Building a Morita Carbine from Starship Troopers

 A few years back we made a handful of Starship Troopers Morita assault rifle replicas.  They were pretty nifty:

But there were a few other weapons available in the Mobile Infantry's arsenals.  Since I'm apparently on track to fit out an entire platoon of troopers, I'm going to need more different armaments.

So we cast another copy of the Morita assault rifle and hacked off the front end and the shotgun mag tube. I also trimmed off the shotgun barrel and the magazine nut from the muzzle piece and shortened the longitudinal trim pieces that slot into either side:

After a bit of cleanup, the main body got my customary coat of glossy lightish red paint:


The next day I couldn't resist the urge to test the fit:


After that, this shiny pink prototype sat in the shop, hanging from a hook in the corner and largely forgotten for months.  Then Andrew the Intern asked about how to make molds and we had a just right thing for him to learn on.  

We started him out with a flat surface to mount it to, in this case a piece of MDF, then built up a layer of foam sheet.  That built up the split to about the midline of the prototype.  That's where we set up a scrap of ABS sheet trimmed to fit close around the prototype.  Then he built up a layer of clay about 3/8" thick over the whole thing.  Then I went ahead and added the needed ridges and registration keys before we have it all a generous coating of PVA release agent:  


A couple days later we went ahead and layered over the whole thing with fiberglass:


Once that had cured, the whole thing was flipped over and the process was repeated on the other side.  Then Andrew the Intern got to separate the two halves of the fiberglass mothermold.  They prototype was left in one side's clay bed:


Andrew picked out the clay, smoothed the bottom half of the clay bed, and added registration keys:


Then the first half of the mothermold was bolted back in place and filled with silicone:


Once that cured, we flipped the mold over, removed the mothermold, and cleaned out the clay that was inside:


After spraying on a healthy coat of release agent, the mothermold was bolted back in place and filled with silicone:


The last then was to remove the lump of clay that was in the magazine well, cut a hole in the mothermold, spray in more release agent, and then fill the hole with silicone to create a plug:


The silicone was poured through a hole cut in the mothermold.  You can see the plug here after we'd poured the first casting:

It's up and to the right of where I'm pointing.  I don't know what I was pointing at there or why.

The little detail bits were mostly the same as the full-sized Morita assault rifle.  We had to trim the side details and make new molds for those.  We also made a new muzzle assembly without the shotgun barrel and magazine tube cap:


Here's two sets of parts dry fitted together:

Note the magazines are already painted and weathered because they were left over from an excess we'd made back when we made the full-sized assault rifle version.

After a bit of trimming and cleanup, the casts were primed:

Then the body was painted with a dark green drab color from the Krylon camouflage line and the action and muzzle were painted with some dark metallic shade from Dupli-Color.  Once the paint dried, everything was assembled, weathered, and ready for us to install a sling:

The slings were a different kind of pain to replicate.  Mostly because the few reference images I was working with didn't really show them clearly laid out.  It took some doing to wrap my head around how exactly they worked, but in the end, I'm happy that we'd done a good job of duplicating the screen-used slings:


With these two done, I put one in the box with the rest of my Mobile Infantry costume.  The other one gets to hang on the wall in my office until further notice:

Now it's time to get back to work on my prosthetic hand:

And there's always the M-55 Tactical Nuke Launcher:


The plan is to get a squad together in time for Wondercon in Anaheim at the end of this month.  

Would you like to know more?

Making Captain Enoch's Helmet

 Like many Star Wars fans, while watching Ahsoka on Disney+ I was really taken with this particular character's look:

This is Captain Enoch, leader of Grand Admiral Thrawn's personal guard of "Night Troopers" that also appeared for the first time in the same scene.  Here's a promotional image of him:


I knew right away that I was going to have to make myself this helmet.

Some time earlier I'd made a mold off of a Black Series stormtrooper helmet from Hasbro so I could mod copies to make a variety of stormtrooper variant helmets.  So I pulled a casting out of that mold for a starting point:


Then we 3D scanned it:

We're getting pretty good at the whole digital scanning thing.

Once the scan data was cleaned up a bit, I hit up my friend Jeff Santos for some digital sculpting.  He sculpted out the necessary pieces to convert the cast helmet into Enoch's helmet:

In no time at all, I'd printed the key parts, trimmed off the face of the Stormtrooper helmet casting, and fit the parts together:


Not too shabby:


Happy that the models looked right, I got started on prep work.  Here's the face after the initial 150-grit sanding:


And after the first round of filler primer:


Every time I found myself waiting for paint to dry on the 3D printed face pieces, I would spend a few minutes laying out and carving in the kintsugi* lines on the resin cast helmet part:


Once I was convinced that we'd matched all of the cracks in the screen-used helmet, the cheeks were installed and the whole thing was primed and given a gloss coat of lightish red paint:


Here it is from the side:


And the front:


In order to make molding, casting, prepping, and painting easier, I decided to keep the faceplate separate:


So at this point, the masters were done:


Both pieces were mounted to a base with cardboard and hot glue, the wrapped in plastic food wrap before a 3/8" layer of clay was built up over the whole thing.  The clay matrix was coated with PVA release agent and then I laid up the first half of the fiberglass mothermold:




Once that had cured I went ahead and set up the second half for fiberglass.  Here's the mothermold after the second half was laid up:


The same thing was done with the mold for the faceplate:




Here's both mothermolds curing:


The next day I removed the mothermold and the clay matrix, being careful not to disturb the master inside:


Then I worked some clay around the edges where I was going to need a parting wall later:


The edges were dimpled to make registration keys to help keep the silicone parts aligned during casting.  At this stage I usually like to add some signatures and graffiti to the parts that will be cut off:


With the parting line set up, I bolted the mothermold in place and sealed it all the way around the edges:


Same for the faceplate:


Then I had Rachel go ahead and fill the molds with silicone:


Once that had cured, I flipped over the mold for the main body of the helmet.  Then I removed the wood base and the clay that made up the parting wall.  Then the whole thing was given a generous coat of release agent before I poured silicone for the bottom section of the mold:


The faceplate mold was ready to go:


Before casting, I dusted the mold with a gold metallic powder:


This powder clings to the surface of the mold, but once the casting resin adheres to it, it sticks better than most paint coatings:


This way there will still be gold visible underneath if the surface finish gets scratched or chipped.

So the next step was to rotocast a copy of the faceplate.  This meant pouring just a few ounces of mixed resin into the mold an sloshing it around until the whole surface is evenly coated:

This gets repeated until adequate thickness is built up:


Here's the first casting as soon as it was pulled out of the mold:


I'm very happy with it:


Here it is alongside the master:


Once the bottom section of the silicone had cured, I notched out the four tabs at the bottom of the rubber mold jacket:



Then I applied a heavy release agent and laid up fiberglass to make the bottom section of the mothermold.  Here it is fitted with bolts after it had cured:


After a bit of trimming and cleanup, I used that mold to cast the first helmet body:

Here it is alongside the mold and the masters:


Here's the complete set of parts including a set of custom-formed acrylic lenses and the chin details:


After a bit of trimming, I dry fit the parts together:


Naturally, I couldn't resist the urge to try it on for a while:


I'm pretty happy with it.  This is my happy face:


Of course,  I never make just one of anything.  So I cranked out a few more castings:


To get the finish I wanted for the gold bits, I decided early on that the best option was gold leafing:


For the main body of the helmet, I started with a gloss white basecoat:


Then the helmet was masked off and the grey parts were painted either Gloss Smoke Gray, or Satin Granite from Rustoleum:


It's a bit more obvious after the masking was removed:

Then the gold leafing was applied to the cracks and patches to match the kintsugi look of the screen-used helmet: 

The main thing I learned from gold leafing the faceplate was that I really don't like doing gold leafing.

To make it easier, I asked Rachel to do it:


She pretty much nailed it:


Once the leafing was done, we picked out the brow trim by hand with flat black oil-based paint.  Then we made vinyl stencils to paint on the Imperial cog logos:


Rachel was also happy with the result:


They were definitely coming along, but they were still too clean:


The final step was to blackwash everything to help the details stand out and give the whole thing that signature Star Wars "lived in universe" look:






Jeff got to keep one of the helmets.  Here's the last pic with all four in the same room:


Here's my copy sitting on display in the office:


At some point I'll get a wild hair and decide to make the rest of the armor to go with it:


Plenty of other things to keep me busy in the meantime.

Stay tuned...