Welcome to the first installment of Gregor's Do it Yourself! In this first post, I'm going to teach you how to make a (budget version) of the famous Destructoid helmet, featured above. While
the real thing will cost you upwards of $150 (and requires you cut your hands repeatedly) whereas this project will cost you $30 or less, as most of the materials can be found around the house. Full list of instructions after the jump!
List of materials needed:
- Cardboard box
- Scissors
- Tin foil
- Two 2-liter pop bottles
- X-Acto knife
- Red sharpie or marker
- Styrofoam, or something to use as a spacer
- Bicycle helmet or hat
- Scotch Tape
- Glue or preferably a hot glue gun
The first thing that you'll want to do is get your helmet or hat and your cardboard box. Make sure that your helmet or hat fits inside the box and if there's extra space that's fine because we have Styrofoam to use as spacers. Take out your scissors and cut the flaps off the cardboard box. Make sure to save the flaps, you're going to need them.
Next, take out your box of tin foil, and wrap it all around the cardboard box. Be sure to finish wrapping it on the back, so the front and sides look as uniform as possible. Tape it up with scotch tape on the back, or if you want to make it seem a bit cleaner, you can use your hot glue gun.
This step is going to be one of the longer ones. What you're going to be doing now is making the grill that you see through. Take a sharpie or a pencil and on the inside of the cardboard box, make an outline of where you want the grill to be and how big you want each opening to be. Take your x-acto knife and cut out the cardboard along with the foil in front of it. If the foil gets too thin on the front and is close to breaking, you can you some scotch tape to reinforce it. Make sure to make the grill fairly large as you're going to want a large field of vision.
Take the two 2-liter pop bottles you found and using your scissors, cut out the bottoms. Take your red sharpie and color the two bottoms red. These are going to be the eyes. Put the eyes where you want them on the box and put hot glue around them to secure them in place.
You're almost done. Take the flaps you cut out in the beginning of the instructions and cut them into same sized pieces, they're going to be for the ears. Use the glue you have to glue these pieces onto the sides of your helmet and then cover them in tin foil as well. Secure the tin foil with either tape or glue.
Take some of the left over flaps that you didn't use for the ears and cut them out into a sort of T shape with sides that reach out to both sides of the box. This is going to be the sort of rivet you see in the other pictures of the Destructoid head. Cover the T with tin foil and use your black sharpie to create the rivets in the T. Glue the T in between the two eyes.
This is another longer step. Take the bicycle helmet and put it on, then put the box on your head so that you can see through the grill. Then put your hand in the box and feel where the box meets the helmet. Take off the box and put hot glue where the box met the helmet, then put the box back on. This time, take off both the box and the helmet. While the glue is drying, take your x-acto knife and cut up Styrofoam so that it fits on the sides of the helmet. You want to helmet to be snug inside of the box, but not so much that the box bends. When you find a good position, apply glue to both the Styrofoam and the side of the helmet. Do this to both sides of the helmet.
Your Destructoid helmet is now complete! Curious as to how to make the aluminum one? Niero will provide full details in the near future. Until then, if you make a DIY Destructoid helmet be sure to
send us your pics and we'll put you on the Friday update. Enjoy!
Contest:
5:55 PM on 10.14.2006
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