Visor Idea

[Xavier]

Well heres what im thinking, for the longest time people who have made helmets have had to deal with the fact that visors are not the right shape, on the MC helmet, the visor should be rounded from top to bottom aswell as left to right, but it isnt, on the ODST helmet, it needs to be much more pointy, well visors are made out of plastic correct? ic u can make a mold of what the visor's shape was in pep, then cast that in plaster, you will have a rounded surface that u can rest your visor on then use a very hot something to soften the visor and reshape them?

let me know what you think, i think it has alot of potential to perfect something that has been an issue.

-X

 

[Eternal]

Good i was hoping this was not just another copy of the other multiple visor threads.

As for your idea, i think you are on a good track, but i would not use an existing visor, first of all the tinting would get all mesed up.

Here is how i would go about doing what you are proposing. First i would pour a block of plaster just big enoug to carv out the negative shape of the visor shape you want. Or you could carve out the posotive, and then seal it so that other plaster wont stick to it, and make a mold with more plaster. once the plaster has cured, go get a sheet of thin but not too thin plexiglass, you can get them at Home Depot, lay it on top of your mold, and then either use an oven to let the plastic slump and take the shape of your mold or try doing it with a Heat gun, which you can get at Home Depot for a reasonably cheap price. let plastic cool, but make sure that you dont let it cool too fast or it might end up just cracking and shattering like glass does if you attempt to heat it up and cool it too rapidly. An oven would be better to help evenly heat and slowly cool the plastic. once cool , you should be able to lift the plastic out easily and have a perfectly shaped clear visor, now comes the issue of the tint, this is where i would get lost, I think i might attemt to go get a roll of that do it yourself tint from WallMart and try to tint it that way, but there may be better ways to do that.

 

[Xavier]

hmm, good idea, that sounds better than mine, the only reason i said use an existing visor is because most of the curve i already there, and thats a professional tint... are you sure it would mess it up?

and you wouldnt need to carve out the shape of your visor, just make a visor in pep, then fiberglass the inside, then smooth it out.. then pour your plaster into that... it would give you the perfect shape.

also if you could get this to work, you might be able to elliminate the need for double visors.
-X

 

[dwoo]

Here are the threads containing my previous posts on the idea of a more correctly shaped MC visor.
<blockquote>visor
i'm sorry, i hate to do this but, it's another visor thread., this is an opinion question.
<a href="http://405th.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5083&hl=" target="_blank">See Through Spray??, such a thing?
</a>Transparent Paint

</blockquote>I crammed a balloon into the visor opening to simulate the shape of the visor. i just need to be able to transfer that shape to a mold for heat forming a plastic sheet.

-dwoo

 

[Durlaburban]

http://www.tapplastics.com/shop/product.ph...205936677919339

blow up a baloon inside the helmet and spray it wit this stuff while its in the helmet. should work PERFECT. then the matter of tint. go to an RV shop around where you live and ask for gold PRIVACY tint. thats the good stuff.

Castin' Craft Resin Spray is used as a finish coat to seal polyester resin castings. It is also a multi-purpose clear gloss finish that allows you to embed or encase almost any object in crystal clear plastic. When sprayed on, it covers imperfections and gives a tack free finish to resin castings. This resin, which is easy to apply and fast drying, can be used to coat wood, dried naturals, sea-shells, pre-sealed paper and fabric.

spary it on the ballon while its in the helmet so the visor become PART of the helmet. it WILL work trust me. this stuffs not made to do this but it will. but be sure its sprayed thick or itll deform or break when the ballons poped and removed.


http://405th.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5584 my tutorial

 

[Eternal]

hmm, good idea, that sounds better than mine, the only reason i said use an existing visor is because most of the curve i already there, and thats a professional tint... are you sure it would mess it up?

and you wouldnt need to carve out the shape of your visor, just make a visor in pep, then fiberglass the inside, then smooth it out.. then pour your plaster into that... it would give you the perfect shape.

also if you could get this to work, you might be able to elliminate the need for double visors.
-X

I am not posotive that the heat would mess up the tint, but if you have the extra money to test it out go for it. the prob with the pep model of the visor, is that pep usualy has a angular quality to it, that isn't realistic, thus you would have to do some shaping any way, but i guess you could use it as a guide. But then again plaster is heavy and even with fiberglass it may flex and not form into the right shape, infact i am fairly certain unless you took serious precautions that the pep mold woudl collaps or distort too much.

 

[Xavier]

like i said if u used a pep model visor, it would have to be smoothed out, but it would act as a very good guide and with 2 or 3 layers of glass on it, i think it would support the plaster..

and, no, i dont have the extra money..

 

[Eternal]

like i said if u used a pep model visor, it would have to be smoothed out, but it would act as a very good guide and with 2 or 3 layers of glass on it, i think it would support the plaster..

and, no, i dont have the extra money..

The idea of the pep mold sonds ok and plaster is fairly cheap, just make sure that even if it is reenforced that you make it stable to pur into, I think i would use playdogh or something to creat a sturdy basin to pour tha plaster into the pep mold.

 

[Yodajammies]

What about car window glass tinting?

I know you can buy sheets of the stuff at walmart (?)


Heat-molded clear plastic coated with a sheet of reflective one-way tinting?

 

[dwoo]

Here are some technical characteristics of an ideal armor visor (source):

Tints:
Amber & Orange Reduces blue light (a chief component of glare), increases contrast, brightens and enhances detail. Ideal for "high glare" sports such as boating, fishing and skiing, and flying.

Coatings:
Mirror or Flash Highly reflective and greatly reduces the amount of light that reaches your eyes. Generally applied over a dark sunglasses lens, but can be applied over any base color. Mirror coated lenses absorb anywhere from 10% to 60% more light than uncoated lenses. These are good for higher altitudes, sand, water and snow. Although the most common are the silver, gold and copper metallic coatings, you will find many colors available nowadays.

-dwoo

 

[smittywv]

this is just a thought and i don't know if it would work... i read in another tutorial where it would be difficult to tint a curved surface... one guy put it like this.. it would be like putting a basketball in wrapping paper lol.. which i think is true.. it would cause you to have wrinkles in your tinting and everything..but could you apply your tint to the plexiglass first then heat the plexiglass to make it conform to your mold? that way your tint will not have wrinkles in it because think about it... the glass on your vehicle gets pretty hot so the tinting has to be able to withstand the heat... but anyways.. just a suggestion.. i don't know if it would work.. if it does let me know please!

-Matt

 

[Walter Spase]

Basketball in wrapping paper... that was me... lol

And the tint does not stand up to direct heat... if you have ever seen tint on a car witha rear window defroster... it bubles up like crazy...

One positive note... While talking to Xavier early I had scraps from my cut up Moto Visor... its gold reflective from the factory.. any way... I applied heat to it and it did bend, and once cooled it held its shape, and did not wrinkle or distort the optic really.... so this may be a good way afterall to achieve full accuracy... I am just weary of trying unproven methods... but maybe he could pioneer the way for accurate MC visors...

 

[smittywv]

thanks for the advice! now that you point it out..the tinting does bubble on rear defrosted windows lol.. never noticed that... although it may not work.. i might just take a scrap piece of plexiglass and tinting and just see what happens.. you never know.. it just may work lol.... if it does i'll be sure to let you guys know and post pics

 

[Eternal]

Basketball in wrapping paper... that was me... lol

And the tint does not stand up to direct heat... if you have ever seen tint on a car witha rear window defroster... it bubles up like crazy...

One positive note... While talking to Xavier early I had scraps from my cut up Moto Visor... its gold reflective from the factory.. any way... I applied heat to it and it did bend, and once cooled it held its shape, and did not wrinkle or distort the optic really.... so this may be a good way afterall to achieve full accuracy... I am just weary of trying unproven methods... but maybe he could pioneer the way for accurate MC visors...

What happened to the tinting though did it discolor or anything when you heated and bent it and after it cooled?

 

[CPU64]

If anyone wants to use this method to form visors, a mold needs to be made with the new curvature and a positive and negative imprint of the visor "bump map"
I made this really quick and crappy model just now of what I'm talking about. Sorry I had to make it so crude but this PC I use for internet is not equipped to run Maya decent enough for anything more complex than this..

[attachment=1096:visor_mold.jpg]

But the idea is to sit the visor into the base of the mold while it gets SLOWLY heated until soft. Then pressed with the top part of the mold. If the mold is nice and smooth, we might need CNC help on this, it should be able to turn a regular mirrored bike face shield into something like the visor on the Legendary helmet.

 

[Xavier]

thats the idea... you would always just put a bunch of bondo on the pep helm and sculpt out the negative.

 

[Sean Bradley]

Everybody thinks that they're going to re-invent the visor...

Well guys I hate to break it to you, but those of us who have been doing this for years use moto visors for a reason; because they're the best product available for this!

The mirror finish thats on these visors isn't something that you can apply at home. It doesn't come in a can, on on a roll. You need a huge high pressure vacuum mettalization chamber to do it, and the companies that manufacture these visors won't do piece work for the likes of us.... they deal with orders in the quantities of hundreds of thousands... not one or two for your suit. Link tried contacting them a long while back... they still haven't called him back.


We're small potatoes to these manufacturers.. so don't expect a solution there.

Really the best you can do for these custom visor shapes is to vacuum form a clear visor in the shape that you need and lightly spraypaint it from the interior...

Thats it, end of story... you can keep trying to reinvent the wheel on this, but thats the best thats available... Those of you who claim you found a solution of a spray-on gold mettalic transparent finish... lets see pics, prove your theory.

Until then, the rest of us will be enjoying our flawlessly mirrored faceshields

 

[howaado]

I was wondering if anyone knows or can draw up a good diagram to make the EVA visor, it would help me alot in my construction of my EVA Helmet.

 

[Walter Spase]

I meant to post back... I actually tried bending a Larger piece of that visor over the top of a spherical object... I don't think it was the stretching that did it, I think it was the heat, but it distorted the tint and actually caused the inside surface to form fine wrinkles... I did some research and spoke to a professor of mine from the university I graduated from, and here is what I found out.

The polymer (plastic) used in motorcycle visors can be forced to changed shape with heat and pressure, but you are more likely to damage a 30 dollar visor than create something worthy of the time money and effort you put into it... a motor cycle visor will not properly take on the shape needed without very high pressure and heat.

That said, the motor cycle visors you buy, start out, not as sheets of plastic that are vacuum formed, but as polymer beads, that are injected at very high heat and pressure. The "tint" is a material that is applied to the surface with a liquid, not a film.

I am not saying you can't achieve the correct look, but you are really going to have to reinvent the wheel on this one. It will not be cost effective from a manufacturing standpoint unless you can produce a homemade "High Quality" product, or a product that is mass manufactured by a third part company with the resources and technology to do it... Like Sean said, we would be small potatoes to a a large manufacturing company. They would most likely require that you pay for all Materials, Molds (very expensive), polymers, tinting material, and then require that you either pay "out the wazoo" for a quantity less than 100, or you can reduce cost by purchasing thousands...

Molds (thousands of dollars)
Material for 100 visors (thousands of dollars)
Time Charge (few thousand dollars)
Product Markup %(the less you buy, the more it will be)

All in all, you really will have to reinvent the wheel for this one... You can make the shape easy enough, but how do you tint it, without it looking like poo... or you can have a close approximation, with the right look and perfect tint, with almost no time invested, and for 30 dollars...

Is a the fact that the motor cycle visor is not curved top to bottom really the most important detail here... I don't mean to discourage, but think about your time and money, and what it is worth to you to have that perfectly curved visor...

 

[Rocknrollcows]

if only one of us had a family member in the industry

my friend's uncle used to make Stormtrooper helms and he would make the tints for the visors on those. I should ask his uncle how he tints them ... ive seen them, they are really nice