X-Wing Hemet: Cheap, Dirty, and Quick

[Rogviler]

Disclaimer: This is not going to be a screen-accurate build. In fact, while I love the iconic look of the originals, they definitely have that feel of being made fast and to a budget if you look too close. So this is sort of an homage to what they were intended to be rather than the exact look of those on screen in all their vacuformed, taped-together glory.

Having said that, back in May my kids and I were going to a Star Wars Day thing at the library. Spur of the moment I spent a couple hours with their bike helmets and some tape to whip up these approximations:

Very approximate approximations. But they were fun, and I decided to make one for myself, this time painting it rather than tape.

So I started with a motorcycle helmet from the thrift store:

And I thought about what to use for all the shapes like the mohawk and the visor cover and I had visions of an autobody filler nightmare that weighs 20 pounds. So instead of that I bought a second helmet that happened to be the same brand and style but the next size larger.

Hmmm...

Yes, now we're getting somewhere...

Very important step to protect the lining from all the mess I'm going to make:

A bit of styrene to round out the bottoms of the ears...

And then I glued on some PVC pipe spacers:

They turned out to be too tall, but they were easy to cut down. Then the mohawk went on:

Not important, but interesting - some Taiwanese person's fingerprint:

I have to go eat some candy, but I'll be back.

-Rog

 

[Rogviler]

Everything's better with a half a pound of chocolate in your bloodstream.

So then I started filling in the mohawk. I guess I forgot to take a picture of how I bulked it out so I wasn't just packing a bunch of filler into it, but basically I cut strips of cardboard and glued it in just enough to provide a backing for the filler, making sure to leave enough space for the filler to be just thick enough to be strong.

Then after some more filler and sanding, at long last I could add the big doohicky panels:

Here's the back piece, with a shot of one style of cardboard filling I did:

And some more detail pieces, including the ear bumps. I wish I could've found some old giant heaphones to use for the ears, but this will approximately approximate well enough.

I forget what I was trying to show in this pic, but here it is:

Now we get into some weird... Pencil spacer:

And then I started to bulk things out with a white glue/water mix soaked into blue shop towels. The shop towels soak up a ton of the mixture and set up almost as hard as fiberglass. More importantly, it's light.

-Rog

 

[Rogviler]

One step back as I realized I glued one of the doohicky panels on pretty far off. I can't have that, even for an approximation, so off it came:

You can see more of the shop towel packing in that shot. I was happy with how the panel came off, not too hard so as to make my life difficult, but not so easy that I would fear that the helmet would fall apart at any time.

By the way, I'm using Bondo Glass to glue the big panels on, and JB Weld (the real stuff) for the smaller pieces. Some of the filler is fiberglass jelly (dark green), and the rest is plain old 3M body filler (light green).

Anyway, with that fixed, back to work with filling...

Sides...

Down to the back piece and ears...

And that's about where I'm at. I just missed having it done for today. Spoiler alert I guess.

Not much more to do though. Just tedious, tedious sanding.

-Rog

 

[skettler]

Looks awesome. Keep us updated.

 

[Rogviler]

Yeesh, how about a non-claustrophobic wide shot?

Kitchen sink light FTW.

-Rog

 

[Halliwax]

cheap, dirty, quick just how i like my women! :$ i mean, excellent work on this! that is some serious bondo work, but it really comes together in the end! keep up the grab work, ice those elbows after all that sanding

 

[propmainiac]

God I hate sanding but its a nessasary evil in this hobby! Lol looking great! Ive really wanted an X wing helmet and this looks to be the way.

 

[Rogviler]

Thanks guys, I appreciate the support. I guess since I failed at my deadline I'll be able to be more careful in some of the details. That's either good or horrible.

I didn't take a lot of pics, so you're missing how much of the shop towels I used to fill out the gaps, it should be said. Most of the body filler is around 1/4" thick, not the inches that it appears. Normally I wouldn't care about huge amounts of filler since it's not a '68 Camaro that I'm trying to pass off as being all original, but nobody wants the weight of a frozen turkey on their head. I don't mind it being sturdy though, that's for sure. If you held one of the originals you'd be like, "What is this made of, paper??" and then if you held mine you'd be like, "What is this made of, military-grade concrete??"

It'll be more realistic that way.

-Rog

 

[karmajay]

Looks great so far!

 

[SofaKing01]

God I hate sanding...

Nothing to be said after that!

 

[propmainiac]

So yeah i hate sanding so what do I do? I decide to build a 3dprinted Blade Runner blaster which im smoothing some parts wth acetone vapor and....sanding! Lol

 

[Rogviler]

Finally got a little time to work on this. It's going to look like I'm accomplishing very little just because all the big shapes are done so it's down to the finer stuff.

Some people like sanding, but I don't know anyone that likes shaping pyramidal inside corners. It is a real pain. To combat this, I made a small chisel out of a screwdriver (LOVE making my own tools):

And with that I was able to very quickly and...controlledly? Anyway, I went from this trainwreck:

To this semi-presentable version:

So don't look at those areas, look at your sanding block, and groan. You can do it! Just gotta be smarter than it.

-Rog

 

[Rogviler]

I was realizing that I need to decide what I'm going to do for the visor and how to attach it before I got much further. Since one of the helmets came with a clear face shield, I knew I was going to use that, but it doesn't have the complex shape of the ones used on-screen (hey, didn't you read the disclaimer?), so it just needs to be enough to fake it.

I'll be fixing it in more of an "up" position, but maybe not quite as much as they showed in ESB where you can barely see it. Something like this should give me enough to tuck it in but still stick out enough to see what it is:

Yeah, my outside workbench is a trash can, what of it?

Anyway, success!

There you can see what I'm thinking I'll do. I was going to fill the space between the red helmet and the white panels, but that looks like it would be too thick of an edge and the visor would fit into...? So I'm going to cut out some of the shop towel packing and tuck it up between the two, like it would have been on the original military flight helmet before they vacuformed the living crap out of it:

Onward...

-Rog

 

[Rogviler]

Forgot an overall progress shot (smoother, at least!):

I forgot to mention one thing, which is that I was having trouble with thin layers of body filler not sticking to the bare helmet material (polycarbonate, I think) very well. To get around this I used some 3M bumper repair epoxy and for good measure hit the helmet with some adhesion promoter. So that's the really dark stuff in some shots that isn't the slightly lighter JB Weld.

Also, it's apparent that I'll need to add some more material around where the oxygen mask clippy things were on the original original helmet, so that it curves in toward the face slightly. I've been debating it, as that seems a bit anal, but since I missed the "quick" part I might as well detail it a little better than I was planning. I think that'll be next, so the JB can set up overnight.

-Rog

 

[Darth Lars]

http://i.imgur.com/GQgtpFY.jpg

Ah. The back edge of the visor cover is supposed to be rounded off. You can see it in pictures of an original here: http://starwarshelmets.com/original-xwing-helmet.htm. That roundness is in the original APH-6 flight helmet. On the APH-6 there is a sharp transition where the edge meets the mohawk, but that is rounded off on the X-wing pilots' helmets.

Great work! I once started out with a helmet very much like yours but did not have the guts to go with it as far as you did.

 

[Rogviler]

^Uh-oh, someone didn't read the disclaimer! LOL

That's interesting though. The visor cover areas are something I was just casually basing off of the 18" TIE Pilot that I have, which are pretty square minus a small rounding off that I have yet to do, and at the time I was just looking to make something to dork around in for Halloween. I was struggling to find good, non-grainy, larger-than-100-pixels references for other areas, such as the ear bulges (which I mostly guessed on, using photos from FlightHelmet.com, but I'll admit that I didn't even look too hard at the areas that seemed obvious. It'll probably be easier to round those off more anyway, so I probably will since it's not too overly anal. (<-- Phobia?)

Appreciate the info. It's pretty obvious now that I can't unsee it...

-Rog

 

[Darth Lars]

Appreciate the info. It's pretty obvious now that I can't unsee it...

Yeah, I figured it'd better be now than later.

 

[Rogviler]

All right, last order of the weekend is to get those extra round cheek bits stuck on:

They will of course need to be shaped after the JB Weld cures, but they're roughed in at least. That was the last thing that was really bugging me. It's hard to find a shot that has a good angle on exactly how round they are, since they're curved but also angled, which is hard to photograph, but I should be able to eyeball it well enough. The main thing was how they kick in toward the face, which the motorcycle helmet didn't have.

I've got to just call it at some point so I can finish it. I envy my self that had a deadline and no time to nitpick. If only I'd started a week earlier.

-Rog

 

[Rogviler]

Rounded that back edge:

Hard to tell exactly how much it's beveled and where it tapers into the straighter edge of the ram's horn part, but I'm going to call that part good enough. It's beveleder than it was at least.

Did some other work with the Dremel on the ear areas and the bits I glued on last night, which I only got a blurry pic of, so I'll have to retake that. Most of what I'm up against is working around the shape of the motorcycle helmet. Compromises must be made.

-Rog

 

[Rogviler]

Ready for some more carnage? Don't worry, it'll get better, trust me.

I spent some time cutting out the shop towel packing around the visor, which is a challenge. It's some tough stuff. But I finally got the visor to tuck all mint and JDM as $#%@:

And that's when I realized that even thought the crest gets its own cap at the front (which is why it doesn't come all the way down, BTW), it would be a challenge to build up the opening with just filler. Plus it would be weak. So I cut a bridge from some spare helmet:

So I did that, shaped the cheeks and ears, and started to refine the opening around the visor and we're here at the moment:

-Rog