Finding The Way - How I Made My OWN Mando Helmet

[Music] that is right everybody today at the galactic armory we finally find the way today i'll be showing you guys how to make your own mandalorian helmet as seen in the tv show the mandalorian now this helmet was probably one of my most frustrating builds i tried so many different techniques to get this helmet to look right there's a lot of work that went into this helmet but i think the results speak for themselves so let's get right into this build the files we'll be using today come from my own website galacticarmory.net so check that out if you want to find the 3d files i made it as accurate as i could get so we have a good base model to work with now i printed this helmet in some beautiful looking silk silver pla it doesn't really matter what color you print the helmet in since we're going to be painting over it all anyway but i thought this one just looked really nice for photos now if you don't have access to a 3d printer i do sell the raw prints that we start with in my shop online so if you want to help support the channel as well as complete this project be sure and check that out check out this beautiful looking print i think it turned out great now the first thing that we're going to want to do to this helmet is reinforce it and we're going to want to do that with some fiberglass resin due to the design of the mandalorian helmet the cheeks on either side of the face are kind of wobbly they kind of hang out there on their own and we obviously don't want any damage to the helmet so we're going to be adding this fiberglass resin to help reinforce it and make it stronger now this resin comes as a two-part mixture one is like your base resin and the other one is a liquid hardener now this stuff is pretty messy so the first thing that we do is add some tape to the visor to try and keep all the liquid fiberglass inside the helmet so none of it drips out and makes a mess everywhere so we're actually going to be using the lid of the container to store our resin in just pour some in at about 15 to 20 drops of the liquid hardener and then i just stir it together with the stick i found on the ground once they're pretty thoroughly mixed we can pour some of the resin in and then brush it in place with a very cheap chip brush i say really cheap you don't want to spend more than a dollar on this paintbrush because it is going to be literally unusable after after we're finished so i paint the resin onto the cheeks of the helmet to help reinforce it as well as the top dome of the helmet just to give it some weight and some heft gotta wait a couple of hours for this resin to cure once it does it'll be pretty solid stuff so that should help reinforce our helmet quite a bit okay the time has come for everybody's favorite red toothpaste bondo glazing and spot putty this material is going to help us fill in the 3d printer lines and give us a perfectly smooth finish for painting now obviously this stuff is not actually toothpaste do not use it to brush your teeth and then sue me it is mainly used for auto body repair so that's where you're gonna find this stuff in like a grocery store what it is it comes out as a creamy liquid and after it reacts with the air for a few hours it will harden at that point we'll be able to sand it and be left with a smooth finish so i'm going to be applying this stuff all over the helmet we're going to be rubbing it in with our finger to help it get into the small crevices around the helmet you absolutely want to be sure and wear a glove as well as wear a respirator for this i should have said you also wear both gloves and respirator for the last part but this stuff is pretty nasty so do it in a well ventilated area and don't touch it with your bare skin once we've coated the entire helmet in this stuff we're gonna let it sit for about four to six hours let it cure and then we'll come back to it so once our bondo is cured we can begin the sanding process now sanding is definitely the most tedious part of this whole process so we're going to do what we can to help speed it up for that we're going to start sanding with a mouse orbital sander on it we've got a 120 grit pad of sandpaper that's pretty rough so it should help sand down a lot of the bondo you definitely want to wear a respirator for this as well as be outside or in an area you can clean up because it's going to kick up a lot of dust and you don't want to be breathing it in or making a huge mess everywhere so we're just going to go around the entire helmet with the mouse sander getting as much as we can we don't have to get everything with it but this should help save your shoulder muscles from all the sanding once we've gotten as much as we can we can clean the helmet off i like to use a leaf blower for it but a microfiber cloth works just as well now we'll follow it up with some hand sanding for the hand sanding we're just going to grab off a little square of 120 grit sandpaper and sand off the remaining areas that we couldn't reach with the mouse sander now sanding is the most difficult part of this whole process it's a pain in the butt takes a long time and you might not get it totally right the first time i just want to encourage you guys at this point if you can make it over this hump you are well on your way to a beautiful looking helmet once we've completely sanded the helmet once we're going to be adding a new material to help the helmet be even smoother now bondo is great at filling in the large 3d printer lines but now we've got a lot of tiny scratches around the helmet to help fill those in we've got a product called rust-oleum 211 filler and sandable this stuff acts like thick spray paint and since it's an aerosol it's going to do a great job at getting in the areas that the bondo couldn't quite reach as well as filling in the small scratches that we got from our sanding it's really going to help our final sanding of the helmet go over really well and give us a smooth surface for painting i wish i could tell you we were done with the sanding process but we have only just begun now that our filler primer is dried i want to go over it again with our 120 grit sandpaper just to complete the first round of smoothing and sanding now at this point odds are there are still some deformities in your helmet or you can see some 3d printer lines that need a little bit more bondo and filler primer so we're going to keep repeating those two steps until we are happy with the finish of our helmet we're gonna add a little bit more bondo in some places that need more work we don't have to go over the entire helmet again but we're gonna need to add some more bondo to some of those troubled areas same with the filler primer after we've added the bondo we're gonna sand it down add more filler primer sand it down maybe add more bondo sand it down you guys get the idea we're gonna keep going with that process until we are perfectly happy with our smooth helmet once you are happy with the helmet we'll be able to sand it down for the final few times before we get to the final sanding i want to show you guys something that you might encounter as well throughout the filling process we've accidentally filled in some of the detail lines like on the mohawk those are kind of important it is important that those are well defined and you can see them in the final helmet so what i've done is i've stolen this little pick tool from our bathroom and we're gonna use it to dig out the bondo and filler primer that found its way into those detail lines the material is pretty easy to push out if you just make sure that you stay aligned so we're going to do this to the entire mohawk to make sure that you can see those detail lines now that we've got that done we can move on to the final round of sanding we're going to start the final round of sanding with a 320 grit sanding sponge going around the entire helmet sanding down every detail it should feel a lot smoother now once we're done with that we're going to increase the grit of sandpaper again to make the helmet even more smooth from 320 grit we're going to jump up to 400 grit again going over the entire helmet making it all smooth again from 400 we jump up to 600 and then from 600 we jump up to 1000 grit this grit of sandpaper is extremely fine and should give us a perfectly smooth surface for painting so painting this helmet is where the real headaches began to set in the mandalorian helmet has a very unique paint job it is like a dark chrome and it seems to change with the lighting that it's in now if you wanted to use the same paint as the one the show uses it's called a luma lustre unfortunately this paint is like 400 for i don't know a couple pints it is not cheap so i wanted to go with an option that was a bit more affordable and i've seen some great looking mandalorian helmets that used a technique called graphite rubbing now basically what this is you take very fine graphite powder and rub it over the entire helmet once this graphite has been smoothed over the helmet it becomes reflective and gives a pretty good look now on all the helmets that i saw they used a black base coat i wanted to try it out with some different base coats just to see if i could maybe lighten up the graphite a little bit i tried it with a white base coat and didn't really care for how that turned out it turned out a bit too light so then i went to a black base coat and i thought that turned out pretty well the drawback to using a graphite rub is that it is extremely delicate i mean if you touch this thing with your fingers you're gonna smudge the graphite and it's gonna lose its shine almost immediately so if you're making this helmet as a display piece a graphite rub might be the best bet i am not however i want to actually hold this thing and put it on my head i tried to seal the graphite powder with a workable fixative it's a aerosol that artists actually use like pencil artists use to preserve their pencil drawings so that they don't smudge it while they're continuing to work on it unfortunately this dulled the shine of the helmet quite considerably so you can make the helmet look pretty cool with the graphite but you can't really touch it or seal it or protect it in any way so i wanted to look at other options eventually i came back to using an airbrush now i've worked with chrome and airbrushes before it's been a while i'll admit but i figured this was the best way to get the finish that i wanted and it has ways to protect the paint so after many failed attempts at getting the perfect finish here's the process i used to get the helmet that you saw at the beginning of the video so the paint that i used in my airbrush is called spastix mirror chrome you can get this paint for less than 20 on amazon so it's a lot better than uh 400 in my opinion now you can see me here testing out the paint on some spoons now spoons are a great way to test the finish of paint that's not on your helmet you know just add some primer we're gonna add a black gloss base coat underneath the chrome and the spoon is already smooth so you don't have to worry about sanding any pieces and you can get them in packs of 48 so very helpful stuff great to practice on before you move to your helmet i was working out a distance of the airbrush that i liked as well as like a an amount of paint that i liked after i tested all the spoons i moved on to the helmet you can also see that we gave our helmet a gloss black base coat just like the spoons it really brings out the shine in the chrome paint so i definitely recommend you do that as well i painted this in light coats just going around the entire helmet and as you can see it gave it quite the beautiful looking shine and it was not too difficult the biggest benefit of this technique is that we can seal the paint so that we can actually handle it with our fingers and not worry too much about ruining the paint job now to seal the paint we used a product called outclad clear coat i tried this as well as the alclad aqua gloss which was recommended to use on the chrome but i actually found that this clear coat worked better and didn't dull the chrome as much so so i went with this instead you definitely want to do light coats on this if you do too much it's going to definitely dull the chrome but you want to do enough coats that it's actually effective so i went around the helmet just a couple times with this clear coat and then i think i'd let it set and cure for at least 24 hours it was probably more like two days before i came back to it so now that we've coated our helmet it should be safe to handle with our fingers and hands so that we can move on to the visor so no mandalorian helmet is complete without the visor face shields are a little hard to come by right now so i think this is actually a green tinted one but i added some black window tint to it and now it's completely black should work just fine for us the first thing we want to do is figure out the size of the visor that we need so with that i've just got a sheet of paper i'm going to trace the outline of the opening with it with sharpie and that should give us a pretty rough outline of the size of the visor that we need to cut out we need to cut it pretty close to the trace that we made so that it fits inside the helmet pretty well if it's too big it won't want to bend properly and it will have a harder time securing it so now that we've got the visor cut out to shape we're going to need to attach it to the helmet for that lately i've been using this product called steel stick it's like a two-part putty that when rubbed together it is workable putty for a few minutes but then it'll start to harden and eventually it'll be like rock solid so it does a great job at holding the visor in place compared to something like glue or tape i found that this is a great way to hold the visor in place you see i took the putty and split it up in just a few pieces adding the putty to a few pivotal areas of the visor making sure that it stays in place and i'll just hold it there for a few minutes while the putty hardens and after a few minutes it should be completely hard you can let it go and the visor should stay in place now this is something new i'm trying out on my helmets you can kind of see it here but the helmet kind of sits a little bit low it's almost touching my shoulders and my head can move around in it pretty freely so what i'm going to be adding to the inside of the helmet are these custom pads now these pads i found on amazon they're for like motorcycle helmets but they've got a velcro sticky side and then the pad side so you can stick some velcro on the inside and then attach these pads to the inside as well to give your helmet some volume and to help fit the helmet better these pads are really easy to apply i just added one to the top to the sides gave it a try on see what other places needed some more padding and just installed them as i saw fit this really makes the helmet fit a lot better and is definitely something i'd like to add to all my future helmets that i intend to wear there you go guys that is how i found the way and how you too can also find the way i'm really looking forward to season two of the mandalorian and i'm debating if i want to make my own mandalorian armor similar to how i made the clone trooper armor so let me know what you guys think i want to thank you all for watching remember to check out galacticary.net for the files or the raw 3d prints i want to thank my supporters on patreon for their continued support i hope you guys enjoyed the video and i hope to see you again in the next one i have spoken you

Channel: Galactic Armory

Views: 1,179,256

Keywords: 3d printing, cr-10 3d printer, star wars 3d printing

Id: ojJQ9MqW500

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020