Thanks for the kind words!
I started out with and iron man mkVI helmet by cutting out lots and lots and lots of paper. I realized shortly that the paper I used was way too light weight and I just wasted loads of time. When I decided to start over War Machine seemed like it might be a little bit more fun. back to cutting paper and tiny little tabs...
I pepped up the helmet, torso, shoulders and arms first.
The first war machine paper helmet came out pretty decent. And yes, I did say "first". I began glassing the model and was making decent progress. I set it outside the to start the next round of resin coating and went inside to get some supplies. When I came back out, maybe 10 minutes later, a freak rain shower had happened and my helmet turned to deformed mush. So.... back to square one...
Shortly after this I made the legs but didn't get any photos of them before glassing.
Fiber glassing the parts came with a whole set of new challenges. I experimented with different methods on almost every part I built to see what would work best. On most of them, what seemed to work was a thing coat of resin on the outside of the piece first. On some of the parts I would do a second coat on the inside and let it cure before adding the fiber glass mat.
One of the hardest parts to manage were large pieces with big, low detail areas. These were very prone to deform once the resin started to soak into the paper. I found that doing a few areas at a time worked better than trying to coat the whole thing. I would start in areas that needed lots of support and reinforce the seams, edges and corners with a light coat of resin and allow to cure before venturing out into the open areas. This helped the rigidity enough to keep the parts from collapsing under the full coat of resin.
The shoulders were particularly tricky and wanted to curl in on themselves. I ended up using a box and building a support structure inside to help them hold their shape.
The were both attached and needed to be cut apart.
with a few distortions to fix and lots of filling and sanding to go, (plus a few other troubles I'll write about in a future post...) In the end, I was in too much of a time crunch to do all the extra work required on the shoulders so I moved over to a quick foam version which, I think, worked nicely (even better than expected) in such a pinch. and actually convinced me that more of the parts could have been made from foam.
I will go back and finish the fiberglass versions in the future.
Some more will be covered in the next post... got work to do.