In other news, the girlfriend liked her helmet:
Since a few of you asked, I’ll tell you what I remember about the paintjob on my girlfriend’s helmet.
The whole thing was a rush job and took about two days. I used the following ingredients:
Grey spray primer
Reddish-brown spray primer
Black spray primer
Krylon Royal Blue
[some other brand] neon orange
Krylon “Original Chrome” paint
Plasti-Dip Rubberizing paint (black)
French’s Mustard
Custom-cut adhesive stencils
Custom-cut vinyl lettering
Authentic USCG rank insignia
After washing the raw casting with warm, soapy water and drying it with the air gun, I gave the whole thing a liberal coat of grey primer. Once the primer had set up (and it dries pretty quick) I dusted on several coats of Krylon Original Chrome. This is one of the better metallic paints I’ve found for the price. At this point, it looks like so:
Then I let the paint dry before masking off all of the areas I wanted the silver to show through. Since all of the paints I’m using are enamels and they won’t stick to wet surfaces, I did the masking with mustard. The mustard works out to be thick enough that I can goop it on wherever I want it and not have to worry about having it dribble all over the place. It doesn’t have to be mustard. If you’d rather use ketchup or catsup or horseradish sauce or béarnaise, it’s entirely up to you. You just want something that the paint won’t stick to. At this point, the helmet looked like so:
Then I gave it a couple of coats of Krylon Royal Blue, let dry, and picked off all of the mustard-filled blisters with a pointed stick (think toothpick, but I actually probably used a pointed piece of tongue depressor) So now it looked like so:
Then I masked off all of the areas where I wanted to have the orange stripe with the gentlest (read: least sticky) variety of masking tape I could find. Bear in mind that this is all still the first day of painting, so all of the paint is still a bit soft and the blue is pretty easy to lift off if the tape is too sticky. Then all of the areas where I didn’t want orange paint got the mustard treatment too. This way there were some scratches that showed through the orange to the blue as well as some that showed all the way down to the bare metal.
The crackling effect in the orange paint was a side effect of the fact that none of the layers below it were completely dry and the orange paint had a very high solvent content. Essentially, it wasn’t sticking the way it was supposed to and it was trying to eat the layers below it. In short: I screwed up and it came out looking (luckily) pretty cool. Then I dusted the whole thing with a bit of the black and red/brown primer, added the vinyl lettering, and let it dry overnight. At that point, it looked like so:
The next step was to mask off all of the areas that needed to be black. I did the black details in Plasti-Dip rubber paint (the spray version of the rubber stuff you use on the handles of pliers and such) because I wanted it to have a different texture when you touched it. So the neck details, the cheek inserts, the temple areas, and the recess under the brim are all essentially painted with a thin layer of black rubber.
Then I drilled holes to mount the rank insignia, scuffed them both with some emery cloth to take the shine down a bit, glued them in place with some 2-part epoxy, and then attacked the whole helmet with black spray primer and a rag. Every nook and cranny got sprayed with primer and then wiped with a rag to get it off of the high spots. When it had dried I scuffed it a bit more with some fine steel wool to both reduce the shine of the blue parts and make the black grit in the recesses a bit more pronounced and random looking. This really brought out all of the details and I’m quite pleased with the results:
I didn’t take any pictures of the inside, so when I finish my next one I’ll tell you all about how I built the padding system and wired the fans and lights as well as how I made the ducting system so that the fans defog the visor. First we’ll have to wait until I get back into my workshop in August or September.
Next port call will be next month in Hawaii, so with a little bit of luck I’ll have some more pep models done and there will be more hi-definition models available for download here.
Stay tuned.
Safe Deployment and can't wait for you to get back and finish the rest!
