Making the R2D2 Helmet

First and foremost, let me just say thank you to everyone for the wonderfully enthusiastic response to my creation. Being tremendously nerdy has never been so rewarding... well, that might be a lie; the rewards of nerddom are self evident and plentiful.

I debated on whether to post the process of making it, but it was so fun I decided I really wanted to share it (I have absolutely zero self restraint). Also, it's not rocket science.

First, I sand-papered the crap out of an old helmet that Philadelphia Scooters kindly provided. I even Tom Sawyered Steve into sandpapering but then got jealous and demanded he give it back so that I could do it myself.

Then I primed and sprayed it with a silver spray paint.

The next step was labor-intensive. I outlined all the shapes with tape. It involved a lot of measuring, cursing circles for being so round, and wishing I had kept my protractor and compass from high school.

From there it was kind of a breeze. I just spray painted the blue on. As you can see, we had other fun things going on; that's an empty canned chile can in the foreground, and the ever-delicious Michelob Ultra by my foot. It's always a party at Jenn's house.

Then I almost walked into this thing on our back deck:

Needless to say, that was EXTREMELY distracting (not just the horrifying part or the talking spider part, but also the, "holy shit, look at that amazingly perfect spider web; we totally have to spend the better part of an hour trying to take a perfect picture of it in the dark" part).

That was okay, though, because it gave the blue time to dry so I could do this:

Looks satisfying, right? It totally was about 23.87 times more satisfying than it looks in these pictures. Next up were the little details:

Next, my handy friend Jon Hauptman used his super awesome saw to cut a PVC pipe down for the doo-dads. It was totally Tim Allen's Tool Time up in that joint. The lighting gadget, on the other hand, is of my own design and is such super top secret technology that the military is currently trying to buy the patent off me to use for interstellar space travel... oh wait, we don't do the space thing anymore. Aww. 

Knowing what it's made of wouldn't help you, though, because it requires 1.21 gigawatts, so... you know... good luck with that.

The final step was giving it about 374 cans of clear coat. I think if I learned anything from this project, it's that nothing (except cakes) can suffer from too many layers of clear coat. When it was done I wore it around the house until it was time for bed... and then I wore it to bed.

Thanks for reading, kid.