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Original
So there it is. Hasbro voice changer. Not so impressive looking, with the big, goofy visor. But think about it. That's not kid sized. That's clearly made to fit adults.
I first saw these at the Toys R Us Clone Wars midnight toy release event. I thought they had potential, so I decided to dig in a bit.
Visor Template
The first thing I did was to draw up a template for a new visor. I used thin plastic No Parking signs, glued right to the face of the visor. Immediately it is transformed:
Not bad! I didn't make a template unfortunately, but one can be found over at [Clone Empire].
White
Putting a coat of white paint on it really brings it together:
Bondo
Now comes the harder part: closing up all the seams! Before I began that part of the project, I took the whole thing apart and removed the lining and electronics. No need to trap them all inside, and the get in the way. Once I got it all back together, I coated all of the seams with hot glue to help keep things from shifting. The hot glue was followed by a coating of spray foam to really solidify it. Be careful! The foam can expand a lot and blow out the helmet! Go slow, letting one coat fully cure before you add more!
I then applied Bondo to every seam, dip and crack that I didn't want, including filling in where the buttons on the side used to be.
After a few rounds of filler / primer / sanding, it was looking good. One thing to be aware of: the Hasbro plastic does NOT sand well. The surface tears up and is hard to smooth back out. Be careful!
Underside
You'll notice in that picture above that I've also build up the underside of the helmet. The Hasbro doesn't have much of an undercut, which leaves a lot of face exposed. I tightened up the neck opening quite a bit using scrap plastic sheets and bondo:
It could be a LOT tighter, but I felt that I'd rather sacrifice a bit of accuracy to allow people to put it on without having to cut sections of the helmet out (usually called a "face off" or "back off" mod on the Clone boards).
Cast Copy
I'll skip the molding, since that will be covered elsewhere. The end result was this:
Making it Rex
To finish this up Rex style, I modified the cast quite a bit. I filled in a couple of the vent holes, since the toons only have 4. Ear details were added using washers, super glue and Bondo. I sanded off the raised brow trim, and cut out the mouth detail entirely. The frown was removed, since the animated clones have a visor that extends all the way down.
The rangefinder topper here is a Boba Fett on that I modified to look more Rex-like. More on the topper later!
