Daft Punk Glove Plates

The glove plates were a nice break from the monotonous filling and sanding of the helmets. I started these by borrowing a technique from a great prop maker by the name of Volpin and created a vector image template for the glove plates. 

I labelled each finger so that I could number each piece without getting muddled up so T for thumbs, I for index etc. I cut out each of the little plate templates and kept em nice and safe in a plastic wallet so they wouldn't go walk about like most things I need seem to do :

All I had to do was trace out the pieces onto some styrene and cut them out with my Dremel and a quick hand sand with some 240 grit.

To get the curve I needed I temporarily tacked the glove plates to a piece of PVC pipe I cut in half to use as a form. They were heated up using a heat gun and when soft enough I pressed the plates to the pipe to give them the same contour and then left them to cool.

I made one full set of finger plates because they are the same on both hands and then made both hand plates by heating and curving the plates bit by bit and kept testing the fit on my hand.

To make the hollow plates into solid bucks for the Vacu-former I filled the hand plates with cheapo wall filler that I had laying around.

The finger plates were glued to more pieces of PVC pipe and all the pieces were then ready for forming.

The first pull:

Being hollow, the glove pieces had no surface area to allow me to glue them to a pair of gloves, the next step I took was to fill in the empty space under each piece, which at first sounds extremely time consuming but was a quick fix, using yet another piece of pipe I pushed a blob of filler into the back side of the pieces and slid the pipe through to push the filler into the pieces and to keep the curvature underneath.

For the hand plates I first cut out the knuckle indents so that the piece fit comfortably on my hand, I then put on a rubber glove slapped a lump of filler into the plate and pushed it down on the top of my hand to get the exact shape I needed 

The rest of the plates were cut out and sanded to shape using a dremel with a sanding drum attachment.

All finished and ready for paint !

Each piece was given 6 thin layers of paint and left to dry 24 hours before being attached to a pair of black opera gloves. The plates were atttached using a rubber cement that I think is meant for car windows so they wont be budging any time soon! The adhesive was black so although I was careful attaching the plates, any slight excess of adhesive blended into the gloves.

Daft Punk Thomas Helmet Phase 1

EDIT - These helmets are now for sale, please email me at judd93@hotmail.co.uk for info

This was the first big scratchbuilt project I undertook, me and a friend of mine are big daft punk fans so I thought what better costumes do for this years upcoming Manchester comicon than the robo duo. I decided to start with Thomas since his mask was my favourite :D I began by using a free pepakura file I found online; at the time it was the only one freely available but since then theres been some great pepakura files released which would have helped me a lot if I had had them when I started this project haha. For those who don't know pepakura is a freeware program that takes 3D models and breaks them up into 2d templates you can print out and reassemble into the final 3D form, the paper is then usually strengthened with resin and smoothed over with body filler. The file I had to use was low poly and wasn't up to scratch on its own but made a good enough base to start on. 

So I began by assembling the pepakura model and giving it a coat of resin:

I didnt bother resining the ears as they were extremely inaccurate and huuuge, and removed them swiftly, I gathered up all my reference pics and started plotting out more accurate shapes compared to the real deal helmet. To make my work easier and save time I used styrene sheet plastic for the smooth flat areas on the helmet, here I've added in the visor, the jaw and the side panels. I cut away the original pepakura jaw piece because it was the wrong shape. I also began filling in the bottom visor lip. Now for people in the UK like me it can be hard finding products the prop makers in the US use and finding a local equivalent can be really annoying and turn up nothing. The stuff people use to smooth over pepakura and give it a nice detailed finish is often referred to as bondo, that's a an american brand body filler for dents in cars and is hard to get hold of over here. However seeing as there is a halfords just down the road from me I ventured in there and found a great substitute called Isopon P38 easy sand, its basically the exact same stuff and works great. I used that to start filling the bottom visor piece and gave it a coat of black so I could sand it back and see any low spots that needed another coat of the filler.

After looking through my reference pics I realised just how off this model was, the dome wasn't anywhere near the size it should be, I solved that by scaling up profile photos of the original helmet and drawing out the shapes on card, I transferred those to 2mm styrene to make a guide frame for the correct shapes. I bulked them out with cheap plaster before skimming with Isopon. I started mapping out the ear size and placement and built out the top visor lip at this point using one of my guides.

I  filled the front section of the dome first, I started using a filler primer to help smooth out the piece and make it a pretty colour :D the frame that crosses through the middle of the helmet is also a guide for where the seam line is on the actual helmet and will help me when I engrave it into my own.

I filled in the back sections of the dome next, I found a contour gage thingy in the basement too which helped keep the whole thing fairly symmetrical; that and a mountain of sanding sponges helped keep this project going haha. I used a piece of string as my guide for engraving the split line. I pulled it taut across the dome and used a quick dab of hot glue to tack it in place  

Whilst I had the scribe and mini files out I added the nose vent details to the underneath, these will work like a cut here line on the casts I pull off this.

Next up I tackled the ear pods, at first I designed them in Solid-works and was going to have them machined, but after getting a price estimate back Mr krabs mode kicked in so I looked for a cheaper way to make them. A pepakura designer by the name of Dungbeetle released his awesome models of Thomas and Guys helmets, shamefully it was too late to use his helmet model but I could use the ear piece from it for my own helmet, so after scaling it to fit my own helmet I printed out the ear pod and assembled. Using my cheapo logic I then coated the inside of the pepped ear with Sonite wax from smooth on, gave it a skin layer of Isopon and then built up its thickness with fibreglass.

Because I coated the paper with wax beforehand it peeled straight off the earpod and left me with a solid sandable piece, all I had to do was sand away the texture the paper had left behind and it was ready for moulding.

To make sure the earpod was a snug fit in the helmet I added tabs on the inside of the helmet that acted like shelves so that it would sit at the correct depth. Next I wrapped the earpod in clingfilm so it stayed clean and seperated, slathered the opening on the helmet with Isopon and pushed the earpod into place. Then it was a simple matter of removing the earpod and sanding the excess filler flush with the rest of the surface.

After that the whole thing was wet sanded from 240 grit up to 1500 grit and was ready for moulding !