My Asok Cold Cast ESB helmet paint up!

My Asok CC helmet arrived this week and I have gotten straight down to it. I have sanded with wire wool, trimmed off the excess resin from the bucket, trimmed the RF unit & ear. Image:



I am going to mask it up and latex it up tonight to get started with painting this weekend. However, I have been told to cut the visor out last, but I was thinking that surely there would be an obvious lack of paint where the filled visor was previously? Any advice with this? Thanks.

gday bud - i prefer to have the visor and all the prep work done before i begin painting. I usually spend time mounting my final visor using some templates, and when everything is positioned correctly, I like to cut out my visor that i will use for the finished product, fit it, and when I am satisfied, I carefully store it away, and do my paint work using one of my dummy template visors, as it doesnt matter if you spray it etc. On a side note, I also prefer to prime and spray the interior before beginning the outside too. I just find, with a dummy visor in place, it has little chance of getting through, but, if there was a reason there was some overspray, id prefer it from the outside into the interior, rather than fully paint up a great lid, then spray the interior and get any overspray on the very detailed outside. Again, personal preference, and likely as im becoming a pedantic old fart, but just my method. I know how exciting it is to just want to get down and paint (to be honest, I hate the prep stages, I just love the paint stages), but by spending a little extra time at the start, it really helps pay dividends in the longrun. Peace

Cool, cheers AGAIN Jayvee. I was thinking about cutting the visor out after sanding etc. unfortunately I have no tools or anything, so any hard work like drilling the side to bolt in the RF and drill the RF itself, I need to wait until I can make it round to his house. And removing the visor, I'm assuming I need to drill the sides where it's thin and saw it out from there. Which I can't do until my dad is back from Holiday hahah.

Jayvee put it very well! Its what I did.

that will be a pretty tough and long way to do it bud, if you can borrow or get your hands on a rotary tool, it would help you heaps. rotary tools have cutters, sanding drums, drill bits and heaps of other connections that will be useful that you can chop and change, and once you have got your base cut and sand, you can refine it with some files and needle files - which you would want to do even if you have to use the hacksaw method. Just note that this bit will take some time to do nicely - put a day aside to do all these little bits of prep. depending on how accurate you want to go, this is often a good time to add the little nicks and scratches that are specific to the paintup you are doing (for esb, there are some good threads by spideyfett, and also one by ponte and terminal fettler that show the positions you want to look at for these nicks and scrapes - hopefully these three gents dont mind me referencing thier awesome work). Good luck brother!

Cheers again guys. I was thinking to me this would be the best way of doing it, I think I will do all the nicks, sand it fully drill the side, do EVERYTHING to the helmet, then cut out the visor as the sturdiness will be about for longer :P Then paint it. Thanks guys.

Rattle cans

Originally Posted by JayBox325

Cheers again guys. I was thinking to me this would be the best way of doing it, I think I will do all the nicks, sand it fully drill the side, do EVERYTHING to the helmet, then cut out the visor as the sturdiness will be about for longer :P Then paint it. Thanks guys.

Yea mate, sounds good - I really think it is the best option to get all the construction out the way before putting any paint on, so glad to see you on track with that. mounting the visor can take a little time - I have been using the chicago screw method mainly, but depending how clean you want your interior, you can even carefully hot glue the visor in at the end. Regardless, I still like to get all the mounting etc done, and by putting in a dummy visor for when you paint (you can cut this out of a thin piece of plastic, or even a cheap laundry bucket) it will give the helmet the sturdiness it needs regardless. But the most important thing is to do exactly what you are doing - and thats to plan it all in simple steps that you find will work the best for what is available to you. Looks like your right on track brother!

That sounds good. Cheers. I will be putting this on hold for a week until I am able to drill the RF & Drill the visor out which will be sometime next week hopefully. Oh well, it gives me time to work on my jet pack. Still have some sanding to do of that.

Another quick question to finish off the building of my helmet, I am wondering how to attach my earpiece over the top of my RF so I can take it off for storage. Asok recommended magnets, but I have no idea how that would work. I don't want to fill his email inbox all the time, so if anyone can help out on here = AWESOME.

bump for help?

Bump for any help on above question?

ALSO: how are people sticking the Rangefinder to the stalk? I have an aluminium stalk and a plastic RF. Will super glue be strong enough?

For the stalk I normally attach machine screws to the stalk and use them as studs forthe rf attachment. The ear can stay on with the tabs that are o. The helmet with some doublesided tape or magnets like Asok told you. The magnets would just be countersunk into the ear and side of the rf mount on the helmet.

Hmm, this is all so much more work than I thought! haha. It seems I'll have to drill a 2 holes in the top of the stalk and 2 in the RF itself. But surely just screwing two bolts into it won't work, I thought it would need two bolts etc for them to screw into? Although, super gluing 2 small bolts to the top should be enough like Fett 4 Real's idea?

No I did not mean superglue anything. I meant u need to take two machine screws and fix them into the stalk via drilling holes and tapping the stalk. Then cut the head off the screw leaving studs in the stalk.

Ahh cool. See photoshopped translation of what you meant :P. I don't want to mess this up :P haha.



I have also just bought these for the earpiece: 2 x STRONG RARE EARTH MAGNETS REBORN/CRAFT/ DUMMY 6 X 2 | eBay

Going to be getting on with all this on Thursday night!

Yes just like that

Sweet! Thanks mate. I'll be doing that this Thursday.

UPDATE:

It's taking shape now! I'll let the pictures do the talking. I've mainly been working on my Jet pack, as I haven't had access to a drill or anything. But I went to my parents last night and made the most of theirs. Popping back next week to get the visor out. I'll let the pics do the talking:

Looking good! Do the magnets hold as well as you hoped they would?

Mate, they're stronger! haha. They're so good. Can't recommend it enough. Just dill 2 holes to the depth/width that your magnets are in each side OR drill one hole thats double so they slot together, but I didn't think about the latter so I just drilled 2 holes. :P

I did that but I didn't thread it. I just made the hole pretty much the same size, but my screw was half a mm or a mm bigger, so I screwed it in as tight as it would go, then sawed off the head. Just using it to help the RF grip onto the stalk and make it more stable. I'm using this and epoxy to hold it on.

DV one of the things that you can do is get a self tapping screw that will drill into it and then cut the head off or or you can get a tapping drill bit like this Tap and Drill Bit Combo-80209 at The Home Depot. with the bit it will add a thread depending on the size bit that you get that you then can screw into.

Finally the actual painting commences!!

I started by masking the entire helmet's scratches and spraying it gray:




Then I masked the rear area and sprayed the khaki:



More soon!!

Also, this is where I'm up to with my costume:

Bare in mind that my jumpsuit is being sewn with new pockets, boots are in post, cod and the rest of the armour are en route also!

Hey Jaybox you have doing a great work, can you up some pictures of the helmet interior to see how you work is done?do you made you own Boba rifle??........

Great work jaybox, the painting process is heaps of fun isnt it:-) some really nice layering work there. The back panels blue/green does seem too blue, but I understand that photos dont always do the actual colours justice like you mentioned. Keep up the great work brother!

I have done the red mandibles!

Looks good Jaybox! I have a question as I also have Asok's awesome coldcast: as you know, when you sand up the lid, you get an amazing aluminum sheen which I guess was added to the resin. Every tutorial I have seen shows people priming the entire lid and the actual metal scrapes and damage are painted last. For this helmet, do you just mask the scars etc and use the helmet's natural metal finish rather that painting it afterwards? It seems odd to paint the metal finish when the helmet already has that look naturally.

I was originally going to use the natural metal sheen to it... but after using filler in a couple of places and the fact the edge of the helmet had a white resin/cold cast border to it where they overlap, I wanted a more consistent colour to it underneath so I sprayed it silver. Hope that makes sense. Oh and also, in my opinion the shine of the silver spray paint looked... well shinier. ha.

Wow great job on the layers at the back!! Very insiping jaybox!

The back panels seem too blue even in photos.. Could you take a picture in daylight? Did you use hunter green & blue?

^ I used a spray paint that was perfect on paper/can/test spray. but over the actual helmet it has come out too blue. If I have time (As I have 5 days until I have to unveil it for a local thing) I am going to mask the rear panels as close as I can and dust a light layer of Panzer green to green it up a tad. Considering this is my first build, I am enjoying it a lot!! Here is some photos of the rest of the bits:

Knees (Have done a dusting of black paint on them since this photo):

Enjoying my helmet (With new black upper cheeks):

What I had last week (Have much more now):

Do you have a paint/color list? I also have an Asok CC and was going to do rattle cans...

Looking great! I just sent an e-mail to Asok. I'm very excited seeing someone else's bucket come out so well.