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Squeeze Box "BX" Helmet Build


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Hey everyone.  I am starting a new thread to follow the Albuquerque Storm Trooper Mold thread I did.  If you want to see the creation of the molds please check it out.  A special thanks to Walt, Vern, and Mark for their valuable input on the mold making and vacuum table process.

 

I am coining my new helmet as a BX helmet.  Why you say?  Well, I am a retiring from a semi professional music career and have recently been working on artwork and other art related projects under the name of Squeeze Box Designs.  Based on a premis of Dia de los Muertos, or day of the dead art.  This helmet is a result of that project and although most of the helmets I turn out will be artistic sculpts based on day of the dead art, I am going to also turn out a few movie style helmets for friends and family who have expressed in interest in having one.

 

This is an original helmet mold based on a pepekura sculpt and is very symmetrical, and very much idealized.  It has some of the basic characteristics of the movie helmets in the fact that since it is a sculpted mold it is not perfectly smooth, but it is very close.  This is my first helmet build with this new mold.  

 

Here is the helmet portion as it sits on the vacuum table ready to be pulled.  This one is done in HIPS.  I plan on hitting it with a glossy car paint clear coat after it is assembled and painted.

 

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This is the face and ear buds on the table ready to be pulled.

 

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Next it needs to be cut off the table and pulled from the molds.  This is not an easy process.  Lots of compressed air and time to pull it off without damaging the plastic.

 

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Round two...trimming up the HIPS.  This part freaks me out a little.  But it came out pretty good.  Just like everyone else that has done a build I trimmed out the eyes and teeth the a dremel tool and cleaned up all the edges and made the proper cuts to the helmet as well.  

 

A rough trim first just to get it manageable.   Next the eyes and mouth. 

 

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Eyes and teeth trimmed out with the dremel. 

 

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Helmet cut to shape ready to fit to the face.

 

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Here is how it fits together.  I added the brow rubber to get a better idea.

 

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And another angle.

 

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Next steps I need to take are getting the eye molds to pull with smoked acrylic and getting my mic tip molds ready to go.  You can see the eye mold process on my Albuquerque stormtrooper mold thread.  I'm still working through a few things.  I received the paint for the helmet in the mail a couple of days ago.

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Not a lot of time this weekend, however I managed to assemble the helmet and am ready for paint.  

 

I used screws on the sides to secure the helmet to the face.

 

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Trimmed the ear buds.  This took a really long time.  

 

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Dry fit....

 

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Ear Buds and final assembly.

 

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Finished up the eye molds yesterday evening.  I had to redo a few things after I cut the eyes out of the helmet and found they needed to be a little bit more contoured.  They are ready to go.  I also made a few more tweaks to the helmet.  Filled a few holes that showed through the HIPS and got a few bumps out of the way.  If things go well this weekend with my schedule I am hoping to get a new negative mold of the eyes with HIPS and then pour a crap ton of plaster copies so I can make a whole sheet of eyes in one pull.  I'm hoping the smoked acrylic plays nice with the plaster eye molds.

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Weekend Update.

 

Sprayed the HIPS with a glossy clear coat, did a little buffing.  It looks awesome!  Worked the eye molds and have 8 pairs of plaster casts of my negatives ready for the vacuum table.  And got the tube stripe templates ready for painting.  It looks like I will get 10 stripes per side.

 

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Sorry all.  I've been lazy with the photos.  The eye lenses I ordered took 3 days longer than they were supposed to to arrive.  They didn't get here until Tuesday of this week.  So I finished up the painting and I will get some more pictures tonight and I epoxied some screw posts for the eye lenses.  Final assembly by this weekend and then it goes up for sale.  

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  • 2 weeks later...

It looks cool, man. I'm trying to line up angles for side-by-side shots with some other sculpts to see how the expression looks among some pals. The nuances are what makes their cold plasteel helmets still have emotion after all

("move along"=😧; hero=😠)

Edited by charlesnarles
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It looks cool, man. I'm trying to line up angles for side-by-side shots with some other sculpts to see how the expression looks among some pals. The nuances are what makes their cold plasteel helmets still have emotion after all

("move along"=; hero=)

Let me know what you figure out.  I'd like to know if you see something that I haven't already noticed.  I have a list going of things that I know of.

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All I noticed was the cheekbone points by the teardrops could maybe poke out a little more strongly, the ear discs could be a little thinner, the mouth is more frowny (vs fancy moustache-shaped) and the eyes are open wider compared to pics of the Dave M & Brian R buckets. Its expression (to me) captures the Empire's distain for aliens, like he's exasperated from policing some cruddy forgotten corner of the galaxy. Try it on! We have to rely on you for side-by-side size comparisons, too :)

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  • 2 weeks later...

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