Assembling the Template
So I started this build because of friend of mine, who's a massive Fett fan, wanted to commission a helmet from me. I've done a few props helmet builds before, but not any with as exact and well-researched reference as a Fett helmet, so I thought it'd be an interesting challenge.
Because the helmet is so geometrically simple (pretty much just a big dome) my initial plan was to not bother with a pepakura model or anything and just do something similar to what
Volpinprops did for his Helm of Yngol build with a simple two-plane template. Pretty quickly though I discovered
Rafalfetts amazing templates, so I scrapped that idea; why reinvent the wheel. Huge thanks for his work.
Anyway, lets start. Unfortunately I took less pictures than I wish I had for this whole thing, but I'll try to clear up the blank spots with words.
My initial laying out of the template paper, trying to get as exact of cuts as I could. Really not much to share here as all these templates are of course already presized to paper sheets and require little other than just pressing print.
One thing I did decide to do differently though was to print at 100% instead of the fit to page option, it created a 3% difference, but I was kinda favorable towards the idea of a slightly larger template both because it gives me more leeway to sand back if I need to, and I just liked the look of the page margins better. I don't expect the 3% to be that critical either way though, from what I hear many official replicas can have far greater variance. Correct me if wrong though.
Main Body Together
Here's some of the helmet starting to come together.
It looks like the top layer is a bit misaligned to the underlying one, but that's just an illusion from a rogue marker mark and some experimentation with spray adhesive.
I wish I had taken more photos of this step specifically, as I had quite a few failures, and even scrapped an entire first try. I'm not quite sure precisely what went wrong the first go, but the two layers came out at very different lengths, about an inch. My suspicion is that the white glue I was using to connect the templates to the plastic was wetting the paper and causing it to stretch and warp, so it ended up much larger than it was supposed to be. You can see in the above shot that I just elected to draw the template lines directly onto the plastic with a marker instead. On this second try the top layer was only a few mm off from a perfect wrap, but nothing major.
I used
cyanoacrylate glue and a tacking method to connect the two layers, similar to what welders. You bend a small segment into place, tack it with CA glue, then bend another segment and tack it. I did this until the entire circle was tacked into place and then put a ring of extra thin CA around the entire thing. Extra thin's low viscosity allows it to seep into the crack between layers some and gives you very deep strong 'welds'. Pre-curving the material is
incredibly helpful when doing this, as it allows for a much easier wrap with less stress on each tack.
I elected for a front seam on the bottom layer, and a rear seem on the top, since then the most visible seam would only be that little band on the rear.
I also glued on the much more complex paper ear templates and such afterwards, using CA glue again to petrify the paper so it would be somewhat sandable later on.
The material I'm using is of course Sintra (aka, closed cell expanded PVC sheets). Other options I looked at were chipboard and polystyrene sheets, but I knew I would end up probably using sintra it for parts of the helmet anyway so it was the cheapest solution to just get a bunch of it and do the whole helmet in it. It's nature as a flexible thermo plastic allows for some nice curved forms too. It's a bit of a pain to cut though, very dense, and you have to be careful heating and sanding it as it is PVC and releases dangerous fumes and dust.
The Sintra was acquired from Sibe Automation on Amazon in 5 24"x48" sheets. The price fluctuates greatly, but I was able to catch them for around 35 bucks shipped. I only used about one and a half sheets in the construction, so you could make due with less. I wanted more for future projects though.