The ‘visor’ or face of the helmet was fairly simple, the trickier part would be to mould the rounded cranium from foam. I began with a template by Evil Ted Smith but left the sides off for now, wanting to get the ridge of the cranium nice and symmetrical. As the glue I have takes time to set (I need to invest in the instant-tack stuff) I glued the top piece at the front, then once that was secure I heat-shaped the curve to match the back before gluing it. As I work I check the helmet fits ok, heating and reshaping as necessary.
^ One half of the crestbox. I added a third block in the middle.
The crest box is cut from foamboard (for those taking notes the inner curve is a 14cm radius, the outer was 20cm. Yay maths!). I layered up some squares and glued them inside the crest box to make it sturdier, leaving space to add the crest itself later. For added strength, I drilled a hole through these inner blocks into the helmet, then glued in dowel, to support the extra weight of the crest.
^ What better motivation to get up early for work than to get up early and work on something else?
Once the sides from the template were added, I used gyprock putty or ‘Spakfilla’ to fill in the gaps and round it off. Above is the first coat of filler, below is the second.
^ Looking more and more like fondant. Detecting an untapped market in Grecian cake decorating …
Most Greek helmets at the time feature a distinctive ridge where the cranium meets the lower half of the helmet, where the shape goes from convex to concave (I’m not too ashamed to admit having to look up which of those is which. Yay geometry!). When it comes to sanding I’ll need to retain that distinctive line that runs around the midway of the helmet.
A note on putty: At first the only putty I had on hand was the type used on pine furniture – it’s the light brown stuff you can see in the photos. Turns out when combined with the smell of the glue I was using, this stinks very, very bad. It also sets harder, which would be fine but the amount of pressure needed to sand it risks deforming the much softer foam. By contrast the Spakfilla has almost zero scent and dries quickly, within half an hour or so, depending on the thickness. It also sands back with a lot less pressure.
The next step will be to sand it all down to a semi-smooth finish, then add embellishments in 2mm foam before prepping for undercoating.