Coating

I was wondering how effective it would be to make the bucket out of foam, primed with PVA then urethane coated with smooth cast 65D. Has anyone tried this?

Darth Pestilence...

Hello, just found this today hopefully I can still lend a hand. Coating foam in urethane or a like product could result in melting your foam, or something equally damaging, I have researched this as well and haven't found to many good results. But there are some other ways. First one is a method I just learned about, covering your foam in worbla, it's fairly new but I've seen some great results, not entirely sure how it's done but I heard it's fairly easy and uses tools you would use for foam armour. Along the same line is wonderflex, it's a older version of the worbla method. Last is xrobots from the UK, a YouTube search or his website has a method of coating foam in some kind of plastic, think hardcore plasti-dip.
Hope this helps, cheers

Actually what xrobots uses as his final coating, is urethane resin, like 65D. So it is possible yes, but the foam used to make armor, like the one xrobots did, is a thick foam. If you made a helmet out of that you would loose alot of space and likely not be able to get it on your head. If you were only to use it as a master to make a mold from later, that would work most likely.

Darth Voorhees said:

Actually what xrobots uses as his final coating, is urethane resin, like 65D. So it is possible yes, but the foam used to make armor, like the one xrobots did, is a thick foam. If you made a helmet out of that you would loose alot of space and likely not be able to get it on your head. If you were only to use it as a master to make a mold from later, that would work most likely.

Click to expand...

Your right, I just rewatched it on YouTube, I should have done before I posted in haste. Hope you can forgive my impatience. I'll make sure to do better research next time. DarthPestilence, good luck with whatever way you choose to build your helmet

I was going to make the armor this way and I watched xrobots start his Iron Man helmet but I'm not sure how effective it would be for a Fett since its a different shape and different pieces

I've heard that the Mandos stopped allowing new members to use foam based armor. I don't know if that applies to foam coated in urethane. I did try this a few months ago after watching the xrobots video, and I will tell you it does not go as smoothly as his video. I already had some smoothcast 65D because I slush cast Cobra Viper helmets. I was just trying to make simple gauntlets and aside from not having a hot knife to cleanly cut the foam (the 1/2inch floor mats from Harbor Freight), the urethane is thick and dries very lumpy. I could make new gauntlets in the time I would have spent sanding those.

i think thats because the 65D is made for slush/roto casting so it sets up quicker and your probably getting runs/drips hardening before they smooth out. Regular Urethane resin cures slower and shouldn't do that...this is speculation though lol.