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As they say, idle hands do the devil's work. I need an outlet to keep myself busy or I'll go crazy. Currently, I have several projects in the works so it was time to pick one and go with it.

Springboarding off the Halo costume I was thinking about next year's halloween character to create. Weighing the pros and cons of a bunch of costumes (including buzz lightyear and the predator) I decided to settle on an old favorite movie of mine from childhood; SpaceBalls. With the help of a newly acquired 3D Printer, and the knowledge gained from creating the Halo Armor, I decided to create a Dark Helmet Costume.

Step 1 - Obtain a pepakura file of the Helmet. For that, I used Dark Helmet helmet by Darkside501st. I have to give the creators of the pdo files a lot of credit for their time and effort contributed. Thank you. After resizing and printing the helmet on 100lb stock paper, it was time to start cutting and gluing. Nothing new here, just applying what I did with Halo armor below:

Used cardboard to reinforce supports. This decreases warping when applying fiberglass resin.

 

Step 2 - Coat with Fiberglass Resin:

 

Step 3 - Apply the Bondo:

 

Step 4 - I decided to pull part of the mask out of the PDO and use the program Blender to help turn it into a 3d print. The below was the result:

Daughter photobomb! Since the mask was too big for the printer, I split it into 3 parts. You can see the seams above. Each seam was sanded and painted smooth. When gluing the parts together, I used hot glue first, then a rondo layer over the seam and fiber tape across the seam as well. The fibers add a lot of strength.

Dry fit the pieces together. Looking good so far.

 

Step 5 - Now for the hard part. I need this thing to sit on my head and not my shoulders. I don't have many pictures but I should be able to give you an idea of how it was done.

I took a a hard hat that has an internal head holder like the one below:

Then cut the top of the hard hat off.

I cut along the top so that the dark helmet faceplate has a place to go when it is in the up position.

With the hard hat ready, I mounted it to the helmet making sure to place screws on the back half only.

 

Step 6 - Dryfit the helmet.

You can see the hinges above on either side.

 

Step 7 - Create tinted visors using plexiglass and car tint.

 

Step 8 - Paint and Finish assembly

The Clothes were a bit harder. Looking at a reference picture, I needed to figure out each piece of the costume. The easiest parts to acquire were the glovesand boots. The rest had to be sewn from scratch using 5 yards of black pleather, some backer rod, and pyramid studs for the arms, gauntlets and around the coller.

The Shorts:

To sew the shorts, I used this video on youtube to help establish a pattern. The rest came together rather easy. Thanks C Martinez.

The Belt Buckle:

This was rather involved and I needed to know how to use blender. After some time creating, I finished with the following designs:

 

Pyramid studs:

I couldn't find any online the right size (3/4" x 3/4") so I made some on the 3d printer and placed a hole in the bottom to screw in an 8-32 1/4" screw. Worked nicely.

The Chest:

Basically difficult to describe but I used an old shirt as a template on the pleather and stitched along the seams. I placed a seam going up the middle of the chest and used the tie to cover all seams. The tie is sewn to one side and attached to the other with velcro.

The shoulder pads are attached via velcro and made from the same mats used in a gym (eva foam). It was a very basic design and I used heat gun to give it a curve.

Using an old underarmour shirt and wrapping the backer rod with pleather, the costume winds down to a close.

Until next time, KEEP FIRING ASSHOLES!

At the request of some RPF members, I'm sharing the STL files I used to make my costume. Some modifications may need to be made. Enjoy!