This is another project I started quite a few years ago. I printed out a number of the small parts for the mask, though never got to the larger parts of the print, and still had plenty left to do on it. I didn’t intend to make it wearable, so that will at least simplify some of the construction.
I didn’t exactly make it far into this project, I managed to print off 2 beds of parts from the required ~10 beds worth needed to build it. Those parts weren’t very well printed either, I used a material I struggled with and they turned out okay, but if I’m going to be putting in the effort to finish this instead of scrapping it, I might as well reprint those parts and get some better quality.
Painting
The paint scheme on it is pretty simple, I chose a glossy black paint to use for most of the mask, and then metallic gold for all the metal highlights and eye components.
- Testors glossy black
- Testors metallic gold
I hadn’t encountered it before when painting my prints (which isn’t all that many prints I’ve added paint to), but I noticed a lot of wicking of the gold paint through the layer lines. Due to this, make sure to do all the gold painting first, as its easier to cover that up with the black paint than cover up the black paint wicks with the gold paint.
I started painting all the gold pieces, of which there are a large number of for the eye pieces and interior of the mask. I left paint off certain parts as I knew those would need to have glue joints, and the glue will stick better to the plastic than to the paint.
Adding coats of black after the gold was easy to work on. The black paint was not wicking into the areas the gold already filled, so I didn’t have any issues with keeping those lines crisp between the two colors.
Assembly
Even as I went into the assembly phase I knew the painting wouldn’t stop, Even once every piece was finally glued together, there was always going to be one more final paint touch up to make sure everything was good to go, without any obvious scratches, unpainted plastic, glue poking through, or places where tape peeled off paint. I also left a lot of the back side unpainted to save time as it was going to all be wall mounted.
The forehead connections were a bit of a pain to get into place. Since the mask is in two halves, you have to position the halves in the right place on those connection pieces (which have no orienting marks) and make sure they’re at the correct angle too (don’t need the halves off kilter from one another).
The nose connections were equally as annoying to get everything together. Lots of epoxy, lots of tedius angling and finessing parts to be the right angles.
I had to sand down some of my paint in order to have good connection points for the glue. All those areas were re-painted later on in the assembly. Once it was all assembled, I had one pass of paint touch-ups to bring it all to a nice level of finish.
After all the eye pieces were mounted, I added some of the additional details around the eyes. I made sure everything was painted well and then cut some copper house wiring to the right size to fit in the eye sockets. Some of the pieces had to be bent to fit into place, then straightened to slot into the holes on either end.
To attach the jaw, I just used two screws I had lying around. I didn’t glue it as I wanted to be able to pivot it to a good position when I started wrapping the wires between the upper and lower jaws.
Final
With the jaw attached, the final piece of the puzzle is to wrap the copper wire around and between the jaw pieces to give the final look of the mask. I know there’s a fabric liner I could make, but that’s more effort than I want to put in at this time for this mask (plus it’s not going to be worn as well, so comfort doesn’t matter). I also epoxied the start and end points of the wraps to make sure they were solidly in place. The rest of it was just patience wrapping things and working the metal so it would follow the shape I wanted.
I’m pretty happy with the final results. The entire thing turned out pretty well and it’s another decade old project completed.
