This was my child of labor during my Welded Metal sculpture class last semester (which was tons of fun- taking it again next year)

This is a half-scale helmet based around the Elite foot-soldier model in Halo 2, Thanks to Dojorkan (frequent HBO'er) for some modded screenshots of the helmet on its own that I based my design around. I went down to the wire with this project- literally buffing the surface 30 minutes before my final critique started, and making my final project [link] (kinetic sculture) in the last 15 minutes.

It was meant as a present for Tactic6557 [link] , one of my dearest friends in the PraetoriaGuard and a hardcore Elite fan to boot. The photos where taken by him today, he just got it in the mail yesterday. Houston, we have a happy customer.

All the 8 of the full sized photos available for download here:

[link]


The process:

I started out by hammering a sheet of 16 gauge steel into a half-pipe, then I cut many sections out about 8 inches long, 1 inch thick in the center and pointed on each end. I bent them into the curve of the front of the helmet and started welding them onto each other, making an (extremely rough) jagged curve on the front. there where thousands of holes I continually had to plug by weleding and continued to be MADE by holding the torch too long in the same place, that and the dish-like inside curve acted like a solar oven on the torch itself, I had to put the torch down because it was too hot to hold with massive leather welding gloves! (this is an extreme case- normally acetylene torches are cooled automatically by the expanding gasses flowing through it)

Welding and hammering of the front wound down to the very end of it's fabrication- I took breaks from working on it to cut out the "wings" on the side and the downward-thrursting plates. for the back spike I just cut the excess off the half-pipe. Yes, the second spike is missing because I ran out of time, thankfully Tactic doesn't care The etching on the side was done with a hand-held air powered cutting wheel (oversized dremel) and I used that as a weak point to raise out the sides slightly like it is in the original.

Well if I got you this far- you must have been pretty interested! Drop a comment or fav if you really liked it. I hope to get more fanart like this and [link] after Halo 3 comes out and I have free time again