Creating a replica of a military helmet can be a complex and detailed process. The author of this project started by sanding down the original helmet to create a smooth surface for painting. This was followed by priming the entire surface with a coat of black paint, which would serve as a base for the final colors.
The next step involved creating masks for various sections of the helmet that needed to be painted separately. The author used vinyl cutters and masking tape to create intricate designs and patterns on the helmet. This process required patience and attention to detail, as small mistakes could affect the overall finish of the helmet.
One of the most challenging parts of the project was creating a custom paint scheme for the kill stripes on the side of the helmet. The author used vinyl cutters to create a mask that would allow them to apply the desired colors to specific sections of the helmet. This required some trial and error, as the vinyl cutter needed to be adjusted to ensure accurate cuts.
Once the painting was complete, the author began working on the visor of the helmet. They discovered that using replacement face shields and cutting them down to fit would be a more efficient option than trying to create a custom template. The author measured the inside space where the shield would sit and created a paper template to ensure a precise fit.
Using a heat gun, the author softened the shield and formed it into place, allowing for a smooth attachment of the visor to the helmet. This process was aided by using epoxy adhesive (e6000) to secure the visor in position. The author found that e6000 worked well for this application, as it takes about six minutes to set up.
The final step involved assembling all the parts together and attaching the side pieces to the helmet. The author used a combination of glue and clamps to ensure a secure fit. To allow the visor to turn up and down, they used a piece of dowel to connect the inside sections of the viewfinder.
As the paint dried, the author held it in place for a few minutes to ensure that everything was secure. This process required some patience, as the author knew that the final product would be worth the wait. The end result was a replica helmet that looked more impressive than expected, considering its complexity and detail.
The project highlighted the potential of 3D printing and small pieces in creating detailed models. The author had to adapt their approach when using 3D printed parts, but ultimately achieved a high-quality finish. This experience may inspire others to take on similar projects, using different materials and techniques to achieve their own creative goals.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey i'm bob and i like to make stuff today we're going to make mandalorian helmets today we're going to make a boba fett helmet now there's a bunch of different ways you could do this punish props has an awesome video on making one completely out of foam you could make one out of paper using peppa cura you could sculpt it out of your material of choice but i'm going to 3d print it i bought it from the modeler and i've kind of been waiting to print it because i don't have a printer big enough to do the entire thing at one time well it turns out that you don't need a huge printer to print a helmet you can cut it up into smaller pieces i want to show you that process but i've got a whole lot of sanding to do so first let's get this thing assembled and then while i'm sanding we can talk more about it i printed all these pieces out of petg now the reason i did that is because this stuff is supposed to be more sandable than pla which is what i usually use so this should help us get rid of the layer lines on the outside of this once we get to that part first we have to glue these together i'm going to use five minute epoxy for this so that it's very quick that should be plenty strong enough and i wanted to show this off this is actually leftover silicone from another project that we poured in the bottom of a little container and let it set up we popped it out of the container and now it's a mixing pad for five minute epoxy there's a bunch of different ways that you can slice a 3d model into multiple pieces to put it on the printer i like to use prusa slicer because it's the slicing software that i'm using anyway it's got a really simple feature where you can take a plane and cut an stl file in half you may need to rotate that object around to get it to slice in the direction that you need to but it breaks it into two separate stl files and then you can print each one of those individually or you can break it down into as many pieces as you need to so turns out the sanding petg is pretty awesome you can get a really smooth finish and once i moved over from hand sanding to the orbital sander on a really low speed it actually went even faster now i did print this dome part upside down which is not great for the finish but it cut off like two days worth of print time so i've got a lot of area up here that i have to fill and we'll get to that in just a minute but first i want to talk about sizing a helmet like this for yourself to size this model for myself i cut it first at this point because this line around here is the widest part of my head and then i printed out just that section a couple of times at different scales i started out with 75 actually for one of my kids to make sure that that would fit for them and i ended up at a 90 ring and this does fit around my head so i thought i had the right size well it turns out that on this helmet you actually have these cheek sections which are pushed in really far and while the helmet will fit on my head it won't fit over my face because of these sections so unfortunately this one is going to end up being one of my kids i'm going to have to print a full-size one for myself and throughout this video we're actually just going to swap back and forth between the two because i've got to do both of them one of the big ways we're going to get a smooth surface here is filler primer but first we're going to go over these big divot sections with some glazing putty this is an acrylic putty that will go on and dry pretty quickly and it sands really nicely it's kind of like thin bondo i've done a couple of coats of glazing putty on this thing and sanded in between them and i actually went ahead and filled in the dent on top of the helmet here because this one's going to be for my son he doesn't want to look like boba fett just going to be a mandalorian so i've tried to smooth that out a little bit i also went in with that same stuff and covered these sections now this didn't really need it but by putting in a thick layer of that and sanding down if you look up close you can actually see some pits in there i'm going to leave those there because that will end up looking like wear once i get the final paint on this the next step on this thing is to spray the entire thing down with filler primer this is just a spray can primer but it's really thick and what i like to do is completely flood the surface with it like it's okay to get drips it's okay to add a ton of it because you're gonna sand down at least the first two coats this stuff is a great way to get a really really smooth finish so let's go get this thing covered and then we'll do some more sanding while that's drying i actually wanted to talk about why it's okay to have a really overflow on the first couple of passes of filler primer basically you've got all these layer lines that are built up like this and you're trying to over fill it so that you can fill the gap in between them you're lifting all the surfaces up then you're going to sand them down and what's left over is in between those layer lines if you look at this piece right here you've got a really really smooth curve and that's because i over sprayed it sanded it down sprayed it sanded it down a couple of times and now you've ended up with a really nice surface that is the middle ground in between the spray and the print this stuff also sands really really easily so if you end up with a drip or kind of a bump you can easily knock it down with some sandpaper no problem why make one when you can make two and twice the time that's kind of what i'm doing here this one's for my son this is a color scheme he picked out i'm going to work on this one off camera as i've already done we're going to focus on the boba fett helmet for now and this is the traditional boba fett except updated to the version that's in the mandalorian he basically took it and repainted it in that show so we're going to do that and use those colors which means it's going to be not perfect but it's going to look a lot newer than it did in the older movies so the first thing i did here was put down a coat of kind of silver just to give it a base coat then i put a clear coat on top of that so i'm going to be working on top of this with the airbrush we've got some masking to do here because this section needs to be red then we've got green and black and then a different green on the top and on the sides so we're going to start by masking this off and i'm going to use this masking tape which is for pin stripers it's really thin which means when you lay it down you can actually get some really nice smooth curves so we're going to go ahead and start on this section and get the red put down first this stuff is great for getting in tight details and on curves and so i've got that along the outside edges of the areas that i want to paint so i need to cover the rest of this just with some tape and some paper and i can use this edge of the existing tape to kind of work onto so i can just get a big sheet to cover the top and all these other panels then we can spray the red on this section even though this guy was repainted in the show there's still some like chips of the paint around the different edges and i'm gonna try something i've actually never tried before using masking fluid this is kind of an acrylic kind of rubber cement type stuff that you can paint on and then when you paint over top of it after that paint dries you can come back and rub off the masking fluid and it takes the paint with it leaving whatever's underneath in this case is going to be leaving kind of a silver color the bare metal so i'm going to use this really sparingly just to put some small details around the edges of this then we'll go and add the red paint we'll see how this thing turns out i'm not exactly sure how that masking is going to work but we're going to go ahead and start working on the paint now the paint for this is all from a chart that i found online it's a layout of the entire helmet and all the different colors specific paint numbers that are the correct colors for boba fett now i picked the ones that i want because i don't need every color possible but if you wanted to make a screen accurate one from the movies that chart has every color every little stencil that you need to make all the dents and all the scratches and all that stuff i'm looking for the big major colors so i just ordered a few of these now some of these are acrylics and they're going to work fine for the airbrush some are enamels and i'm not exactly sure how well these are going to work i'm probably going to dilute them down a little bit and do some tests also i'm going to be using an airbrush for pretty much all of this and i just barely know how to use the airbrush there are some really good videos on youtube if you want to learn all the ins and outs of airbrushing i know just enough to be able to put paint down the right here is where i put some of that masking and you can see that you just rub it off and it takes the paint that was laying on top of it with it it leaves kind of a chipped effect so once we put the other colors over here those little areas will just stay silver that turned out really cool and honestly i didn't have to necessarily mask those because i'm going to be painting over this section anyway i wanted to try to separate those colors as much as i could so now i have to go back and re-mask the red areas so that i can paint this section in this section green and then i'm also going to have to paint this section black so i think i'm going to mask off the red do all the green and then come back and then remove the black area and just spray over top of the green i'm not exactly sure i'm just kind of figuring this out as i go along but basically a bunch more masking and painting i got the base color green on and you'll notice that it's a little bit splotchy it's not a super even finish so i don't know if that's because of the paint is mixed incorrectly or i don't know how to use the airbrush but regardless that's what this one looked like before i put the clear coat on it and you can see that that clear matte covering that i put on here really evened out the surface so i'm just going to go ahead and get the last little bits painted on here and then i'm going to go over this entire thing with that clear mat and we'll see how it turns out i mean i followed the colors that are on the diagram i masked it off exactly as i should so i shouldn't be surprised but i'm really surprised that looks like boba fett so we're moving along pretty nicely but now i need to do the back section it's a different green so i'm going to mask and get that painted up and then we'll work on some of the details and all the viewfinder and all that stuff that goes on the side and that will have to create some specific masks for the small pieces on the sides of it and for the little lines that run across here i've got a bunch of the little side pieces all painted up and a few of them masked off because i have to add some detail to those sections the next thing i'm actually going to work on is putting the kill stripes across the side now this is a little mask that i cut out on the vinyl cutter but it's really just a bunch of rectangles so you could do that with masking tape just the same i'm going to stick this across here and then kind of cover this section around it then i'll spray that with the color then we can move on to those other details so this is all cut to be straight but obviously the helmet curves in a couple of different directions so this may take some doing to actually get it to follow the curve and for the vinyl not to pucker up around the corners what i may have to do is actually cut up from these top lines so that i can kind of lay them over each other up in this top area it won't be perfectly squared off but i doubt you'll be able to notice the painting for this thing is all finally done i've just got to stick the side pieces on we'll get to those in a minute next up i want to move to the visor i looked around online and a lot of people will use these replacement face shields and cut them down to fit on the inside and since i don't have a template i'm going to make one really quickly just by measuring the inside space here and up here and start to kind of draw out a paper template and then once i make sure that that fits i can lay it on top of the shield and cut it out it was actually really easy to cut and get fit in there there's still some trimming i can do so that it will sit all the way up against the kind of inside wall and then after that i'm going to take a heat gun just to soften it and form it a little bit and then i think i'll use e6000 and some clamps to get this thing glued into place after that we can finish assembling e6000 would probably work just fine but it will take a while to set up this stuff is a two-part mixture takes about six minutes to set up so i can just hold it in place until it hardens that turned out really cool and actually wasn't as much work as i expected so now we have to add the side pieces on here we're just going to glue those together and put them on the only thing is that the viewfinder actually turns up and down so i'm going to use a little piece of dowel to connect those on the inside to make sure that it can still rotate and is tight enough to stay up when you want it to be up i am just holding this while it dries you could use activator but i found a lot of times that when you spray activator on a painted surface it will mess up the paint and so i don't want to run the risk of getting any of that activator on the other areas so just take a couple minutes to hold it while it dries so i know i say this pretty much every time but i am extremely happy with how these things came out i honestly did not expect them to look as good as they do one of the reasons i avoided making a boba fett helmet for so long was because of how complex the paint was but this re-armored version kind of gave me the confidence to give it a shot and it's a lot less detailed but i think it turned out really really good now this is proof that even if you have a small 3d printer you can still print out a bunch of small pieces put them together and end up with a really nice final product but like i mentioned before there's tons of other ways that you could make something like this out of all different materials and if this gave you an idea for a project i would love to hear about it down in the comments but even if this isn't your thing we've got tons of other types of videos that you may want to check out and if you're not subscribed be sure to do that as well that's it for this one thanks for watching we'll see you next time but the next step for for the next step from this but the next step on this entire thing is to spray it with filler primer this is an aerosol wow wow bubba was being mischievous at school and so he got the dunce cap and got set in the corner i've done a couple of coats of the what's this stuff calledhey i'm bob and i like to make stuff today we're going to make mandalorian helmets today we're going to make a boba fett helmet now there's a bunch of different ways you could do this punish props has an awesome video on making one completely out of foam you could make one out of paper using peppa cura you could sculpt it out of your material of choice but i'm going to 3d print it i bought it from the modeler and i've kind of been waiting to print it because i don't have a printer big enough to do the entire thing at one time well it turns out that you don't need a huge printer to print a helmet you can cut it up into smaller pieces i want to show you that process but i've got a whole lot of sanding to do so first let's get this thing assembled and then while i'm sanding we can talk more about it i printed all these pieces out of petg now the reason i did that is because this stuff is supposed to be more sandable than pla which is what i usually use so this should help us get rid of the layer lines on the outside of this once we get to that part first we have to glue these together i'm going to use five minute epoxy for this so that it's very quick that should be plenty strong enough and i wanted to show this off this is actually leftover silicone from another project that we poured in the bottom of a little container and let it set up we popped it out of the container and now it's a mixing pad for five minute epoxy there's a bunch of different ways that you can slice a 3d model into multiple pieces to put it on the printer i like to use prusa slicer because it's the slicing software that i'm using anyway it's got a really simple feature where you can take a plane and cut an stl file in half you may need to rotate that object around to get it to slice in the direction that you need to but it breaks it into two separate stl files and then you can print each one of those individually or you can break it down into as many pieces as you need to so turns out the sanding petg is pretty awesome you can get a really smooth finish and once i moved over from hand sanding to the orbital sander on a really low speed it actually went even faster now i did print this dome part upside down which is not great for the finish but it cut off like two days worth of print time so i've got a lot of area up here that i have to fill and we'll get to that in just a minute but first i want to talk about sizing a helmet like this for yourself to size this model for myself i cut it first at this point because this line around here is the widest part of my head and then i printed out just that section a couple of times at different scales i started out with 75 actually for one of my kids to make sure that that would fit for them and i ended up at a 90 ring and this does fit around my head so i thought i had the right size well it turns out that on this helmet you actually have these cheek sections which are pushed in really far and while the helmet will fit on my head it won't fit over my face because of these sections so unfortunately this one is going to end up being one of my kids i'm going to have to print a full-size one for myself and throughout this video we're actually just going to swap back and forth between the two because i've got to do both of them one of the big ways we're going to get a smooth surface here is filler primer but first we're going to go over these big divot sections with some glazing putty this is an acrylic putty that will go on and dry pretty quickly and it sands really nicely it's kind of like thin bondo i've done a couple of coats of glazing putty on this thing and sanded in between them and i actually went ahead and filled in the dent on top of the helmet here because this one's going to be for my son he doesn't want to look like boba fett just going to be a mandalorian so i've tried to smooth that out a little bit i also went in with that same stuff and covered these sections now this didn't really need it but by putting in a thick layer of that and sanding down if you look up close you can actually see some pits in there i'm going to leave those there because that will end up looking like wear once i get the final paint on this the next step on this thing is to spray the entire thing down with filler primer this is just a spray can primer but it's really thick and what i like to do is completely flood the surface with it like it's okay to get drips it's okay to add a ton of it because you're gonna sand down at least the first two coats this stuff is a great way to get a really really smooth finish so let's go get this thing covered and then we'll do some more sanding while that's drying i actually wanted to talk about why it's okay to have a really overflow on the first couple of passes of filler primer basically you've got all these layer lines that are built up like this and you're trying to over fill it so that you can fill the gap in between them you're lifting all the surfaces up then you're going to sand them down and what's left over is in between those layer lines if you look at this piece right here you've got a really really smooth curve and that's because i over sprayed it sanded it down sprayed it sanded it down a couple of times and now you've ended up with a really nice surface that is the middle ground in between the spray and the print this stuff also sands really really easily so if you end up with a drip or kind of a bump you can easily knock it down with some sandpaper no problem why make one when you can make two and twice the time that's kind of what i'm doing here this one's for my son this is a color scheme he picked out i'm going to work on this one off camera as i've already done we're going to focus on the boba fett helmet for now and this is the traditional boba fett except updated to the version that's in the mandalorian he basically took it and repainted it in that show so we're going to do that and use those colors which means it's going to be not perfect but it's going to look a lot newer than it did in the older movies so the first thing i did here was put down a coat of kind of silver just to give it a base coat then i put a clear coat on top of that so i'm going to be working on top of this with the airbrush we've got some masking to do here because this section needs to be red then we've got green and black and then a different green on the top and on the sides so we're going to start by masking this off and i'm going to use this masking tape which is for pin stripers it's really thin which means when you lay it down you can actually get some really nice smooth curves so we're going to go ahead and start on this section and get the red put down first this stuff is great for getting in tight details and on curves and so i've got that along the outside edges of the areas that i want to paint so i need to cover the rest of this just with some tape and some paper and i can use this edge of the existing tape to kind of work onto so i can just get a big sheet to cover the top and all these other panels then we can spray the red on this section even though this guy was repainted in the show there's still some like chips of the paint around the different edges and i'm gonna try something i've actually never tried before using masking fluid this is kind of an acrylic kind of rubber cement type stuff that you can paint on and then when you paint over top of it after that paint dries you can come back and rub off the masking fluid and it takes the paint with it leaving whatever's underneath in this case is going to be leaving kind of a silver color the bare metal so i'm going to use this really sparingly just to put some small details around the edges of this then we'll go and add the red paint we'll see how this thing turns out i'm not exactly sure how that masking is going to work but we're going to go ahead and start working on the paint now the paint for this is all from a chart that i found online it's a layout of the entire helmet and all the different colors specific paint numbers that are the correct colors for boba fett now i picked the ones that i want because i don't need every color possible but if you wanted to make a screen accurate one from the movies that chart has every color every little stencil that you need to make all the dents and all the scratches and all that stuff i'm looking for the big major colors so i just ordered a few of these now some of these are acrylics and they're going to work fine for the airbrush some are enamels and i'm not exactly sure how well these are going to work i'm probably going to dilute them down a little bit and do some tests also i'm going to be using an airbrush for pretty much all of this and i just barely know how to use the airbrush there are some really good videos on youtube if you want to learn all the ins and outs of airbrushing i know just enough to be able to put paint down the right here is where i put some of that masking and you can see that you just rub it off and it takes the paint that was laying on top of it with it it leaves kind of a chipped effect so once we put the other colors over here those little areas will just stay silver that turned out really cool and honestly i didn't have to necessarily mask those because i'm going to be painting over this section anyway i wanted to try to separate those colors as much as i could so now i have to go back and re-mask the red areas so that i can paint this section in this section green and then i'm also going to have to paint this section black so i think i'm going to mask off the red do all the green and then come back and then remove the black area and just spray over top of the green i'm not exactly sure i'm just kind of figuring this out as i go along but basically a bunch more masking and painting i got the base color green on and you'll notice that it's a little bit splotchy it's not a super even finish so i don't know if that's because of the paint is mixed incorrectly or i don't know how to use the airbrush but regardless that's what this one looked like before i put the clear coat on it and you can see that that clear matte covering that i put on here really evened out the surface so i'm just going to go ahead and get the last little bits painted on here and then i'm going to go over this entire thing with that clear mat and we'll see how it turns out i mean i followed the colors that are on the diagram i masked it off exactly as i should so i shouldn't be surprised but i'm really surprised that looks like boba fett so we're moving along pretty nicely but now i need to do the back section it's a different green so i'm going to mask and get that painted up and then we'll work on some of the details and all the viewfinder and all that stuff that goes on the side and that will have to create some specific masks for the small pieces on the sides of it and for the little lines that run across here i've got a bunch of the little side pieces all painted up and a few of them masked off because i have to add some detail to those sections the next thing i'm actually going to work on is putting the kill stripes across the side now this is a little mask that i cut out on the vinyl cutter but it's really just a bunch of rectangles so you could do that with masking tape just the same i'm going to stick this across here and then kind of cover this section around it then i'll spray that with the color then we can move on to those other details so this is all cut to be straight but obviously the helmet curves in a couple of different directions so this may take some doing to actually get it to follow the curve and for the vinyl not to pucker up around the corners what i may have to do is actually cut up from these top lines so that i can kind of lay them over each other up in this top area it won't be perfectly squared off but i doubt you'll be able to notice the painting for this thing is all finally done i've just got to stick the side pieces on we'll get to those in a minute next up i want to move to the visor i looked around online and a lot of people will use these replacement face shields and cut them down to fit on the inside and since i don't have a template i'm going to make one really quickly just by measuring the inside space here and up here and start to kind of draw out a paper template and then once i make sure that that fits i can lay it on top of the shield and cut it out it was actually really easy to cut and get fit in there there's still some trimming i can do so that it will sit all the way up against the kind of inside wall and then after that i'm going to take a heat gun just to soften it and form it a little bit and then i think i'll use e6000 and some clamps to get this thing glued into place after that we can finish assembling e6000 would probably work just fine but it will take a while to set up this stuff is a two-part mixture takes about six minutes to set up so i can just hold it in place until it hardens that turned out really cool and actually wasn't as much work as i expected so now we have to add the side pieces on here we're just going to glue those together and put them on the only thing is that the viewfinder actually turns up and down so i'm going to use a little piece of dowel to connect those on the inside to make sure that it can still rotate and is tight enough to stay up when you want it to be up i am just holding this while it dries you could use activator but i found a lot of times that when you spray activator on a painted surface it will mess up the paint and so i don't want to run the risk of getting any of that activator on the other areas so just take a couple minutes to hold it while it dries so i know i say this pretty much every time but i am extremely happy with how these things came out i honestly did not expect them to look as good as they do one of the reasons i avoided making a boba fett helmet for so long was because of how complex the paint was but this re-armored version kind of gave me the confidence to give it a shot and it's a lot less detailed but i think it turned out really really good now this is proof that even if you have a small 3d printer you can still print out a bunch of small pieces put them together and end up with a really nice final product but like i mentioned before there's tons of other ways that you could make something like this out of all different materials and if this gave you an idea for a project i would love to hear about it down in the comments but even if this isn't your thing we've got tons of other types of videos that you may want to check out and if you're not subscribed be sure to do that as well that's it for this one thanks for watching we'll see you next time but the next step for for the next step from this but the next step on this entire thing is to spray it with filler primer this is an aerosol wow wow bubba was being mischievous at school and so he got the dunce cap and got set in the corner i've done a couple of coats of the what's this stuff called\n"