So one last thing for the helmet exterior before I send it out for paint. And that's to get the visor exactly the same shape and size as the real helmet. Or as much as possible. The purpose of this is to maintain the helmet's proper width, especially the 'flare', and to have light reflect off the visor as it would the real thing.
The ESB visor has a peculiar shape with a concavity near the top at eye level. This causes an up/down mirror image reflection in that area.
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To copy this exactly required making a mold of the visor of an untouched G2. My first ever mold, in fact. It was simple to be sure, and I had fun learning. I tried two different approaches. The first was extremely simple. Just take an impression with self-hardening clay. The second, was to build a silicone and fiberglass impression. The first one actually resulted in a better mold for this particular purpose.
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It didn't have to be perfect or record fine surface detail. It just had to capture the surface shape.
The next thing is to make it the right size. In the past I have used t-visor.com's FP Deluxe visor. It's a great visor. I like how well they reshape with heat, and it has nice clean edges. However, for a G2 ESB helmet, the FP Deluxe is too narrow. They actually don't have any visors that will work. I reached out to them to suggest an upgrade to the FP deluxe and gave them my measurements for what it should be for the G2, but that was a couple months ago and I have never heard back. If any of you guys know the people running that business, maybe let them know we want a new size visor for our new size helmets. The FP Deluxe is about 2 1/4" wide at the bottom. If we look at the real helmet, we can figure out an approximate width for the real visor, which is about **2 5/8"** as measured across the curve at the bottom. (**I'm going to correct this after having a discussion with [USER=4963]RafalFett[/USER] about this measurement. He makes a compelling case the proper measurement is more like 2.44". He has a more precise way of measuring than I employed. Thanks Raf).
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The G2 has a straight-across measurement of 2" from mandible to mandible at the bottom (measuring the top edge, though, which is slightly wider than measuring where it meets the visor), which slopes along the vertical axis to 1 15/16" at the top of the vertical section. That's the width you should have after you install a visor on a G2 for ESB. At 2 1/4", the t-visor will only have an extra 1/8" on each side to hold the mandibles apart. That's probably not going to work well for a G2. On mine it was leaving a 1.75" wide front facing visor. Which looked really wierd. Since it also depends on exactly how you cut your inside mandibles, each helmet will be a little different in what width visor it will need, if you want it to fit and install like the original. I ended up with a measurement of about 2 9/16" for mine. I made a template and bought some sheet acrylic. Lots of different brands to see if there was any differences. There were. The best color for our purpose is smoke gray #2074.
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Since I still can't find 2mm smoked perspex/plexiglass I chose both 1/8" and 1/16" thickness of different brands to see which works best. **Both those sizes are wrong, too thick and too thin so I'd really like to find the 2mm stuff.** (**Another correction thanks to [USER=4963]RafalFett[/USER]. He has compelling evidence the visor is actually 1/8" or 3mm, but beveled at the bottom to be more like 2.5mm. So a 3mm or 1/8" visor should be close to accurate thickness afterall. Thanks again, Raf)
the mold needed the inside edge for it to work. I tried taking impressions of the inside of the helmet but what ended up working better was just sculpting the shape by hand.
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visor recipe: bake at 375º for 5-10 minutes. Remove from heat. Using some hand protection, press down and rub the acrylic into the mold for a few minutes to make sure it's taking the shape. Gravity alone won't do an optimal job. Let it cool in the mold until it's rigid again.
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Lots of tests. All of these got heated and molded multiple times. The 1/16" did best with taking the shape. (That's the silicone mold on the left)
A long while back I re-primered my modified G2, and it's been waiting for its new visor.
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New visor installed. This has the 1/16" in for now until I can find 2mm. Here is what I call my G2'79 next to my raw G2 for comparison. The '79 is wider at the base by 3/16" but the visible visor width is the same top to bottom.
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Concavity causing mirror imaging of light source:
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