My paper support weren’t doing as good a job as I hoped they would.
PEPAKURA HELMETS PATCH
No biggie, those were easy enough to patch with a piece of aluminum tape, and the first layer of fiberglass should do the rest.Ī bigger problem was that the helmet was bent out of shape. I also tore the helmet in a couple of places with the Dremel’s cord. While working the extra resin out, I managed to Dremel my way through the top of the helmet in a couple of places. Well, nothing that a bit of relentless Dremeling couldn’t fix.
![pepakura helmets pepakura helmets](https://i.etsystatic.com/9763105/r/il/637242/2072339401/il_570xN.2072339401_e5ra.jpg)
Now I had a nice big chunk of cured resin at the top of the helmet.
![pepakura helmets pepakura helmets](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0311/8009/5619/products/MedievalHelmetsevafoamtemplate_1659x.png)
But… It would have been a better idea to leave the helmet so that the extra resin could run out of the helmet. The next day I came back to the workshop. Working around the extra supports inside the helmet was a bit of a pain, but I managed. I applied a liberal amount of resin on the inside of the helmet, using a paint brush. I read somewhere that it’s a good idea to apply one layer of resin only first, so that the weight of the glass mat doesn’t bend the helmet out of shape. I also decided to go through the whole process of making the helmet with the tester as a practice run. I ended up using extra pieces of paper to extend the small flaps so that there would be enough surface area for the glue. I have no idea how that’s meant to work with thicker material. I ended up adding additional support structures inside the helmet to try and make it stay in shape.Ģ: There’s a _lot_ of fiddly small cutting and gluing involved! Some of the folds are so ridiculously small that they are impossible to do even on 160 gram paper. I had already learned a couple of things:ġ: 160 gram paper isn’t quite thick enough. Seven hours of cutting, folding and gluing got me something resembling the picture on the proverbial package.
![pepakura helmets pepakura helmets](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/7b/78/ab/7b78abb799be4646c3b2eedde0bc0797.jpg)
Making the tester seemed to make sense, so I got to work. The tester helmet has around 250 tabs to glue, while the actual helmet has around 1100. Why not? I downloaded the pepakura viewer program and the Sharkmark VI Iron Man helmet PDO-files, and had a look at the files. I am, after all, an avid maker of things.Ī brief browsing through The RPF showed me that the hip thing that the kids these days are building is an Iron Man helmet. Seeing as it was pretty much described as “easy process, awesome results”, I decided to give it a try. So, I stumbled upon something called “pepakura” while browsing the net.