Well color me depressed. Oooook....If I have to ( head down kicking at ground.) I feel like I've been sent to my room.

Any way you can remove the material without having to sand it off?

Not sure yet....but sanding is ok....I ain't sceart. There are some spots in that area I'm not happy with anyway.

Before you to a lot of sanding, just make sure that the back opening and the neck extension is all in-line. You don't have to remove a lot of that back opening (as in NHM's red lined illustration) in order to get the proper neck shape. I didn't. Remember that this is a DP recast (2nd or 3rd generation, who knows). After the tusk tubes end, there is supposed to be 2 inches of side before you reach the opening.

Here are some photos of my "Darth Ugly" side by side with a DP DLX. Hopefully these will help.





And note the side profile shape, especially the neck.

That is really looking outstanding! I took some material off of the cheek and tried to open the skull up some more. Also put some more epoxy on the left side neck. I'll post some pics tomorrow after everything sets up and I can do some sanding.

T,

Add a little bit of Aquamend to the edges, then sand them down. Do just the bare minimum to give yourself some meat so that when you sand them you can do something like the pic below without making the cheeks too small:

Ok I took the extre material off of the left cheek and added some more to the left neck. I have to redue the dimples, just threw them in real quick.

As for the skull....I heated and pulled on this sucker like a mf and realy could not achieve any more, for me this is as wide as this....( fill in a bunch of realy bad words here...some begining with F,M,C,B,S and some more I just made up today.) gets!





There is still sanding and shaping to do ( I say that as if it will ever end ) but thought I'd take a few more pics anyway.

Next up as promised to Mac I threw the dome on and shot away...first I used the AW dome.













Next up is the piece of crap that came with it.



















Anyway sorry to sound so angry in this post...its just something about this thing has really cranked me off today. I'll be happier next time. Scouts honor.

That dome that came with the kit imo looks better than the AW kit, so whatever you did... you did it right!

Overall, looks much better now.

Thanks NHM....I was just in a really crappy mood that day. As for the dome I'm not sure if I'm done with it or not. Because this helmet is less than perfect I tried to capture a little more of a worn look to the dome.
In person it looks to have slight brush strokes in the finish. Because I was having trouble finding good semi-gloss paint I left the surface of the dome some what un-smooth for lack of a better expl. this in turn made my gloss paint into semi-gloss. Anyway I'll decide about the dome once I have paint on the rest.
Take care.

T-VIRUS and I have been conversing a lot over the phone, and we often talk about our modification projects, share techniques, swap ideas and exchange information. But this is where I'm extremely excited in that we can help each other directly despite the physical distance. We're in two different States and separated by a time zone.

As I've had succses with the facemask modification and he had made leaps and bounds with modifying the dome, it would be interesting to swap projects!

Today, his Darth Ugly arrived in the mail.

Here, together, for the first time are two really, truly ugly ArmorMask Vader facemasks. Finally, two ugly sisters of Cinderella from ArmorMask's shop have reunited!

T-VIRUS has really made a valiant effort on his facemask given how excruciatingly disfigured and warped this kit was to begin with.



(Caption: two ugly sisters put their heads together for a beauty shot. Awww!)

And he's come this far without owning a Don Post Deluxe or Don Post Classic Action. He was doing this purely based on 2D online images!

Here the vertical tilt (or "nod") of the helmets are different due to the shape of his facemask's neck.

I will be working on making modifications to the neck. He's also sent me a tube of PC-Marine, which is made by the people who make PC-7, PC-11. It seems like it's their answer to my favorite: AquaMend. So we'll see what we can do here.



There is enough material added here that I can sand down quite easily.



Here is the part of the face that NHM expressed some concern. If I have time, I will see if I can address it too.

I had to see what was going on under the primer, so some acetone and ktichen paper was used to rub the primer away.

Another reason for this is that primer gunks up the sandpaper, so the more I remove now, the more mileage I will get when shaping the neck.



Talk about effort. While I relied on heat to shape the dome (and, again, I had the benefit of having a Don Post Deluxe right next to me as a three-dimensional basis of comparison), T-VIRUS opted to sculpt the structure out. Man, he's BRAVE!

On the upper cheek surface (left eye) the acetone has dissolved some of the red stuff (is it Bondo?) which is fine; it beats sanding, if I can chemically thin it out. Hope the acetone doesn't attach the urethane.

Fortunately there is enough PC-Marine and Bondo on the interior of the facemask for me to sand and reshape the exterior.

And here is an idealized angle.

You can see T-VIRUS was busy with sanding and shaping. This was not trivial work!



With the dome covering the skull, a lot of this is unncessary detail anyway. The important part is the face.

It has potential!

So let's see what we can do....