Okay so this is going to be a HUGE update!!! I apologize in advance for how much I am going to post here, and I'll break it down in a few posts for organization sake.
First things first the, the neck guard!
Let's start with a word of affirmation, Failure is always an option, and bot did I fail! My initial plan for the neck guard was to mold and cast it. However, the first time I molded it, I got a lot of things wrong, and the mold had a lot of holes, and problems with the interior texture. So, with that, I tried something crazy. I mixed up a batch of silicone, poured it in the existing mold, and shoved the positive back in there, to try to fill in the gaps.
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To my credit, this actually surprisingly worked, despite being one of the biggest messes I've made in the shop. However, next was the cast, and I had the completely wrong kind of polyurethane! Apparently the one I had was for like casting fake bricks or really porous looking stones.
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All this to say, after this catastrophic failure of it crumbling as I pulled it out, [USER=49165]DeltaAlphaZulu[/USER] gave me a great piece of advice, why don't I just print it out of TPU? Well, I decided to give it a shot, fixed up my printers, and started printing it. The print came out with a really nice finish, so now it was time to sand it.
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I used 120 grit sandpaper, but next time I would probably go a Little lower grit. TPU is notoriously hard to sand. Once I got it mostly smooth, I coated it with 3-4 thick coats of hex flex, the same paint I use to coat my Eva foamwork. I found painting and treating TPU like foamwork in its finishing and paints worked really well. From there, it was then coated in the zinc metallic paint I used for the rest of the helmets underlayer.
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I didn't really get an intermediate picture here, so moving on, it was time for final assembly. I trimmed up the visor, and I use heat threaded inserts, and M5 bolts here to assemble everything together modular, which you can see one of under the eye section here.
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Now it was time to show the final assembled helmet clean for the last time!
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From here, it's on to weathering! Starting with a chrome dry brush across the entire helmet. I generally try for a full coverage texture here, and use the paint chipping from earlier to highlight those edges, and center highlight then with the chrome pen. I use the ink here from this pen for the rest of the dry brush as well. To dry brush, I used a pretty beat up brush, and dabbed into the silver, and stippled most of it off on the plate, before scratching the helmet up. I want it to really look like I've been down in the mud, rocks, and foliage of the battlefield. Leave no stone unturned and no helmet unscratched.
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Next up to bat, was the dark wash. I prefer my dark ashes to be more muddy sludgy than straight black or grey. I used a combination of black, burnt umber, light brown, and a little bit of green to get this grime color.
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Then it's just a matter of using a paper towel to dab most of it off, to really leave it dirty. I usually try to cover the whole piece all at once, so it has a little bit of sit time where it really picks up the paints.
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Last step, disassemble and clean up any excess between the parts! Something to note, I made sure to really weather the visor to help it blend in during this process.
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From here, in the next post, we get into electronics!
