That curve is an odd bird), or its going to be alot of filler work otherwise.

Anyway, here's the good news.
It looks like you did a good job on the pep, alot of those small little lines seem to line up great (especially around the ears.)


So keep it up! Your doing fine.

 

[closet batfan]

Don't bother pepping the teeth, it's easier to make them separately out of another product.

Make sure you strengthen some of the larger areas, you can see some warping in the helmet already and that warping will increase when you apply resin.

I did two layers of resin on the out side and three layers of resin and fibre glass on the inside.

Good luck

 

[closet batfan]

You want to put tin foil between the face plate and the main helm then glue them together. this way after you've finished resining and bonding it's easier to seperate the sections so you can articulate the helm.

 

[PurdueMadLou]

Hey hkt0214 - welcome.

The biggest mistake I made, IMO, is to not resin the inside well enough before laying fiberglass cloth. The cloth, even when saturated with resin, will not adhere well to intricate details, especially those small interior corners like in the chin/jaw or around the ears. The next helmet that I pep, I am going to put a layer of resin on the outside, then a thin layer on the outside, use my heat gun to "unwarp" or fix what I can, then either use more resin or rondo on the inside to fill in some of those corners. Then I'll lay some fiberglass on the inside.

My first helmet needed (still needs actually since I'm still working on it) quite a bit of adjustment that I have been trying to accomplish in the bondo stage. Unfortunately in some areas I end up sanding through the paper into an air pocket on the inside of the helmet between the paper and the fiberglass. Does that make sense?

As far as the teeth/eyes - like closet said, I'm not going to try and pep any more teeth. I am doing part of the eyes to make sure I get the right eye shape going into the helmet.

For the areas that you circled in red, I like Kolin's rule of thumb. If you're not left with a flap big enough to do anything with, cut it out. After I attached the larger flaps on the same "line", I went pack and glued scrap pieces to both sides of the line on the inside to simulate a flap.

If you check out my build, there is a picture that TryChick sent me on how to connect the pieces together for resin using binder clips.

Cheers.

 

[hkt0214]

Thanks for the replies everyone! I appreciate the help so far!

it looks good but if your finding this model hard you can use the cutting tool on pep designer to make it easier for your self thats what i did , i find it hard aswell when the model has been unfolded like that so i make it easier for me

Is that a feature of the full, licensed version of Pepakura Designer? I have Designer, but the "free" version (i.e. the one where I can't save anything).

My general rule for peping a lot of the smaller areas, if its 1mm or under, forget it. If it is a bigger gap than 1mm however, do it.

Remember, the further off you are on that one peice, double to triple that at the last piece at the end.

If your off an inch in the begining, you'll be off by a mile at the end.

Also, the sides of the forhead are concaving in, You'll want to pop those back out before you resin (after studying builds, this is going to be my big fear as well for my pepped helm, hell my first foam helmet did the same. That curve is an odd bird), or its going to be alot of filler work otherwise.

Anyway, here's the good news.
It looks like you did a good job on the pep, alot of those small little lines seem to line up great (especially around the ears.)


So keep it up! Your doing fine.

Thanks for the tip. Yeah I had a couple of pieces where the flaps were like that, but I pretty much did what you suggested to begin with, so I feel better about that now.

Don't bother pepping the teeth, it's easier to make them separately out of another product.

Make sure you strengthen some of the larger areas, you can see some warping in the helmet already and that warping will increase when you apply resin.

I did two layers of resin on the out side and three layers of resin and fibre glass on the inside.

Good luck

You want to put tin foil between the face plate and the main helm then glue them together. this way after you've finished resining and bonding it's easier to seperate the sections so you can articulate the helm.

So does it matter what order I do the resining in? Like, should I resin outside, then resin inside, then outside again, then inside again, then fiberglass inside, and finally resin inside again? Is that a good order, or should I do it a different way?

Hey hkt0214 - welcome.

The biggest mistake I made, IMO, is to not resin the inside well enough before laying fiberglass cloth. The cloth, even when saturated with resin, will not adhere well to intricate details, especially those small interior corners like in the chin/jaw or around the ears. The next helmet that I pep, I am going to put a layer of resin on the outside, then a thin layer on the outside, use my heat gun to "unwarp" or fix what I can, then either use more resin or rondo on the inside to fill in some of those corners. Then I'll lay some fiberglass on the inside.

My first helmet needed (still needs actually since I'm still working on it) quite a bit of adjustment that I have been trying to accomplish in the bondo stage. Unfortunately in some areas I end up sanding through the paper into an air pocket on the inside of the helmet between the paper and the fiberglass. Does that make sense?

As far as the teeth/eyes - like closet said, I'm not going to try and pep any more teeth. I am doing part of the eyes to make sure I get the right eye shape going into the helmet.

For the areas that you circled in red, I like Kolin's rule of thumb. If you're not left with a flap big enough to do anything with, cut it out. After I attached the larger flaps on the same "line", I went pack and glued scrap pieces to both sides of the line on the inside to simulate a flap.

If you check out my build, there is a picture that TryChick sent me on how to connect the pieces together for resin using binder clips.

Cheers.

Yeah, that makes sense, I'm hoping to avoid that too... Like I said, this will pretty much be an experimental piece to make sure I have the process down before trying a real piece. Hopefully I don't make too many mistakes this go around... Thanks for the other advice, I'll definitely take it and try it out.

 

[Surreal Studios]

Great first pep, helmet looks good. Just remember when it comes time to resin it, make sure the first coat is a light one as to not soak the card stock and distort the helmet. I generally do 3 coats of resin on the outside . First cost is a light coat to seal your part so that you can do heavier coats of resin after .

 

[hkt0214]

Great first pep, helmet looks good. Just remember when it comes time to resin it, make sure the first coat is a light one as to not soak the card stock and distort the helmet. I generally do 3 coats of resin on the outside . First cost is a light coat to seal your part so that you can do heavier coats of resin after .

Thanks for reply, Surreal. I really appreciate the help; your build is really an inspiration to my boyfriend and myself. I kind of feel like I'm talking to a celebrity...

---

Now for some updates. The helmet has been resined and fiberglassed. In total, the resinning/fiberglass process went:
1. 1 light coat outside
2. 1 coat inside
3. 1 coat outside
4. 1 coat inide
5. 1 coat outside
6. 1 light coat inside - fiberglass cloth placed on wet resin - more resin over placed fiberglass
7. Sand/smooth the inside
8. 1 coat inside

After resinning and fiberglassing (but before sanding/smoothing):

The only issue here was fiberglass was a pain in the butt using the "resin -fiberglass cloth - resin again" method. I think next time we'll try spray adhesive. Any advice on that part?

Then we started on the bondo. We started with placing it on the top of the faceplate. Unfortunately, we put WAY too much and we ended up trying to sand as much off as we could. We couldn't see our detail lines...

Didn't take any pictures of the heavy bondo, but here's the helmet post-sanding:

I feel like this is the hardest part, by far... Also, it feels like the easiest to make big mistakes on. I'm afraid of sanding too much and getting down to the paper or fiberglass if I keep making mistakes.

How should I go about making my details lines? Should I cut into the bondo while it's still "wet"?

 

[closet batfan]

Looking good so far, you will lose detail lines from time to time when you apply layers of bondo, I don't think there's any way of getting Around that. You can always go back over the lines with a Dremel tool later to tidy up the small details. Keep going

 

[hkt0214]

Hi guys! I need some help and advice on getting detailed lines with bondo...

Here's where I'm at so far:

Now, for the left side, my lines are awful on top:

(a view in the "valley" of the lines)

The lines on top we got by wrapping sandpaper around a popsicle stick and sanding it that way. We also used a dremel (thank god my bf has tools...) to "carve" out the lines when sanding didn't work. They weren't coming out good...

Then, by a shear stroke of luck, we got the line on the bottom, near the chin (reposting the same picture from above):

We got this by letting the bondo sit on the helmet until it was the consistency of a rubber eraser, then scoring the line with a putty knife. It's by far the sharpest and cleanest line we've got yet.

So then we tried that method on the other side of the helmet:

We did the same "scoring" method with the putty knife and then sanded it with the sandpaper popsicle stick. The lines didn't come out as good as with just the putty knife...

So we don't really know what to try anymore to get nice, sharp lines... Should we stick with letting the bondo get to that rubbery consistency and then make lines? What the general consensus that most people do? I've seen some crazy sharp and detailed lines on projects here (projectearth and surrel, come to mind).

Advice or help, please?

Thanks in advance.

 

[closet batfan]

I ended up putting filler/bondo over the lines, I knew that this meant that I would lose detail but After I had got the shapes smooth I used a dremel tool to cut the detail lines in, it really helped to make the lines look sharp.

 

[hkt0214]

I ended up putting filler/bondo over the lines, I knew that this meant that I would lose detail but After I had got the shapes smooth I used a dremel tool to cut the detail lines in, it really helped to make the lines look sharp.

I was hoping it didn't have to come to that, but I was tossing that around too...

How would you know where exactly to cut to get the lines? Just eye it up and go for it?

 

[closet batfan]

I printed out the pep files again but onto paper and cut out the main sections without the tabs, I then postioned these paper templates onto my Ironman helmet and drew round them to get the correct ridge lines, this also helped to check the helm was symetrical.

 

[hkt0214]

I printed out the pep files again but onto paper and cut out the main sections without the tabs, I then postioned these paper templates onto my Ironman helmet and drew round them to get the correct ridge lines, this also helped to check the helm was symetrical.

Thanks for all the help you've been giving me. I just checked out your build, so awesome, one of the best ones I've seen.

So basically just cover the whole helmet in bondo to get the basic shape, print out the pep pieces as a "stencil", mark the lines, and cut the lines with a dremel?

 

[closet batfan]

It sounds so easy when you put it like that! Thanks I'm glad you like my IM build hopefully I'll fix the problems I'm having and it'll be ready for the premier of IM 3.