Cardboard Bender Helmet! | Building a Bender Costume Part 1
Hello, there! The Bender Project is officially underway and off to a spectacular start! Last week I assembled the basic structure of the helmet out of cardboard, as a way of getting my head around the shapes involved in making this costume work. There will be more to see this week, so make sure to check out the stream this Wednesday to see an update on that! Also, make sure to watch the video when that goes live on Monday. For now, though, let’s walk though the first stage of this process!
The first step was to roll out the cardboard so that I could have a nice, round cylinder as the foundation for the head. While I was rolling, I made sure to press very firmly into the table and rock the cardboard roll forward and back to really work the bend into it. It makes a spiral, with the middle having a much tighter curve compared to the outside edge. To combat this and try to keep an even cylinder, I put the middle of the spiral on the outside when I closed the cylinder. I held the tube around my head to get a proper size, and tried to include a little bit of wiggle room to account for different materials in the final build.
The resulting shape was fairly solid, but not perfectly round. The solution to that was to cut out a cardboard circle with the same radius as my tube and attach it on the inside to hold everything in the right shape. Eventually, that worked but not without cutting the disc a little too small and leaving me needing to shrink the cylinder to fit. I suppose I could also have cut a new disc, but who has the time? Long story short, at this point any wiggle room was gone, and the cardboard was up against my nose.
With the tube adjusted the disc fit perfectly and… the helmet wasn’t perfectly round. Unfortunately my method of using a string tied to a pen to draw my circle left me with imperfect results, but it was good enough to get by. I placed the disc about 2 inches from the top of the helmet, and taped it into place, leaving plenty of room below for my head. I cut out a space for the mouth, and it was beginning to look like that would be the best place for my eyes to line up so I could see.
The helmet felt much more comfortable with the mouth hole cut out, but there would still be a panel covering that opening. That panel would actually be inset, leaving me with even less room. It was becoming clear that I would definitely need to scale the helmet up slightly in order for this to work, but that’s a problem for another day. For the time being, this proof of concept was looking promising.
The visor was much easier than I was expecting. I used the edge of the tube to trace arcs into the edge of two strips of cardboard, and folded the rest around to meet up on the sides. Just a little bit of tape was all I needed and the silhouette was really starting to take shape, but we were still missing the signature chrome dome.
This was a much more challenging undertaking. The helmet had a few inches of opening at the top to support the dome piece, and since this build is purely practice and research, I decided things didn’t need to be perfect or pretty. The top part of the new shorter tube was cut into strips, and those strips were curled over to meet each other at the top of the head.
The first attempt to close up the top of the head left things a little bit short, but all I had to do was cut the strips down a little further, and everything closed up perfectly. I was happy with the shape, but the size was a little bit wrong. I ended up needing to shave two or three inches off of the top of the head, and push that support circle on the inside a little lower, and suddenly everything came into alignment. Fortunately, having less room inside the helmet wasn’t an issue given the fact that my head will be lower down anyway.
At this point, I was able to get an idea for how much extra height this costume will add. It doesn’t seem like it will be an issue, but I should really be smart about how I attach that antenna or I am going to be gluing that on all day long whenever I use this thing. As I write this, I’m thinking it may be a good idea to attach the antenna with a magnet, and have some sort of internal safety chain. That way it can get knocked off without being lost, and repair would be a snap. Literally.
Pictured above: Man happy about his recent robot murder. This picture really gives you an idea of how big the head is compared to me, and what size this bender costume is going to end up being at the end of the day. It’ll be a bit extreme, since he’s only around 6 foot or so in the show, but I think it’ll just make the cosplay look a little more dramatic and draw some extra attention. For that reason, I’ve been considering a gold finish, a reference to Futurama Season 4 Ep. 15, The Farnsworth Parabox.
Overall, we are looking at an almost complete success. The next step will be to build the shoulder plate, which I will be doing over on Twitch this Wednesday at 4 eastern. Thanks for reading. It’s been a blast, as always! I’ll see you in the next one.
