With under a week to go, I focused my attention on making the face mask. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how the whole thing is going to work at this point, but the basic idea will be that there will be some sort of hinge so that the face mask can be lifted into the void of the shell over the hat. First things first, though: I have to make the mask. Out of… something,.
Instead of doing this at the workshop, the floor of the living room became the base of operations. Keep in mind through this whole process, though, that the shell is at the workshop and the face mask production is a couple miles away in the living room. What could possibly go wrong?
Sitting on the floor, I put Spaceballs on TV and paused it at part of the first entrance scene for Dark Helmet. As it turns out, this gave me an actual life-size picture to work off of! I broke out the glue gun, a couple Rock Auto boxes, a box cutter, and a rotary cutter and got to work.’
It took me a couple tries and I had to tear apart the mask and put it back together a couple times. No picture to add here at this time of what I think is the finished product, but I made it so that the sides and the top will be cut down to size to match the shell.
Now that the basic mask is created, the gaps will be filled in with hot glue and I’ll sand everything down to make it smooth. After a couple quick coats of some sort of sealant (gesso? poly? Don’t know yet), I’m going to coat it in polyester resin to harden it.
I also need to make some of the trim bits, since the mask is more two-dimensional right now. I think there are some left over strips of floor foam from the Shark Gun project that I can use as the edging. I’ll need to get some tinted plastic to make the visor ports, and the center grill will need to be trimmed out. The metal port in the center will just be painted with a metallic paint after drilling some holes through.