Making a Phase II ARC Trooper from a Skygunbro Clone Trooper Kit

A while back I picked up a few kits from Skygunbro's Custom Creature Shop.  Here's what they looked like when they showed up:


I've already explained how I converted one of them into a "realistic" movie-style version of Captain Rex's helmet from the Clone Wars animated series.  You can read about that little project here: LINK


Since I was on a roll with Star Wars stuff and I needed something frivolous to distract me from my actual paid projects with fast-approaching deadlines, I went ahead and converted the next one into a Phase II ARC (Advanced Recon Commando) Trooper helmet.  

Here's the finished result:

For step-by-step description of the conversion process, and a lot more photos, read on...


Once again, I started with helmets that looked like so:


Just like the Captain Rex helmet, the first step was to reshape the right ear in preparation for fitting a rangefinder.  I started by taking a belt sander to the details on that side:


Then I taped over the resulting hole:


And poured some casting resin in to form a new skin with a flat outer surface:

Once the resin had cured, I pulled off the tape and had a nice flat surface to work with:


Since the ARC Troopers have a decidedly different shape the the chin area of the helmet, I also gave that part some love on the belt sander:


Once I'd gotten rid of all of the soft-edged, curvy parts of the chin, I started building up the straight, pointy new chin with Bondo:


I also did some filler work along the mold seam and the right ear:


After a couple of rounds of filling and shaping, the new pointy chin was just about right:


One of the parts I liked most about the Phase II ARC Troopers is that they retained the Phase I mohawk with the big tailfin.  In order to duplicate that look, I started by cutting off the existing mohawk:


Then I made a profile template by tracing the outline of one of my many Phase I clone helmets so I could cut out a copy in 3/4" MDF and a couple of slightly bigger copies in 1/8" foamed PVC board:


Just like the Phase I troopers, the tail fin would be fitted with a little red light.  So I drilled out a hole in the back of the fin:


With that done, I sandwiched the MDF between the two PVC sheet pieces and mounted it to the top of the helmet:


After a bit more glue and filler work, I gave it a coat of primer to see how it looked:


Not bad:


The forehead end of the mohawk still needed a bit of smoothing:
 

Once that was done, the whole thing got a coat of Duplicolor Chrome spraypaint:





Just like I did with the Captain Rex helmet, I used mustard to mask off some areas where I wanted visible scratches in the paint then sprayed on a coat of gloss white:


For a while I couldn't make up my mind about exactly which paint scheme I wanted to go with.  There are only a handful of ARC troopers in the entire Star Wars universe that are important enough to even get a name, but I couldn't quite decide which one I'd want.  After a lot of deliberation, I settled on a somewhat obscure character named "Hammer." He shows up briefly in the Clone Wars series and has a unique set of distinguishing markings in gray and two shades of red.

With a plan in mind, I masked off most of the helmet to spray the areas that needed to be grey:


Before I sprayed on the gray paint, I added a bit more mustard masking so there would be parts where the grey markings would be chipped off to show the white base coat.  Then I sprayed it:


Next, I re-masked the whole thing leaving only the areas that had red markings exposed.  Then I added more mustard again:


Then the red spray:


Here it is after I'd peeled off the masking tape and paper:


Not bad:


After scrubbing off the mustard blisters, it looked like so:


It's a start:


After a bit more masking and mustard, I sprayed the darker red portion on the back of the helmet:


At this point, I decided I really didn't like the square markings on the sides of the dome, so I repainted it white and had my friend Jen cut me out a set of circular stencils on her vinyl cutter:


After a bit more masking, it was time for more red paint:


Once the red had dried, I started picking out the black details by hand:


Here it is before I'd scrubbed off the mustard blisters:


Then after I'd painted all of the grey parts on the ear, the frown, and the strip around the back and sides of the head:


After a bit more tweaking, I broke out the airbrush and added a bit of greasy black and dusty brown weathering.  Then I installed the rangefinder in the right ear:


It was looking pretty good:


When I added the little black dashes to the aerators I finally remembered that I'd neglected to add the "vocoder" detail to the chin:


I ended up cobbling it together from a couple of scrap pieces of foamed PVC sheet:


Once I was happy with the shape, I gave it a gratuitous coat of satin black paint:


As soon as the paint dried, I glued it in place:


The very last thing to do was to install the "tail light" in the back of the fin.  I started by snaking a pair of wires through the hole:


Then I soldered on an LED and resistor and wrapped them in heat-shrink tubing:


Here it is all powered up:


Then I cut out a little rectangle of clear red acrylic and rough sanded it on one side in order to help diffuse the light:


Here it is glued in place:


The power supply was just a 3AAA battery pack taped in place inside the left ear:

The added weight helps offset the weight of the rangefinder and stalk on the right ear.

With the tail light in place and functioning, I was ready to call the whole thing done:


Here's a few more photos of it from a variety of angles:












Now that the helmet is done, it's been relegated to storage with the rest of the collection:

Sooner or later I'll get to work on these other two helmets:


The white one second from the right will probably be painted up in the purple and grey livery of Mace Windu's 187th Clonetrooper battalion.  That just leaves me to figure out how to modify the one remaining Skygunbro clone kit sitting on the right.  Any suggestions?

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