Halloween was fast approaching, and making a daft punk helmet seemed to be a trope among the engineers at Formlabs at the time. Having seen previous attempts, I was determined to execute on the fundamentals of the helmet design more effectively, and I wanted to add my own twist with the use of hydro graphics. The final result involved many more hours sanding than I was initially expecting, and made my apartment smell of solvents for several days, but it was well worth it.
The helmet has two main components - the printed shell and the visor. The printed pieces were pretty straightforward. I split a model I found on GrabCAD into parts that my FDM printer could handle using Blender. I glued the parts together with Cyanoacrylate, coated the assembly in epoxy, sanded for upwards of 10 hours, primed, and painted.
The visor was made using thermoforming. On the right, you can see the tool I made for thermoforming. It was made in two slices on a ShopBot because the height of the tool couldn’t be done in one job. Holes for alignment pins were cut into the two slices, and they were combined together with wood glue.
Larger ShopBots can have significant backlash in the Z stage which in this case led to harsh cuts into the tool. These were cleaned up with wood filler. The final tool was covered in a pretty substantial amount of epoxy and polished. Before thermoforming, the tool was coated in wood release. Thermoforming is sometimes painfully effective at transferring details (or errors) from the tool to the final part. For the visor, I wanted optical transparency which required several polishing and sealing steps on the tool.
The thermoforming process can be seen in the header video. After cleaning off all of the mold release and doing a final polish with Novus, the visor was remarkably clear. I used PETG for thermoforming as it’s cheap and fairly tolerant of deep draws. To cut the visor into shape, I FDM printed a reference visor that I could use to trace an outline onto the thermoformed part. The PETG was fairly thin, and the traced outline was easy to cut.
PETG is very solvent resistant, and proved difficult to dye. Normal fabric dyes did nothing to it, but I was able to find a fairly aggressive formula called iDye Poly which did the trick. Securing the visor into the printed mask took some patience. I tacked the visor into place using Cyanoacrylate, and used gasketing tape around the perimeter for a final seal.
The rear of this helmet seemed to have a lot of creative real estate, so I opted to use hydrographics on it. This is something I had no experience with and no supplies for, and given those initial conditions I’m happy with how the final result turned out.
Hydrographics require a container several times larger than the object being coated. Having no such container, I lined my bathtub with a tarp and used that. This worked well, but the solvents used in hydrographics are very volatile which resulted in my apartment smelling like paint thinner for the better part of a weekend. I used an off-the-shelf hydrographics kit which included the pattern and small aerosolized cans that had enough primer and thinner for one job. Once the hydrographics patterning was done, I masked off the main area and finished the rest of the helmet with a gold spray paint and gloss sealant.