Smoothing out the cheeks:
Hence of the polystyrene 1mm material is pretty stiff, the corners of the cheeks compared to the original helmet are very very sharp. To smooth out the corners I used a special shaped scraper, car body fine polyester filler and sandpaper grain 300.
The special shaped scraper I built from a left over of polystyrene. As guide for the scrapers curve I just used a bottom of a small can, marked it with a permanent marker and cut out the shape.
After mixing the filler you have only 2 min to get the correct shape. So before I practiced the movement of my hand a couple of times. The trick is to flatten the scrapers angle during the filling process, that varies the curvature to the outside and makes it a little wider. For me it looked like the original has that.
So after mixing the putty it is important that you fill the corner in one move, you start at the inner side and move pretty straight outwards. If the shape is not what you expected do the same movement again form the beginning to the end. When you stop in the middle of the filling process you will get waves or bumps, later on its much harder to sand them away.
This photo I took right after the filling procedure.
This was after sanding a little bit, it looks pretty close to the original, what do you think? (Unfortunately not the dome...I know:facepalm)
Hence of the polystyrene 1mm material is pretty stiff, the corners of the cheeks compared to the original helmet are very very sharp. To smooth out the corners I used a special shaped scraper, car body fine polyester filler and sandpaper grain 300.
The special shaped scraper I built from a left over of polystyrene. As guide for the scrapers curve I just used a bottom of a small can, marked it with a permanent marker and cut out the shape.
After mixing the filler you have only 2 min to get the correct shape. So before I practiced the movement of my hand a couple of times. The trick is to flatten the scrapers angle during the filling process, that varies the curvature to the outside and makes it a little wider. For me it looked like the original has that.
So after mixing the putty it is important that you fill the corner in one move, you start at the inner side and move pretty straight outwards. If the shape is not what you expected do the same movement again form the beginning to the end. When you stop in the middle of the filling process you will get waves or bumps, later on its much harder to sand them away.
This photo I took right after the filling procedure.
This was after sanding a little bit, it looks pretty close to the original, what do you think? (Unfortunately not the dome...I know:facepalm)