The Helmet, part 01

The helmet is always a key part of any suit, and is one of the elements that I would want to look the most convincing, since human eyes are often drawn to the head of a person first. I will be making the helmet mainly out of EVA foam due to the ease with which it can be cut and glued together to form complex solids.
My base design was done in Fusion, with the helmet’s size designed to fit its visor. The principal tenets of the design is functionality, therefore I went for a design that maximises the wearer’s field of view. Early on I expected some difficulty in coming up with a way of making a clear visor myself that would be the right shape. After considering heat-bending some acrylic, I settled on purchasing a transparent hemi-sphere (which can be ordered to size down to the millimetre) which I would then cut to match the helmet rim.
Taking some inspiration from existing suits and some video games, I settled on this design. Some people say it resembles the Halo suit? I had thought that my main inspiration was the Space Engineers helmet, but it does look like both. The visor is fixed, as the suit is never expected to be used within a breathable atmosphere (it is pretty bulky after all).

With the design finalised, I printed out all the external faces on some paper (there were some jokes regarding this when I came into the workshop looking for a regular paper printer) which I used as masks to trace out the same shapes in 4mm foam.

The base shape of the helmet was then assembled like a self-designed 3d puzzle using hot glue.

4mm is obviously too little for the helmet to hold its own shape, so 1-2 extra internal layers made up of much larger pieces were added to make the helmet more rigid. Those were traced out using multiple paper faces that I printed earlier, then trimmed by eye to fit properly.

The front part of the neck ring still flexes a lot, but it will ultimately be held in place by the visor.

Ball Joints, part 02

In other good news, after some messing about with a worn down Flashforge printer (the Prusas are not equipped for ABS printing), I got one half of a ball socket printed. I had to use 30% infill for it to be solid enough for bits not to break off. Just in time, I’ve recovered the now dried fist part of my ball joint. Here are the 2 pieces fitted together in their current state:

The smoothed ABS actually feels very polished to the touch and to the eye, and the piece slides around freely already. Someone actually thought that I had covered the print in resin. I am still going to smooth the socket pieces as well to add extra strength between its layers. The spherical shape is actually slightly warped, meaning that I probably left the piece in acetone for too long. With this in mind I am going to leave the freshly printed piece (which has much more surface area) with the acetone for the same amount of time.