Daft Punk Tron Cosplay Build 1

Helmets.

I don't know what it is about helmets. They're bulky, expensive to make, hard to breathe in, and retain heat like greenhouses. They make it awkward to talk to people and usually you look like a bobblehead.

But I just keep making them. Part of it is about the anonymity, and part of it is me being socially awkward and not wanting to make eye contact. I'm self-conscious enough that I don't want people to see my face in regards to my cosplay. I'll have to get over this for next year's PAX East (my planned cosplay has me both wearing a dress and showing my face, oh dear). But for now, I'm happy just rocking it in a kickass helmet and leather jacket.

I've been a huge fan of cyberpunk since I first read Neuromancer in seventh grade. It all started with the literature: console cowboys surfing the crystalline matrix of cyberspace, hacking across the net and tearing down firewalls and black ice. I'm an avid speed-reader; I tore through each of the Harry Potter books in hours and finished the Dark Tower series in a week. Cyberpunk was my introduction to science fiction, and I devoured Stephenson, Sterling, and Gibson's books without discrimination. And then I watched the Matrix in eighth grade, and everything changed. It wasn't just a genre of books anymore; it was a complete aesthetic, slick black pvc and fierce mirrorshades, blaring neon and crisp chrome, high-tech hexagons and low-life grunge. I'm a visual learner, so it took seeing the look to really bring the scenes I had read about to life. I was hooked.




My first interaction with carbon fiber weave was during FIRST robotics; our team, 1758 Technomancers, used it in the 2008 season for the first time, fashioning pronged grippers that were molded to the shape of the exercise balls used in Overdrive. And boy, were those suckers slick looking. I helped do the layup, and they turned out really well; thus, I never really thought of it as a high-end composite that was difficult to work with. I just had to remind myself to watch out for the splinters and wear gloves instead of being lazy.

When I got to college, I had just seen Tron: Legacy for the first time. The vision of the glowing neon blue in contrast to the ubiquitous black haunted me. Blue is definitely my favorite color, and the combination of neon on black is a match made in...robot heaven? Anyways...

So the idea of a Tron-inspired costume or prop had been bouncing around in my head since freshman year. I doodled helmets and helped my friends work on their motorcycles, and eventually combined the two. And this year, I finally put them together with my love of Daft Punk, complete with the requisite carbon fiber and, of course, helmets.

I started with a drawing of a helmet around the silhouette shape of my head, split into 1" segments.

I made oval shapes to the dimensions of the drawing on pink insulation foam, as with my Zer0 helmet, cut into circles to approximate the shape of my head and glued together in order.

 A few guide lines to help me with shaping. I noticed that the back of the helmet had a steeper undercut than I wanted, so I filled it in with some expanding foam.

 Compared to the original sketch...

I shaved it down into a reasonable shape, and then filled some of the larger gaps in with expanding foam (it is truly Great Stuff!).

  As you can tell, I'd already started using Bondo to cover the surface of parts of the original.

 More shaping...

 The foam was good for adding volume, but did leave a lot of gaps once shaved off, which meant a lot of Bondo was spent filling these, rather tha

Note the gratuitous amount of foam around the lip; I had learned from last year's mistakes on how the Bondo spot-putty (the darker red stuff later on) would dissolve insulation foam, so I made sure to have every last surface covered with the Bondo body filler or at least the great stuff foam. And then I sanded, and sanded, and sanded some more; I purchased a sanding block for this project, because I knew if I was going to make a cast, it would pick up every last pitting mark and lazy detail that I didn't feel like working my arm sore over.

 Spot putty is a lot more expensive, so I tried to use it mainly on the visor, which was the part that was most imperative to get as smooth as possible. I then used some wood filler I had lying around to smooth out the back of the helmet as much as I could. There's never enough Bondo to go around ;-;

 After a night's sleep, it was more or less cured, and my hall hated me because I had introduced so many terrible Bondo fumes. It turns out that even though you're wearing a respirator, it doesn't mean the smells don't exist. Yeah, I know, I didn't learn from last time's toxic melted foam fumes debacle...

 I brought it back into my room and applied some spray-on mold release that I had acquired from a lab cleanout earlier last summer, fingers crossed hoping that it was still good. Copies of The Tech, our student newspaper, became my floor's new best friend.

 Here she is, all greased up and shining. I was ready to start applying silicon, so I dug out some of the leftover bottles of Smooth-on I had also found in a separate lab cleanout last summer. But then disaster struck...

Welp. This two-part silicone is definitely not supposed to be doing that. That chopstick is standing straight up in what is suppose to be a liquid with the viscosity of corn syrup. (No, it's not a chopstick I eat with. I picked up a budget pack of 20 of the plastic ones in China way back when, with the intent of giving them as gifts; they've been excellent stirring sticks because it turns out I have no friends to give them to D:)

 So...um...yeah. The heat from the basement where I had been storing them had probably not helped keep them well. At this point, it was halfway through January, and about a week away from my first deadline. And I had no way of proceeding.

What a sad glamour shot. By the time of my next post, though, I had finally gotten my stuff together and stopped ignoring expiration dates.