Author: jimel

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.