Malaxor's ESB Fett Helmet Build-Up

Well, I thought I’d keep up a thread as I work through a scratch build for my ESB Fett helmet. Full credit goes to Wizard Of Flight for the wonderful templates and Antman’s threads that really give some good advice, which you will see reflected in this build.

I started this project with a throw-away build using thin single thickness Crescent chipboard and paper (not shown here), just to see how everything goes together. I highly recommend this as I discovered sizing issues (such as fitting around my glasses) and details about the scaling of the PDFs with different printers, etc. In the end, 41% print scale for the helmet templates and 103% (on my Epson inkjet) for the dome template worked out for my sizing needs.

For the actual build, I’m using the double-thick Crescent chipboard. I've seen a few posts that suggest not using this because it is essentially two pieces of the thinner cardboard laminated together, but it is much more solid and actually has led to fewer issues for me thus far. I think it’s OK as long as you don’t keep moistening the same section of cardboard over and over again. Gorilla wood glue has really worked out well for me as well.

Wrapping the inner portion and clamping in place:



Because of how I clamped the back side, I ended up with a slight curvature on the back of my bucket between the top and the bottom. To correct this, I moistened the area and clamped for a few hours with narrow wood to correct this. I did not let it go full dry because I didn't want the bucket to get totally flat on the back:



I clamped the sides using 2” boards on the range finder side and 1 and 3/4" on the other side and let it fully dry to get it nice and flat (note: wood that is laminated worked best lest you end up with wood grain pressed into the cardboard):

Now I glued the inner and out pieces, and cut out the cheekbones:



I hand shaped the cheekbones after moistening and let them dry in place which made gluing a lot easier. As a note, I was using a painter’s masking tape to hold things in place. It worked, but advise caution because it did like to take off some of the cardboard when removed. Just be careful:



I sized the lower cheekbone, glued it in place and then glued the cheekbone backplate, and here it is at this stage:

At this point I wanted to figure out how to size the dome. First, I put the dome form in but just secured it with tape for the time being. I first tried the dome template at 100% (scaled up from the default 97% on my printer), which allowed the little inch markers on each page to exactly match up at one inch each. I taped the domes together on paper only (this is for sizing only):



I then put this on my helmet. As you can see, when worked all the way around, the templates were short by about 3/4”. Also, although you can’t see it here, the top of the dome was too snug against the dome form. It never would have worked with the full thickness of the cardboard:



I took a more exact circumference measurement just to double-check how much bigger the template needed to be. The more precise result was about 7/8” of additional width overall:



The 7/8" extra I needed means that I would need the template to be about 3% larger than it was in my last print. I also need to account for the thickness of the cardboard.

Fortunately I was able to set the scale on the PDF to about 103% and still print properly which I allowed me to re-try the whole thing. I improved on the test setup by taping some scrap pieces of cardboard to the dome form to simulate the final thickness. You can see that along with the first section of paper glued on here:



Here's the result with all of the paper test cases taped on:



This seems to work...no gaps anywhere, and it seems to mold to the dome with my "thickness simulator pieces" in place...so i'm hopeful that that the actual pieces will fit ok.

I'm trying to decide whether I should now put in the keyhole pieces in back or just finish flushing out the dome...

i like it! it looks very clean so far

Haven't had a lot of time this week, but I was able to get a little bit done. I basically got the rear keyhole plate installed and glued in the dome form. I decided I wanted to work on the keyhole before putting the dome on so I could have easier access. The keyhole was a challenge to moisten the cardboard the right amount to allow it to be bent without destroying the structural integrity of the really thin parts. Anyway, here's where I am right now:



If anyone wants to see more details, let me know. I should hopefully get the dome on soon.

Thats a good looking bucket. I've been getting readt to start building mine for a few days now and these pictures make me want to get started. keep up the good work and please post more pictures.

Ralfskunk, I'm glad I can provide some encouragement as I share what I've done. I don't consider myself any kind of expert as of yet, but if you have a question I can provide more detail of what I did. In reality I'm following the advice in a number of other scratch build threads here on TDH (Antman's thread from a few years ago has a lot of really good details), so I'm not showing every tiny detail unless there's a question. Again, I hope to get some more pictures up later this week, especially as the dome and ear pieces come together...

Ok, I have finally started to get the dome put on. I know it’s been a while…I am more or less keeping up status once a week or so. But giving the long dry times between steps and work in between, this is the best I can do. If you recall I did I dry run of the dome with paper just to make sure everything would fit. I printed everything at that size and drew a line such that the only shaded region matched the lip of the dome. I cut everything out, moistened and preformed the pieces as best as I could:



I then glued the back portion as shown and allowed to dry overnight.



Here I re-moistened the pieces and bent to the dome frame. I left the paper on each piece so I could see the horizontal lines and match everything up better. I peeled the paper off later.



Now for the next piece, I decided to cut the dome portion into smaller sections. I think this was a good choice as it makes the pieces smaller and it was easier to work in smaller sections. But I continued to do both sides at the same time:



When I folded these together, here is where I noticed I had a real problem. While I had the right idea in re-sizing the dome parts with my paper test from a prior post, I had forgotten a couple of important details. The first issue that came up at this point was that my scaling probably shouldn’t have been an equal horizontal / vertical scaling. While I was confident that the three pieces would wrap all the way around the dome, the pieces were getting too long when they met at the center. Here you can see how I cut them off:



The second issue was that because I had flattened the side for the ear pieces, it caused the dome pieces at those places to not be aligned correctly. This, combined with the sizing issue above, caused me to fabricate a bunch of custom pieces after doing some fancy trimming to make everything still conform to the proper dome shape as you can see in the previous picture. While it looks a little ragged here, it will be ok after the filling and sanding later on. The distortion due to the flat sections of the dome also caused some buckling in the cardboard as I forced it to meet the dome shape as I got close the left right dome form. Here you can see two pieces out of alignment:



With some trimming I was able to take out the buckles and maintain the dome form. I am always keeping in mind that it is much easier to fix in now than it will be in the fiberglass / bondo stage. You can see the fixes I had to do in multiple places with the last pictures in this post.

Moving on I have continued to add pieces to the front of the dome. Here the last pieces are in position:



Now, while that picture looks OK for the last pieces of the dome, it actually turned out that my pieces were a bit too long (the #1 dome pieces overlapped). So I trimmed each side equally to match up. But why when I measured so carefully before. I think it’s because my sizing assumption was based on the circumference of the dome lip as I sized it with paper. I didn’t account for the width of the cardboard itself. Here all the dome pieces have been added. It looks a bit rough in some of the trimmed spots, but the important thing is that the shape is right as all the rough spots will be taken care of later as I sand and fill:



Now I'll probably fork into two efforts: building the ear pieces and doing the initial filling and sanding pre-work on the bucket. Hope to be back soon with more progress.

That is looking great.....

Hey thanks. The other thing I'll be working on as well is putting in the helmet dent, front triangles, and noting the location for the borden. More to be seen soon, hopefully.

Well, all I have gotten to so far is fabricating the right and left ear pieces. I spent a lot of time figuring the sizes for each layer and re-doing the bottom right ear piece more than once :/ Here you can see the laminated layers I built up before final shaping for the right ear piece. For the left earpiece I have already shaped it and done some initial filling and sanding:



For filler, I'm using just a basic wood filler. This has really worked great to even out the edges of the laminated layers and fill those small areas left over after shaping. Here you can see all the pieces that are shaped and have had filler applied and sanded:



Next, I'll tackle sanding and filling the helmet while I alternate priming/sealing these ear pieces. I'll be on the road the next few weeks so I won't get any more work done for a bit...

Real life getting in the way of having Fett fun the past few weeks...but I am back at it now.

Since the last post I have spent a lot of time filling (with wood filler) and sanding every seam and doing more rough shaping. I had to do a lot of rough shaping of the dome and the mandibles. My goal here is to make everything as close as possible before I move onto fiberglass and bondo. Here are a couple of screen shots of the first pass through sanding and filling:



This wasn't though...I spent a few more rounds of serious sanding and filling. I then outlined the location for the forehead arrows and the dent:



Turns out I actually had the dent position a little bit off in the above pic. I moved it, but forgot to take a pic . Anyway, here is a pic of the rough out that allowed me to form the dent. The arrows are also roughed out as well:



After filling and sanding out the dent and shallowing-up the arrows a bit, here is where the bucket stands right now:



Can't see it there, but I also cut out the small left mandible rectangle. You can see I've marked the spot for the borden connector, but haven't done anything with it yet.

I'm planning out my strategy for fiberglass and bondo, so hopefully my next post will show what I've done.

A little more progress here. I cut out a portion of the face mask, leaving a good chunk in place just to make sure nothing deforms through the initial fiberglass steps:



As I was doing that, I noticed that I had a bit of a problem on the inside. The small lip on the inside remaining from the top of the dome form would actually get in the way when it's time to put the visor in. So, a little bit of elbow grease and I got that part cut out and smoothed down. If you look carefully you can see the the edges of that dome form on the right and left of the picture where I cut everything out:



Next I took the big leap and started the fiberglass on the inside to give it some strength. Now, if you haven't done this before, make sure you have the right equipment (the right kind of respirator, goggles, gloves, etc.), work outdoors, and wear clothes you don't care about... Anyway, I cut it a little close to the hardening time on one of the quadrants (slightly discolored) because it was pretty hot outside, which can really speed up the cure time, but it still worked out OK. After a lot of course grit sanding, sanding, sanding, and more sanding in my every-so-stylish respirator...it's finally smooth on the inside, with a few blemishes to be fixed during my next round:

These next steps have taken a while, thus the delay in posting. The next thing I did was to apply fiberglass resin to the outside of the helmet. I was really debating whether I should do the whole helm or just parts. In the end I decided to the whole thing because I am thinking the bondo would work better with a resin base (as opposed to cardboard). I applied the resin in a number of stages because the resin can get runny and leave streaks that are then a major pain to sand back down prior to bondo. So I would work on one portion, let it set and then work on another portion always keeping the helmet rotated so that it would run too much. Here's what it looked like when had gone over the whole helm:



After this, I sanded (60 grit worked well at this stage) everywhere to smooth out any rough edges and to rough up the resin for better bonding:



Now it's on to the bondo...

Ok, so after the fiberglass, I worked my way around the helmet doing small sections at a time. Doing small sections at a time with a minimum of bondo makes this a lot more manageable, but it still takes a lot of time and a lot of sanding. Anyway, the basic process was to apply a cover coat for the small area I was working on, sanding it rough-smooth with 60 grit. When I had a whole area covered (like the dome) then I sanded with 120 then 220. Then I would move on to another area, like the mandibles, and so on and so forth. Anyway, right now the entire bucket is mostly done. I have a few blemishes and uneven spots to address before I move up to finer sanding (possibly wet sanding). Here are some pics sanded up to 220:



The "spots" are places where the fiberglass is peaking through, but it is sanded seamlessly with the bondo to form a nice smooth, even surface.

Next I will be cutting out the remainder of the front visor portion and finishing those edges. Once that's done it will be finer sanding and then primer / glazing putty iterations.

I'd be careful with wet sanding. I did the same on my build and the water managed to soak through the resin and into the cardboard in some places.

Jesuit24 said:

I'd be careful with wet sanding. I did the same on my build and the water managed to soak through the resin and into the cardboard in some places.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip. I was kind of worried about that too. While I *think* it's sealed up everywhere, it's probably not worth the risk...

Back at it again. Here you can see the rough cut-out of the rest of the visor portion. I attached some temporary supports at the top and bottom of the visor to give it some structural integrity. These were attached with 8-32 binding posts bonded to the inside with JB weld epoxy.



I then used fiberglass resin to seal the portion that was cut away, then bondo'd and sanded until it was seamless:

While I was working on the above cut-out and waiting for things like the JB weld to set, etc., I continued working on the ear pieces. I re-built the upper right portion of the ear piece to allow me to embed some tiny little super-magnets within the structure itself. You can see the individual layers in the next two pics. Note the last layer is a thinner 1mm piece of cardboard that goes on top of the magnets. This makes it a seamless piece and avoids the chance that the magnets will pull out of the piece altogether (these do happen to be really strong magnets). I embedded thin steel washers on the backside of the the other piece to hold the two parts together when its finished.



Here you can see the final piece on the right with the top cardboard glued down. I put a small card board ridge on the right piece with a corresponding slot on the left piece to help keep the two pieces positioned correctly:



Here's the the piece shown with the range finder stalk attached and then a final shot of the piece all together. The magnets do hold that piece on quite well:



All the ear piece part together. They have all been gesso'd to seal them up and sanded smooth: