Some of you have seen my earlier thread regarding this really horrible kit that was bound for the trash, but I renovated it and turned it into an ANH.
Here is another wonderful conclusion to the story arc of the Darth Ugly saga - Ugly ESB!
For those tuning in, there was an eBay auction years back that sold what turned out to be very inferior, warped castings that came originally from a Don Post Classic Action. They varied in quality.
Now the one on the right which belonged to a friend, T-VIRUS, which is the continuation of this whole story arc. The one on the left was built out but later discarded, R.I.P. The one on the right does look better. It originally looked like the one on the left, but at the time the photo was taken, T-VIRUS had taken great strides to try to correct the original warpage, so he did an amazing job given the extent of our Vader knowledge 5 years ago. However the prop still exhibited problems with shape and warpage. For example, the dome on the right had a bell curve to the rear on one side which doesn't show upon in this frontal shot.
If you want to see how the faceplate evolved, view the original thread at [url="http://thepropden.aokforums.com/still-ugly-vt387.html"]The Prop Den • still ugly[/url]
So... back to the dome:
One of the problems with the dome was the flaring. The flange was cut incorrectly and the flaring made it look weird. Heating the material until it was soft enough to correct the flange flare was one thing, but it was not simple. Correcting the flange meant warping the domecap. Correcting the domecap meant warping the flange. The correct domecap shape meant the flange had to be severely bow-shaped (that bell curve I mentioned), which was unacceptable.
It was going to be a throwaway dome. Since it was sitting in a corner gathering dust, I asked T-VIRUS to send it to me to salvage. As you saw in the "still ugly" thread, the faceplate salvage turned into a major renovation that surpassed all my expectations for this piece of poodu.
I had been developing two domes in parallel - the Darth Ugly dome and a flawed casting of a GH ANH dome which I had cut into 3 pieces, then remastered and resculpted it to make it an artistic whole with the Darth Ugly faceplate. The results you saw:
I really wanted the Darth Ugly dome to be paired with its own mask, but at the time, the dome simply didn't look right and required a lot of rework. Believe me, it was heartache not to.
I don't have complete progress shots as I thought the dome was doomed for failure. I cut off the widow's peak and did some sanding to see if it could pass for an ESB dome, but the whole brow structure was incorrect and needed to be redone.
Above, I'm redoing the mid strip and the brow. What you don't see is under the black acrylic paint the modifications to other parts of the dome. Because of flaring of the sides, the sides had to be pushed in with heat, but this made it too pushed in, so I resculpted the fold line, believe it or not.
Now the hardest part was the flange having such a strong bell-curve towards the back. This wasn't solvable with heat manipulation alone, as it meant something else had to be warped if you wanted it to be straight. So what I did was use a Dremel fiberglass cutting disc to cut the flange into strips:
And then exposing the flange to heat, I could manipulate the strips into approximately the right shape I needed them to be, i.e. straighter.
Here's an early stage of development of the ESB style mid strip. You can still see the flange on the left (wearer's right) is still cut into strips:
Filling the seams was the next step, now that the seams are wider in some cases, and the strips are oriented at different angles and directions. Here you can see only a certain stage of reconstruction. I had redone the fold line but it's under the black acrylic paint. Also you can get a sense of the brow being redone, but I hadn't quite cleaned up the surfaces. You can also see the side of the domecap had been reworked significantly since it was too pushed in and needed to be subtly widened.
The flange end wasn't cut correctly by the vendor who sold T-VIRUS this helmet, so that had to be resculpted.
But even after doing all that work, the flange didn't create the right silhouette for me, so I had to build out more curvature, so now a huge section is given new material.
So the following are some progress shots. Please don't mind the slightly incorrect dome positioning (I hadn't had coffee) and the painted ESB-style chin triangle. The paint scheme is still from my ANH setup of this faceplate. I don't intend to cut it yet until it has been molded.
These are Work in Progress shots as of April 1: 12:25 p.m. I still have a bit of fine tuning to do, and correcting the right flange.
And here's a look of the ESB versus the ANH. Same faceplate in both shots.
Although the original kit was warped, distorted and deluded, it was still based off of a Don Post Classic Action, which was marketed as an ESB helmet. I therefore find it very satisfying to help this project return to its movie origins by bringing this back into an ESB configuration!
Hope you enjoyed this writeup!
