It's been unbelievably busy these past few weeks with full time working, I actually miss the free time I had with school!
The little time I've had has been spent rebuilding some of the badly set parts in the cheek vents, the ear vents, and the needler. But I managed to actually try out something I've been thinking of for a while.
If you look at this picture:
You can see that the curved part of the earbox is pretty rough as it curves around the middle of the earcup. I didn't want to just eyeball it and glop bondo on, since those earcups are rather delicate to sanding and I don't want to have to reinstall them again because the bondo obscured those beautifully printed and vacuumed details.
It should be noted that there are no pics of the right side of the helmet after I had to cut out the first vac-formed cup, and install a new one, but the right side faired a LOT worse than this left side. The right side was a jagged nightmare before I did the following steps.
---
So I scaled a picture of the side of the helmet to the size of the 3d modeled ear cups I made, printed it out like so with a vacuum formed copy of my earcup 3d print
The concept is to apply Cereal's tape peeling method for getting straight lines out of bondo, and expand it for computer accurate curves (or as computer accurate as I can muster). So I take that photo and use it to trace the patter onto the vac-formed cup:
Lay it on top of the helmet-installed cup, slap the bondo on top of it, and then peel off the stencil I've made:
I had a little bit of bondo leakage, but the result is substantially cleaner than what I had before, and cleaning this up is going to be a lot easier than the old shape:
I had to arbitrarily cut the ear box in order to cram the full circle ear cups into it before, so there was no way to guarantee symmetry between the left and right boxes, but with this method, I can guarantee at least from the perspective of the main point of reference (that small circle in the ear cup) it will appear to be symmetrical. Whether it is actually symmetrical is doubtful, but it'll be a lot closer (and cleaner) than before. I may redo the process with a less picky plastic, since the polystyrene I used is sort of thick and intrusive, I may redo it in PETG which will grip the installed cup a lot tighter.
Not much progress in the past month, but it's more than nothing!
The little time I've had has been spent rebuilding some of the badly set parts in the cheek vents, the ear vents, and the needler. But I managed to actually try out something I've been thinking of for a while.
If you look at this picture:
You can see that the curved part of the earbox is pretty rough as it curves around the middle of the earcup. I didn't want to just eyeball it and glop bondo on, since those earcups are rather delicate to sanding and I don't want to have to reinstall them again because the bondo obscured those beautifully printed and vacuumed details.
It should be noted that there are no pics of the right side of the helmet after I had to cut out the first vac-formed cup, and install a new one, but the right side faired a LOT worse than this left side. The right side was a jagged nightmare before I did the following steps.
---
So I scaled a picture of the side of the helmet to the size of the 3d modeled ear cups I made, printed it out like so with a vacuum formed copy of my earcup 3d print
The concept is to apply Cereal's tape peeling method for getting straight lines out of bondo, and expand it for computer accurate curves (or as computer accurate as I can muster). So I take that photo and use it to trace the patter onto the vac-formed cup:
Lay it on top of the helmet-installed cup, slap the bondo on top of it, and then peel off the stencil I've made:
I had a little bit of bondo leakage, but the result is substantially cleaner than what I had before, and cleaning this up is going to be a lot easier than the old shape:
I had to arbitrarily cut the ear box in order to cram the full circle ear cups into it before, so there was no way to guarantee symmetry between the left and right boxes, but with this method, I can guarantee at least from the perspective of the main point of reference (that small circle in the ear cup) it will appear to be symmetrical. Whether it is actually symmetrical is doubtful, but it'll be a lot closer (and cleaner) than before. I may redo the process with a less picky plastic, since the polystyrene I used is sort of thick and intrusive, I may redo it in PETG which will grip the installed cup a lot tighter.
Not much progress in the past month, but it's more than nothing!
