After I announced the winner for my halloween costume contest, I got to work hunting down the components I would need to create them. Just a quick refresher... there were three costumes: Captain N for me, Mega Man for my 3 year old, and Kid Icarus (Pit) form my 1 year old. The Captain N is well underway, and should be finished without too much effort. Pit isn't too hard either, I have all the pieces, just need to make a couple of tweaks and put it together.

The Mega Man costume on the other hand, is by far the most complicated build out of our trio. It didn't help that I am a bit of a perfectionist that when the mood strikes me I get WAY into what I am working on. I will try and document my build as best I can and post the results here. The first item up is Mega Man's helmet.

* The Helmet *

Step 0: Aquire items
I was not looking to spend alot of money (although I have), so I tried picking stuff up from the Goodwill's in the area around me. The helmet alluded me the longest. I picked up a bicycle helmet that was too big for my son, then some toy plastic helmets, like police or military ones, but none of them was perfect. I liked the bike helmet the most, but with it being to large I was left with nothing. I decided on going to Walmart and picking up one the right size. I justified the $20 for the helmet since it will be time to get my son a bike soon, so I will repurpose the helmet after we are done with the costume. Although if this is as awesome as I think its going to be... I am not sure I will be able to take it apart.

The first step after I got the helmet was to extend the back/ears and add details like the widow's peak to make it look more like Mega Man's.

Step 1: Cut/Shape Frisbee
Tools Used:
Hot Glue Gun
Heavy Duty Scissors
Marker
Materials:
Bike Helmet
Frisbee
Hot Glue Sticks

The ear and back extensions were done with a frisbee we had laying around. I choose the frisbee since it was rather sturdy, yet flexible plastic. I laid the frisbee up against the back of the helmet to try and get a rough idea of where it needed to be cut. Marked with Sharpie, cut with heavy duty scissors. I ended up with enough left over to do the two ear covers.


The helmet has enough space between the hard platic shell and the hard foam that the cut frisbee could fit into it.


I slide the pieces in and hot glued the frisbee pieces together (after alot of trial and error shaping steps). I didn't glue it to the helmet since I wanted to reuse it later, plus the foam/plastic of the helmet was a pretty tight fit.


Step 2: Foam for helmet additions
Tools Used:
Electric Knife
Rasp
Dremel
Materials:
Blue Foam

There are five pieces that I needed to add to the helmet to make it look like Mega Mans. The Widow's Peak, the two bumps/ridges on the top middle, and the two ear pieces. I had found these water work out things with this heavy duty blue foam on it. I used an electric knife to cut the general shapes (learned this trick from helping my wife with her projects).


I did the final shaping with a rasp, and for a little more intracite work I used a Dremel


Step 3: Lights
Tools Used:
Drill w/small drill bit
Wire Cutters
Soldering Iron
Hot Glue Gun
Materials:
Red LED's
Resistors
Battery Pack
Wire
Switch
Solder
Electrical Tape
Hot Glue Stick

I started feeling a bit frisky... I was looking at images of Mega Man... and thought... I need LED's to make this epic. So I did a little research and found some info on getting/using LED's. Read more there if you want to see more detailed steps. I went to Radioshack and got some Red LED's and some resistors, since I already had the rest of the supplies this wasn't that expensive.

After doing a couple of tests with the LED's to make sure I could get them to light, I started on my work.

First I marked where I wanted the lights to be in relationship to the ear pieces. Then I drilled two small holes for the LED's leads to fit through (attaching all of this to the frisbee so we can use the helmet in the future... this is getting less and less likely to happen).


I then proceeded to wire it all up. After a couple of tweaks and burns... Everything worked like a champ. It was a wiring mess, so I quickly neatened everything up and taped it down and hot glued it into place.




Step 4: Skinning the Helmet
Tools Used:
Needle
Sewing Machine
Scissors
Hot Glue Gun
Materials:
Black Electrical Tape
Velcro
Thread
Glue Sticks


I bet you have been wondering how I was going to turn this Red/White Cars/Frisbee bike helmet thing into the blue Mega Man helmet. Easy, skin it all with dark blue fabric. Again, while on all my trips to the Goodwill stores and the like, I had a very long list of supplies that I needed. At one of them I happen to find light blue and dark blue cotton sheet sets. The fabric was the right color, and they both were a stretchy type of material which was exactly what I needed. It would have been nice to find something a little more metallic in nature, but this was not a huge deal to me.

I added the widow's peak to the the helmet just with black electrical tape. I also added a couple of other blue pieces of foam to smooth out any hard corners that the fabric would bunch up in.

Next step I remove the nice padding inside the helmet that was attached by velcro (an important thing to note). I then roughly measured out what size the piece of fabric needed to be (basically a big oval). I'm sure someone with more experience would have done it differently, but I was winging it. I then started to sew some velcro pieces onto the dark blue fabric so I could attach it to the velcro that was already mounted in the helmet (how handy was that!).

I was hoping to be able to stretch the fabric smoothly over the whole helmet, but that would have required something like spandex. So I ended up putting a seam in the back. I did the seam by pulling one side tight across the helmet and marking a center line along with a cut line. After making that initial cut, I taped it down, then repeated on the other side. I took the fabric off the helmet and sewed the seam from the back. Then pulled it back over the helmet. I wrapped it tight around the frisbee part of the helmet the secured it via hot glue.

(Embarrassing Photo is full of WIN because of final product).

I really thought this wasn't going to be a huge deal. It turned out to be way more involved than I thought, eating up most of the time I spent on the helmet.


Step 5: Skinning the Foam
Tools Used:
Scissors
Hot Glue Gun
Materials:
Glue Sticks
Tupperware
Sand Paper

Down the home stretch... I then took some light blue fabric, and hot glued it to the foam. I tried to stretch the fabric as much as I could so to avoid any seems.


Then cut out the bottom of some tupperware containers for the ear pieces. I sanded them down to remove any words/logo's. The real reason to sand them down was to give it a frosty look making it disperse the LED light better. I then hot glued the plastic piece to the ear piece.

Back on the helmet I threaded around the led, so I could cut a hole in the fabric without worrying about it ripping apart.


Finally I hot glued these 4 pieces to the helmet, completing this stage of the build.

Pics:





I wish I would have remembered to take more pictures during the process, but you get the idea.


Up next... the Mega Buster