Trust me. It's a math thing. - Major Samantha Carter, Stargate SG-1

Tag: foam

Stargate Jaffa Helmet

Posted on by Jim Vo

After discovering the plans by Honus for an Animatronic Stargate Helmet last summer, I became obsessed with making my own Jaffa uniform. The helmet was by far the trickiest part of the build. Funny thing is, it’s the first thing I started and the last to get finished. We were even fixing it on the way down to the Hall Contest Table at CONvergence. There’s a fair amount of detail required. FYI, the electronics will be covered in its own post. I need to gather up the resources Tom used for the electronics.

This took a lot of rework. A lot of it was because I hadn’t worked on this type of project before and, frankly, it was pretty ambitious for a first project. Misery comes in three: I ended up having to make most of the parts 3 times. The base of the helmet was built twice in Pepakura and a third and final time in 8MM EVA Foam from TNT Cosplay Supply. This took most of the roll to complete. I was still new to Pepakura and it took a lot of manipulating to get the printouts to complete the template. I also made 2 Horus and 2 Anubis Guard headpieces out of paper from the Pepakura files, which I ended up destroying with expanding foam. I learned a lot of lessons that day. That was also how I destroyed the first Pepakura helmet. The second Pepakura helmet didn’t fare much better and became deformed because of the spray foam (the correct one this time) and the hard safety hat I had glued in. The EVA Foam helmet was a much better fit.

I should also point out that some of the carved designs are not screen accurate. Frankly, I fudged a lot of it. I didn’t have enough reference photos to work off of, so I replicated the larger artifacts and freehanded the rest of the pattern carving. At the time, there was a huge time crunch looming with CVG2018 approaching.

Build Images

Here’s a happy shot of me while we decided where to trim the foam extensions.

Trimmed and fitted with the face covering. The cover is reinforced with aluminum bars to hold its shape. Without an eye screen, it actually makes a fairly sturdy handle for carrying.

Initial carving, before hitting it with the heat gun to expand the gaps.

Closer carving designs and feature detail.
The unwanted gaps were filled with Kwik Seal. The lines were cut lightly, then hit with a heat gun to open the lines.

Slightly out of focus rear carving, free-handed with EVA foam.

The grey foam I used to make the accent pieces ended up being a lower density EVA foam so it shredded a little when sanding.

EVA Foam detail from the top of the helmet.

One more shot of detail on the tailpiece of the helmet. I’m particularly proud of the scarab at the bottom.

Small detailed shot of the ear fan. There will be more detail in electronics post.

Helmet after painting. This may have been an earlier iteration of the paint. Tom is my paint guy and went through a few versions until he was happy with the color.

I used sketches like these to cut out the shapes needed. I cut out the pattern and transferred it to 2MM EVA Foam. The ‘scalloped’ portions helmet were hand sketched as well. I drew half of the pattern on a folded sheet of paper and then used a glass-top desk as a make-shift light table. I also learned that if you do it in pencil, you can transfer the pattern to foam by pressing the paper into it, sketch-side down.