Daft Punk Tron Cosplay Build 2

I'm not sure why I keep wanting to do this to myself. Silicone is gross, my floor is even grosser, and it's painstaking and time consuming and nothing ever goes right. But I got funded by the excellent Techx, which can reimburse selected projects up to $500 in funding for a project to display at the annual Techfair at the end of January. It really let me splurge and do this project all-out, as far as materials goes. But while all of this cash is great, it does mean that I had very specific check-in deadlines I had to have results for. It's the golden rule of cosplay, folks. Cheap, good, fast: pick two. And apparently I picked good and fast, so it was really the funding that allowed this all to come together.

As it happens, the major deadline for a halfway point happened during the same weekend as the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. For those of you joining us new to the world of the Institvte, Mystery Hunt is a huge world-reknowned puzzle hunt, where dozens of rounds of steganographic codes, ciphers, and real-time activities are released for solving, in the hopes of one team eventually finding the location of a coin hidden somewhere on campus. The hunt typically starts on Friday and goes until at least Sunday, sometimes spilling over into Monday. I've participated in Hunt with a very large team for three years now, and hunting is a 24-hour activity. While I'm not as hardcore as some of the hunters, I like to be on site at HQ to help people solve and bounce ideas off of others, so I was rushing back and forth in the ten minute walk and four flights of stairs between hunt HQ in the Stata center and my helmet in my room on Fifth East. 

In our last installment, I had just found out my six month old silicon had solidified into a rubbery mess. So I ran down to Central Square Blick to get some brush-on silicon, which was a better idea anyways than the tin-casting silicon I had to start with. While I was down there, I stopped by Artist and Craftsman Supply across the street in Central. Biiiiiiig shout out to them; the employees are some of the most helpful fantastic understanding people I've ever met, and they really go out of their way to both keep prices extremely reasonable, and to make our projects happen the best they can. They saved my hide something fierce later on in this helmet casting, but more on that later. I picked up a block of Plastalina modeling clay from them, to make the bridge between the two intended parts of the mold:

Rebound 25 is the new formula of SmoothOn that I bought. It's meant to be able to be brushed on, meaning that it wouldn't slip off the surface of the helmet nearly as badly as the silicone I tried to use for the Zer0 helmet.

I put about six coats on the back mold, an entire batch of the silicone. In the hours in between waiting for coats to dry, I peeled off my gloves and retreated to the lounge, where other hunters were puzzling. I tried to contribute remotely before having to run back and apply another coat. I ended up using some random longboard bushings I had lying around as mold registration keys.

Mold registration keys are small defined features you attach to your silicone mold. I plopped them on at about layer 3, and brushed on a few more layers over them. Because this mold is going to end up floppy, I'll make a mother mold, which is a hard shell formed over the silicone. The registration keys are intended to help align the floppy silicone layer with the cured outer shell, because inevitably the two will separate somewhat and peel apart as you remove the mold.

Once the silicone was completely cured, I then removed the plastalina bridge, applied some mold release to the edge of the silicone, and started brushing more silicone over the front half of the helmet. You can see that there's a lot of dripping going on; cover your floors! Also, I may have been a terrible person and dipped my brush back into the dripped silicone to brush it back on. Waste not, want not!

Looking pretty good after three layers. I popped some more registration keys on (two bushings, and then the lids from a contact case).

A few more coats of silicone, and then it was time to make the mother mold.

I initially made the mother mold out of plaster because I'm a cheapo. I bought some plaster gauze, which is gauze impregnated with plaster that you cut into strips, wet, and then smooth on. I put two layers of this gauze around the entire helmet.

Hopefully the function of the registration keys makes sense now.

Looks like a katamari.

Then I took a box of plaster of paris and just went to town, smearing it thickly all over the entire helmet. The point of the mother mold is to make a really hard structure that captures the shape of the helmet and keeps it from deforming.

All done, and now I just had to wait. But I couldn't.

The deadline was coming up, and in my dumb hurry to meet it, I did a really stupid thing: I didn't finish waiting. I know, I know, waiting should have been the easy part. But I woke up the morning of the check-in, bits of plaster of paris still in my hair, fumbling down the ladder of my loft while trying to remember whether three hours of sleep was too few to be solving puzzles with. I tapped the outside of the mold; it was a little cold, but I chalked that up to my aversion to turning on the radiator during wintertime in Boston. In my defense, the radiator gives off some really, really weird fumes.

So I cracked it open and trimmed the silicone a bit, and put it all in a cardboard box. I hurried across campus to the check-in location, huddling to avoid the light drizzle. The representative was pleased, and seemed a little grossed out by how the plaster looked. I sighed in relief; I had passed the check-in. I dropped the box off upstairs in my room, and now that the deadline was done, I whipped up a batch of cookies to bring to the hungry hunters, and speed-walked with cookies and laptop to HQ, devoting myself to the hunt until the hunting was done.

When I finally caught up on sleep, I went to inspect my pride and joy. And I realized I had made a huge mistake.

If the plaster is cold or damp, it means it's not done drying. You'd think it would be obvious. But no, I had to be impatient and dumb and peeeeeeeel it off. So as a result, the back of the helmet mold had warped, spread wider, until it was definitely at least three inches wider and an inch and a half too shallow. I have no pictures of this shameful result. I was too busy mourning the work and energy that could have been better spent elsewhere.

 Even worse, I was out of plaster. This was something I'd bought off of amazon, and I really didn't want to deal with it again. So I finally sucked it up and purchased something that Smooth-on makes (I promise I'm not sponsored by them, really), called PlastiPaste, that is meant exactly for making mother molds. I've forgotten to mention: the plaster gets really heavy. And when you're rotocasting something, swishing a ten pound item the size of a paint bucket for about thirty minutes on end is not a good time for your arms. Or it's a really good time, if that's what you're into. But I'm a small shrimpy girl, and while I got some of them biceps and triceps and deltoids, it's certainly not the easiest thing.

Plasti-paste, on the other hand, cures rock hard, and is lightweight. But where the f--- was I getting this from, one weeks before Techfair? In a fit of desperation, I called Artist and Craftsman.

"I need plastipaste."
"Oh, that's fine. We're about to order from Smooth-on, we can just tack it on."
"But there's a catch. I need it by Thursday."
It was Monday. I heard her exhale on the other end. But then her voice brightened, like the sun breaking through the clouds. "Tell you what, we can just expedite the order. I know a guy who works up there with them at one of the distributors, how much do you need?"
"---I, uh, I'm making a helmet-"
"Okay, the gallon size then. And it'll definitely be here by Thursday, I'll give you a call. It'll probably come out to $62, tax included, is that alright?"
"Yeah, yeah, however much it takes. And how much for the expedited shipping costs?"
"Oh, don't worry about that. We were going to do the order anyways, we're just adding yours on."

Ohmygod. The best. I'm telling you, Artists and Craftsman in Central Square, Cambridge, MA are the most helpful miracle workers in the art world.

I could barely contain my excitement, my heart racing at my serendipitous fortune, when I got the call on Thursday morning, as promised. The girl at the counter recognized my order ("You're making a helmet, right? I like your hair!") and I thanked her profusely with what must have been a terrifyingly wide smile. I carried the heavy box up from Central and up four flights of stairs, opened it up, protected my floor and hands, and got to work.

What a dream Plastipaste was, compared to plaster of Paris. It was soft but sticky, and stayed where I put it; no more messy globbing and catching it as it dripped off.

 It cured in a few hours, just like advertised, and became a nice shell.

 I rotocast the helmet (no good pictures of this, sorry; the process was fast and I was on my way out to a sci-fi movie marathon...) by tying the two sides of the mold together with bungee cords and swishing around small mixed mounts of the smooth-on plastic.

And then I went to the movies, and when I came back, I began to demold. It took a lot of force, and I actually accidentally cracked parts of the edges where the plastic was thinner In the end, the front came off easy since I just ended up cracking the plaster, but the back part took three people holding it down and pulling to take it off. Plasti-paste, man. Holds its shape against the apocalypse.

Here's a picture of it with the back part still stuck on; note that I wrapped foil around the edge to keep it from sticking to the dried plaster. That would have been a really bad time if the two mother mold halves of hard materials had stuck together. I also put a few registration keys along the top of the silicone to line up the two mold halves. You can see how floppy the silicone is in the picture below.

And completely demolded! This was the first thing I had ever cast, and boy was I excited, particularly after the failures of last year. You can see that the silicone picked up every little pitted detail on the helmet; again, sacrificing time ended up sacrificing quality somewhat.

Here's a comparison of the cast helmet to the original. I derped and spilled some plastic on the original, which is the streaky white...sketchy stuff splatter on the visor. Yeah.

And of course, I could not resist putting this on. It fit! It was too big, but that's ok! I can't see, but that's ok! I made a helmet and it was hollow! I made a plastic thing! I was so incoherent with excitement!

In the background you can see a Christmas tree that might be familiar from my friend's blog.

In the next post, I'll talk about how I carbon fibered the helmet, and some of the ways I hacked that together. Rock on!