Episode IV: A New Rope (to hang myself)
Sorry for the delay in a new episode. Had to adult for a while. When we last left our hero (me), I had corrected the ventilation holes in the chrome filigree part. Now it is time to attach the cut to hell jowl piece from the Disney mask. I do this with obscene amounts of 5 minute epoxy in several stages and application, using my own grubby hands as clamps, because I just didn't trust clamps in this instance. I wanted to monitor and adjust the positioning the entire time the glue was curing. This is THE hardest part of the entire mod. If you do this, be prepared for lots of swearing. I actually snapped the whole piece off and filed off the glue the first time because I wasn't happy with how it was sitting.
Here's the jowl piece (which I've named as such because when everything it together, all you can see of it is in the jowl area). There was SO SO SO much fine sanding and filing to get this little a****** to sit against the bottom of the filigree as seamlessly as possible....which is to say, you'll see me filling giant gaps and seams in it later with putty:
Here it is after (I think) the second glue application. You can see that the peg holes by the nose are super distorted. That's because I had to hit the piece with a heat gun to widen the radius of its arc a tad to get it to fit to the filigree piece. The very bottom corners of the BS filigree piece SHOULD be pinched in about 5mm deeper (another change made for molding purposes), but unfortunately, that is one accurizing fix I can't do...at least not without a solid week of work, so I had to compromise here and alter the jowl piece those 5mm instead to fit. Unless you have a screen used helmet held up right next to this one, that 5mm difference isn't noticeable.
Here is the jowl piece attached after all glue applications (but before puttying), and the warped peg holes dremeled out so the pegs fit again. Just have that one big gap to deal with on the end. The other side (not pictured) lines up perfectly:
After that nightmare, I decided to do something simple and hack apart some plastic to vent some aggression. I focused on the eyes. With my ventilation holes all fixed up, we need to remove the plastic bit that inexplicably plug them. However, we still need to retain some of the part, because it provides the accurate backing to the "tears", and makes the eye opening the proper size.
Vent plugs removed:
Here's EXACTLY where you want to cut:
I'll show the finished result later once I glue it in, but I didn't want to do that yet in case I had to make more mods to the area. Remember, I'm making this up as I go. lol
Speaking of which, I had to hack down the Disney cheek piece even more to get everything to fit perfectly when it's all sandwiched together. Here's how this part needs to be cut down.
The areas where the cheeks attach are now cut EXACTLY on the seam line to where it will attach to the BS (before I had excess plastic that I had intended to weld to the BS from the inside, but it just wouldn't allow me to line everything up right. Also, I cut off the nose area down to where the peg holes are, as it was pushing ever so gently against the backside of the chrome filigree piece.
Aaaaaaaaand back to the filigree!
Half way through this next step,
I made a VERY VERY hard decision. I've decided I am NOT going to preserve the vacuuplated chrome finish on the filigree. So while you'll be seeing everything protected in masking tape in these upcoming photos, I eventually tore it off and said screw it. Here's my rationale: 1. it'll make modding and blending so so much easier if I don't have to be so butt clenchingly precise. 2. The convex shape of the filigree on the forehead is inaccurate and annoying me, and I want to sand them down flatter. 3. Vacuuplated chrome is not accurate. The screen used helmet was cast resin and painted (POSSIBLY cold cast, but hard to say for sure). I'm just going to paint the silver on with a more accurate looking paint. It wasn't perfect gleaming chrome; it was just a highly polished metal look, which I can achieve with paint.
First thing I did was pix up my two part glazing putty and drizzled a little into the speaker holes (remember that I had the holes backed with hot glue earlier so the putty wouldn't just ooze out).
And then a second application so that it sits higher than it should, so that I can then sand it flush later. Notice I filled in the hole where the helmet meets the filigree too. This is not necessary, as it's pretty much covered by the helmet, but at certain weird angles, I could see down into it, and that made my OCD twitch.
Next I started filling in the seam to the jowl piece:
And while I was there and had the materials out, I tossed a little into the vent holes I cut too much out of:
SO SO SO SO SO SO much sanding later (minus the vent holes. still gotta do them, but need to do file work first):
And lastly for this episode, reinforcing the helmet!
I mixed up a two part glass fiber infused body putty and VERY liberally applied it all over the seam, inside and out, and along the inside of the flair. Inside the flair is both for cosmetic reasons, but also to stiffen up the flimsy plastic. What great about this step is that it adds a very nice weight to the helmet. It feel like something tangible and real now, as opposed to lightweight cheap plastic...but not too heavy to feel uncomfortable if worn for several hours.
And after sanding. If I hadn't had an air palm sander, I would quite possibly have gone mad.
And the state of the union at the moment. Next up, FINALLY permanently attaching the Disney crap to the Hasbro crap, and then resurfacing the helmet! Stay tuned!
