Managed to miss this thread somehow...
NoahFett -- haunt your local thrift shops. I got one discounted at Toys Be We back when they were first going away, but th eother three I've snagged were all at local Goodwills, for about $6 each.
The Mandalorian Mercs has a "minimum required" tutorial to get one of these looking less like the toy it started out as. To me, that's the most important part. But to get it actually looking
good, and more accurate, requires a lot more time, patience, and fiddly work, but it's still eminently possible, even on a limited budget -- which I have had my entire adult life.
Here's my WIP over on the Mercs board. Go ahead and read the whole thread if you're interested in what all I've done to it, but the cost in materials has been fairly minimal. It's mostly been time. The whole materials breakdown is:
•The helmet, duh
•New earcaps from Asok (two right ears, in the case of this helmet, as I'm mounting a blast shield rather than a rangefinder)
•A couple sticks of plumbers' two-part epoxy putty
•Scrap 1mm sintra for the new cheeks
•Styrene strip for the reworked back vent (if I'd redone the keyslots, it'd've just been more scrap sintra)
•.010" styrene sheet for the "membrane" covers over the earholes
•Two-part plastic-repair epoxy
•Super glue (aka CA glue, good old cyanoacrylate)
•Radio Shack voice amp, cannibalized
•Exciters to turn the cheekplates into speakers
•Retract servos for the blast shield
•Brass strip to mount the blast shield
•Window tinting
•LEDs for the "turn signals" (just a little something I felt like doing)
•Replacement headphone pads
•Urethane foam for padding
•Microfiber fabric to cover the padding
•Panty hose (to butcher for backing off helmet openings)
•Fan
•Wiring, batteries, solder, and other incidental electronic stuff
•Toothpaste for masking
•Toothpicks for applying the above
•Paint
•Airbrush
•Weathering powders
That's absolutely everything involved. Total outlay,
not counting stuff I already had on hand (airbrush, glues, plastics, most of the paint, and so forth), ~$250 -- and that's only because this is the helmet that I got for $35. Yeah, that's some expense, and a lot of elbow grease, but it's still cheaper than starting out with even one of the "budget" helmets. But a lot of that is only for the electrical/electronic components in my particular build. With a manual rangefinder, replacement earcaps, and a cheap bucket found at Goodwill, that cost could get knocked down to under $100 easily.
You gotta weigh the three factors in what I call the Life Equation. You've probably seen the same thing under different names: Time. Cost. Quality. Pick two. If you want it good and cheap, it's going to take forever. If you want it good and fast, it's going to cost. If you want it fast and cheap, quality is going to suffer. No way to escape that.
--Jonah