Helmet Stand : How to do it
Dave makes a helmet stand for his friend George! Subscribe to the channel: https://bit.ly/2SaaYmX
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I'd been working on a Star Wars Boba Fett helmet for my friend George and also wanted to give him a few options for where it could hang in case he wasn't going to constantly wear it.
Some kind of stand or something to hang it on a wall seemed like the best things to give him.
It needs to be simple and not take away any focus from the helmet...but also look cool when the helmet isn't on it.
So with that in mind, I had recently seen a technique called slice form where you put together flat pieces to make a three dimensional shape.
There are all kinds of ways to do slice forms, and the basic idea with this one is to have a set of differently sized circles intersect perpendicularly with a duplicate set of circles.
After some trial and error on the computer, I printed a small test version of the circles onto card stock which is basically just thick paper. We cut out all the circles and then assembled them.
And the first test went well, so we started making more tests at the size the final piece would be.
An expensive floor lamp got was used as the base.
I had some sheets of eight inch acrylic and really like how smooth a finish it can have with little to no sanding, so I took the final design and altered it to factor in the thickness of the acrylic so that the pieces would slide into each other smoothly during assembly.
The final pieces only ended up taking about 15 minutes to cut with a laser cuter and the toughest part was not watching the laser work.
A scotch-brite pad roughened up the acrylic circles so the spray paint would have something to grab onto.
Before the paint, I drilled three holes into the two circles that would hold the slice form to the stand.
Two light coats of matte black spray paint on each side worked out really well.
A small pipe cutter and a lot of twisting got the floor stand pole to the chosen length.
Once the pole was cut to length, I used a hammer and nail to put dents where I was going to drill. I tested denting and drilling on the cut part before using the actual pole.
There was a little bit of blow-out on the test piece, so for the real pole I ended up using a smaller drill bit first and then drilled through the holes on both sides with the final size drill bit to get rid of the blow-out.
Now it was finally time to put everything together, so I screwed the two main circles to the pole; and after that it was going to just be a matter of assembling the rest of the sphere the same way I did with the paper tests.
However, after I connected a few of the pieces, it was looking a bit wonky.
I could see that the top screw holes didn't line up with the others just enough to make problems, so I cut off some of the inner parts of the larger circles and removed the top bolt and nut. This fixed the problem and next time, I would locked down the pole more securely for drilling. The great news is, it didn't end up needing any glue. It's a really strong friction fit.
To finish it all off, I just screwed it onto the base and now we have a finished helmet stand for George!