I’m raising funds with #EXTRALIFE for kids treated at my local member hospital of Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals! I need YOUR help to reach my fundraising goal, will you make a donation to support me?
www.extra-life.org
Last year during Extra Life 2023, SigmaProps challenged me that if we beat a certain stretch goal, I would have to make a blue grenadier helmet. I accepted and we beat the goal!
I wanted this helmet to be given away to help raise money for Renown in Reno, NV this year. The helmet is blue and white to represent Extra Life, and the visor and signatures are silver to represent myself and Renown being from Nevada (the silver state). I kept the helmet mostly a secret as I worked on it. Here’s relatively few pictures I took to still show off the build process!
Here’s the helmet when it was first printed. The files were from NerdForgeDesigns It was printed as 1 piece, a 0.1mm layer height, and took 5 days to print. I bulk buy my material in red, so the blue grenadier started out red.
Supports removed.
I coated the helmet in UV resin, cured it, then sanded it with 320 grit sand paper. The only picture I could find after this sanding pass was the one with my parents dog, Whiskey, when he had too short of a haircut. Say hi to Whiskey! Bonus pic of how he normally looks!
Next up was Rustoleum filler primer.
After that I added Bondo spot putty to the larger imperfections, wet sanded at 600 grit, then repeating spot putty and wet sanding until I was happy. This step took the longest by far. I knew I wasn’t going to weather this helmet and there would be a lot of white, so the imperfections would be hard to hide.
Didn’t get a picture of this step, but I attached neodymium magnets to the back of the helmet and neck seal using JB Weld steel stick.
The helmet was primed with white Rustoleum paint/primer.
The parts that I wanted to keep white were covered up with Frog Tape.
I sprayed the helmet with blue Rustoleum paint. (No picture of the helmet)
These are the specific white and blue paints that were used.
I bought waterslide paper and printed out the 405th and Extra Life logos. Acrylic clear coat was sprayed onto the printed paper, then the waterslides were cut out and applied to the helmet.
A gloss Rustoleum clear coat was added.
The visor buck was printed out of PETG at 0.1 layer height.
I sanded the visor buck at 80, 150, 320 grit, then filler primer, and then wet sanded at 600, 1000, 2000
I sent the buck to Angus314 who vacuum formed it for me so big thank you to him! Once the visor was back my friend LivedDeclips (no forum account…yet) helped me chrome the visor, following the tutorial by N8TEBB so another thank you to both of them! The visor was installed with at tap of hot glue.
Thank you to Wayward Flood for letting me ship the helmet to him for TORG. At TORG, we had Steve Downes, Jen Taylor, Jeff Steitzer, and Tim Dadabo sign the helmet! Thank you to all of them so much for the signatures, their time, and helping bring this whole helmet together!
