Re: Daft Punk Helmet Build
Update!
This is more about the handplates than the helmet, so sorry for the lack of pretty-pretty lights.
After seeing the vac-formed method a couple pages back, I decided to finally get off my ass and make my own vac-former. This was also inspired by the gift of a new toaster oven that my wife and I received for our wedding - the old, crusty oven donated its heating elements to my new oven box.
She's a small machine - 14"x14" bed - but I wanted to start small on my first attempt. If you're interested,
you can read about the build process here.
SO! I decided to make a couple casts of my hands and sculpt out the gloves. The left hand will receive the same plates as the fingers on the right, so I only sculpted the back handplate there.
Then I did something VERY disturbing, and fed all of them into my bandsaw. This was a very, very weird thing to do. About halfway through cutting them I noticed I was grimacing, too. I suppose thats the natural reaction to feeding a hand into a moving saw blade.
After sanding the bases flat (meaning cutting off all the fingerprints - also weird) I trimmed each piece apart from one another and set them out on my vac-table. The numbers and letters are coded so I know what segment they are. "i1" = Index finger, first section.
And the pull! This is done in .080 styrene. Turned out a lot better than I had hoped, especially considering I didn't build up any drafts or raise the pieces too high off the bed.
Ran out of styrene before I could do the hand plate backs, but I should be able to pull those later today. Then I have to figure out how to get these out to the chromers... I'm thinking of making a parts tree similar to model kits so these can be sprayed more easily. We'll see...
