I came back to this after some time off from tinkering with it and started assembling things in earnest. The helmet got another coat of primer and some light sanding so I could see what the hell is actually going on. The biggest problem areas are around the cheeks and front grill, since I am nauseatingly OCD about trying to get this stuff right and am now noticing a bunch of ways in which my printed copy diverges from the screen-used one.
The grill on the screen-used one, I now realize, doesn’t have overlapping or overhanging segments, but there’s simply panel lines between the segments. That’s annoying, but truthfully it’s not something I’m going to bother fixing on the 3d printed copy because visually, it gets the job done.
The cheeks need a fair bit of cleanup and I ended up filling in some of the panel lines that divide the front of the mask from the sides. I will be etching those back in with power tools, but probably not on the 3d-printed copy.
In the short term, my goal right now is to get the helmet to a point where I can do a quick resin cast of the thing and continue cleanup work. I have been sanding this PLA filament so much that I don’t think I can reasonably get much more out of it, and I suspect any future changes I want to make to the thing will be easier when it is all 65D resin, rather than the printed material.
