Daft Punk Helmets and Complete Costumes WithOUT Using a Vacu-form

Made in 4 months, for about $50 per entire costume, Including the helmet.
First of all, these are not exact replicas, they do not have programmed LEDS, and no Vacu-formed visors. I was trying to do this for as cheaply as possible, and I do not know anything about programming LED's. I hope to improve upon these in the future, but for now, this is what I've got, and I love them! Okay, let's get started, this isn't exactly a step by step, but I will show you and explain to you what I can.

Supplies used for the helmets:
Two softball helmets
Bondo
Craft foam
Paper and cardstock
Duct tape
The motherboard from a calculator
LED light up rings (These http://tinyurl.com/ouxnvqu)
Flashing battery powered mini Christmas lights
Transparency plastic and recycled plastic from a box a barbie came in
Window tint
Metallic silver and metallic gold spray paint
Spray on sealer
Cosmetic wedges
Electrical tape
hot glue
hacksaw or dremel
Exacto knife
A sanding tool or sandpaper
Wire's
Soda cans


For Thomas's Costume:
Black Boots
Jeans
A wallet chain
A button down dress shirt
Black fabric, sewn into a hood for covering your neck and head
Black leather or pleather jacket
Rhinestones

For Guy's Costume:
White button down shirt
Black suspenders
Black dress pants
Black boots
Black fabric, also sewn into a hood
Black leather or pleather jacket
Wig cap (Not always needed, but since I was Guy, and have long hair, I needed it to keep it all in one place.)
Rhinestones

For the gloves:
Black gloves, leather if you can find them, we couldn't.
Gold and Silver reflective tape
Foam

Now that our supplies are out of the way, on to the process. We winged it most of the way, and made it work!

Step 1: Step 1-hacksawing Your Helmets

Yeah, so, Our dremel tool wasn't working, so we had to just hand saw all of these. The Thomas helmet did not require any cutting, but Guy's helmet did, basically the entire top and face was sawed off, we then took two scrap pieces of helmet, one cut into a curved plate shape to line the wires on, and the other for the jaw.
As for Thomas's helmet, we had to cut our a jaw shape from some card stock and attach it on the base of the helmet.

Step 2: Bondo and Sanding...

So.Much.Bondo.And.Sanding.
Now, this is the part where I started losing hope, thinking we would never get this done. Why? Because bondo is hard to lay smooth on a ridged helmet, and applying it and sanding is the really boring part. Just keep pushing through this part and it will get done, I promise! It did take the longest, and it took us a while.
In retrospect, I would not have put bondo all over the helmets, I would have just applied in areas needed, such as points where the jaws attach, the paper jaw, and any holes or uneven areas. It will cut bondo and sanding time down by quite a bit.

And as for the sanding, we had to just sand both by hand due to lack of sanding tools, we were trying to use supplies on hand to cut down on costs. We used 80, 60, 150, and 220 grit sandpaper in order to get the really rough parts and smooth down the entire helmet.

Step 3: Wrapping Guy's Wires

Pretty quick step, but not easy, we bought several feet of wire, I can't recall what type this was, but If I think of it I will update here. We first cut all the plastic tubing off so we could get to the colored wires seen in the photos below. We cut them down, and one by one bent them over our head plate and hot glued them into place. It's not easy to get these wires bent, but it is possible to do it. Take a snack break in between and get some inspirational music pumping. You will need it.

Step 4: Painting and Applying the Visors, Wires, and Ears.

Okay, so, after you've spent about a month bondo-ing and sanding, it's time to do the fun stuff!!
First, you should cut your ear pieces for Guy's helmet, this piece will be applied around the soda cans you already have glued on. I cut mine out of foam, with the protective paper over it still (Foam and spray paint do not work well together.)
Glue on those pieces and get ready to paint.

Paint and Sealer:
When applying your paint to both Thomas and Guy's helmets, make sure you allow plenty of dry time in between coats, and avoid touching them before totally dry to avoid finger prints. Add several coats and then finish off with your glossy sealer.

Ears:
The ears were cut from foam, with paper over them and glued into place, I can;t really explain the shape, so I provided pictures to better show them, I added the motherboard from inside the calculator and cut it into a shape to glue where Guy's "Circuit board" goes on his helmet, just below the soda cane ears.
Wires:
To apply the wires to the back of Guys helmet you just need to glue it into place!

Visors:
For Thomas's visor, We cut a piece of flexible plastic, and added window tint to it, after that we simply glued it into place. We had to make several different shapes out of paper before we found the right shape to cut to fit our visor perfectly.

For Guy's visor, since I do not have a vacu-form machine, we first took a large rectangular piece of plastic and cut it to fit down the center of the helmet and applied tint on it. Then it was glued into place.
After that I cut 10 sections of plastic, 5 for each side, you can do as many or as few as you like, but at least 3 will make it easy on you. After cutting the rectangles we laid tint on them and glued into place, I overlapped each section with the last going from top to bottom, it gave it a "Retractable helmet look" cut sections of pieces off as needed.

Step 5: TIme to Add the Lights!

So, I used different lights for each helmet. In Guy;s helmet I took the light out of some light up rings from the dollar store and taped them inside my helmet, so all I have to do is push the button on each one to turn it on and off.
On Thomas's helmet however we used a battery powered pack of mini Christmas lights, we simply taped each bulb onto the inside of the visor in the helmet, and hid the cord and pack within his costume, all he has to do to turn his lights on is to flip a switch on the pack and they will blink or stay still. I also put two lights on either corner of the inside of the visor, also from the light up rings. I've included a video below of the lights.

Step 6: The Costume!

To start off, I will explain how I made the gloves.
For both sets I cut out finger pieces and a part for the top of my hand out of craft foam, after that I wrapped each one in reflective tape, gold for Guy, Silver for Thomas, and hot glued each piece on the gloves, make certain you have something INBETWEEN the glove so your glye doesn't seep through and the fingers and palms get stuck together, I learned the hard way, even though I know better.

For the jackets we took self adhesive rhinestones and basically copied the look on the backs of daft punk's jackets.

And last but not least, the black hoods, we wore these under our helmets to conceal any skin or hair showing while wearing the helmets, To make them we just used a basic hoodie pattern and elongated the neck so it would tuck down under our shirt collars.

As for the rest, you can see in the photos how we dressed ourselves up to look like daft punk.

Step 7: Photo Montage and Video Time!

We debuted our costumes at a party of some very dear friends/very big daft punk fans, they went over very well! We will be wearing these to several other events throughout October, so as I get photos I will add to this instructable. I really hope this was helpful to ya'll! Remember, you need quite a bit of time to make these, This was a low budget build, and done without using a vacu-form like I've seen most instructables. Remember to Rock, Robot Rock your costumes this halloween! :0)

Comments

[amandaggogo]

Fil Wiatrak, my boyfriend just looked at photos of the jaw on Thomas's helmet, and drew it out on graph paper first, then cut it from card stock and just kind of made adjustments as he taped it to the helmet, winged it basically. We looked at the pepakura viewer too and it didn't help out either.

[DerrezedD]

hi my name is jared may i buy these helmets from you?

[Fil Wiatrak]

How'd you make the jaw for Thomas' helmet? I tried the Pepakura, but that just prints out a connect-the-dots version that isn't helpful at all.

[tsimecek]

So awesome, my roommate and I have been trying to figure out what to give out candy in this Halloween and daft punk is perfect!

[amandaggogo]

Awesome! This took us a good while to pull together, but we mainly only had weekends and some weeknights to work on this, and winged it most of the way, so ya'll might be able to pull off making these pretty quickly with the step by step! Post up photos if you guys make em! I'd love to see them! :0D

[curiouseddie]

Were you up all night to get this lucky? :p

[amandaggogo]

haha, just about! Up late working on these most nights that is.

[Darxide23]

I've seen several how-to videos on making these helmets that take months and several hundred dollars to make. Your method might not be perfect, but as cheap and quick as it is to make them it's well worth it for people without time and money to make "exact" replicas.

Very nice!

[amandaggogo]

Thank you!
And yeah, I would kill for an "Exact Replica" but I do not have the time or money to pull that off, nor $4,000 to just buy one, and since these are strictly for halloween and maybe a con here or there, I think they are okay, and since we can always improve work on them over time, I think we did a pretty sweet job.