So last August I started new papercrafts for version 2 of Daft Punk Thomas and Guy helmets. Here is my progress thus far on the Thomas Bangalter helmet. Unfortunately I lost a majority of my pictures from the papercraft stage to the finished master for the mold due to my camera messing up on me, but all you need to know about that is that it involved ALOT of filling and sanding. I have more pictures of that progress on my Guy Manuel helmet build for anyone interested as I bought a new camera to replace my old one.
As you can see here there is a tremendous difference between my first Thomas helmet and the new papercraft. At this point, I was pretty excited to see the finished product as the papercraft model showed a lot of potential for a great helmet
Here is a picture of the helmet in the sanding and filling stage. Sadly this was the only picture I could salvage from my camera. I will go into more detail on the Guy Manuel Helmet as to what I did to get to this stage of the helmet before molding.
At this point the helmet is completely smoothed out and primed. I wet sanded the helmet from 400>600>800>1000 grit to make sure it was completely smooth as any imperfections would translate to the finished cast. I purposely left the visor and ears a bit off as I was planning on cutting those sections out on he cast.
I used Smooth-On’s Rebound 25 to create my mold around the helmet. As it was somewhat of a complex shape, I split the mold into 2 halves to allow for easy demolding. The round parts you see are registration keys to help put the mold back into the outer shell properly so that it maintains its shape.
Here is a picture of the second half of the mold applied. At this point I let it cure and prepare to add the outer shell.
The outer shell was split into two parts as well to allow for easier demolding. I used 2 pieces of mdf for each half that bolted together to join the shell halves together.
during the demolding process I had trouble taking the master helmet out of the shell from the visor half and ended up cracking it halfway down one side.
Luckily since I already had the mold done before the damage, I was still able to produce my first successful cast!
As I did not have access to a lathe, I ended up having the ear 3d printed and then decided to make a mold from that.
I made a simple mold that was 2 layers and let it sit to cure.
Here is a 360 view of where I am with the helmet now. I sanded down the helmet cast completely with 120 grit sandpaper and found some minor imperfections, so I used some filler in those areas. Once I had the entire helmet roughly smoothed out, I attached the ears temporarily to see how it looks, So far I’m extremely happy with how this is turning out. My next step is to sand the entire helmet down from the 120 to 220>320>400 then prime it and wet sand it down and prepare it for the chrome process. I will post some updates on my facebook page before I make my part 2 so check there for the most current progress. Thanks and stay tuned for part 2!
