Face Time

Welcome once again after a long break in the blog to the most insane Rubie's Vader Conversion ever! If you have $90 for a Rubies, a dremel tool, multiple saws, files, fiberglass, body filler, primer, countless rubber gloves and dust masks, tons of sandpaper, and most importantly, ENDLESS HOURS to waste. Maybe you can do this too!

I feel I have finally reached the point where I see the light at the end of the tunnel though... The FACE is coming together now.. The following occurred over about a two week period upon return from my last trip to Virginia Tech.

As anyone with a Rubies Helmet will tell you, the mouth is NOT symmetrical. So here are some photoshop drawings I made by tracing the mouth shapes from the mask onto paper, scanning it in, and then planning how i would make the teeth 'right'

Plastic Templates

Here's the First of the plastic templates cut from styrene sheet and glued onto the mask with cyanoacrylate (superglue) gel.

I made two main templates, the 'outside outline' one applied here, and the 'teeth' one applied later.

Same thing from the sides, you can see I have added in some styrene sides on the right and left, and a tiny lip on the bottom. This will give us something to glue our 'teeth' to.

The 'TEETH' Template glued on at the bottom. at this point its just a very thin piece of sheet sytrene. the teeth may look sturdy in the picture put they are only slightly thicker than paper right now. This is just a template to which to glue the 'real' teeth' to the back of. (Can't make that sentence work!)

TEETH
1/4 inch square styrene 'tubing.' Evergreen and Plastruct are some of my new best friends. So I cut out several of these and glue them to the back of the template that is glued to the front of the mask, gluing them on from the inside.  I'm not gonna lie, this was a PAIN.. i cut about ten teeth out for the 6 needed but i got the hang of it.

Results: Vader Teeth. from left to right, the space between each tooth is slightly larger than the previous one, but you really can't tell unless you are looking for it, and it looks far better to my eye than the original teeth i cut out waaaayy back when.

Vader's Wrinkled Brow

So heres what i did.. I puttied over the whole upper nose.. then made a styrene template with the holes for these cut out of it and glued it around the nose in a previous post... In this step I used an X-acto razor saw to cut down each one. The Evercoat filler cut great, but the ABS and styrene plastics cut poorly. I used a dremel cutting bit to 'drill out' the excess material. I am left with kind of what i want, but with very ugly edges.

Eyeholes
Just a quick note here that I did a few things:

1. Dremelled around the eyeholes and inside of nose to remove a lot of excess material.

2. Dremelled, sanded, cut, and sanded some more, to get the eyeholes as close to perfect as i can. These should be super smooth and ready to accept the Lenses behind them.

3. Put body filler in behind the bottom of the teeth to keep them secure.

But I JUST Cleaned this UP!

Thats right, More body filler. then more sanding needed..

Sanding and Filing

More sanding and filing done after the filler was applied and dried. Lets see how we did...

Really kinda getting there..

I am seriously starting to see a likeness here... Cheeks are appropriately asymmetrical for ESB Vader, Eyeholes are smothed out. Teeth are looking pretty good... now to tackle those pesky brow slots again..

Missing Step?

Well I have left out a step because I didnt take photos..I was too busy!

Brow Slots

Basically I took some tape and put the lines down for the brow slots. This time they'd be easy to cut out since the material to be removed is all body filler, which cuts much more nicely than abs or styrene. So I cut down with the X-acto razor saw again, then I used an x-acto knife to cut along the edges and the filler just sort of flaked out of the slots properly! A little bit of work with some small detail files and i have some pretty good slots done.

Sanding and FilingAgain
Next I Sanded and filed all the areas that still needed more work... AGAIN.

PRIMED

And here we are. Primered again. Very VERY VERY close to done..

Little red circles show imperfections i still need to address.. filing and a tiny amount of filler putty will take care of these...

A few more tiny Imperfections...


And there we have it! 

That is the end of todays lesson in: WHY YOU SHOULD JUST BUY A PREMADE VADER HELMET AND NOT MOD YOUR OWN. :)

(Seriously I am having a lot of fun with this project, but my GOD the labor...  )