Having never painted an ice hockey mask before, when the opportunity arose we decided to have a bit of fun and see what we could produce, the helmet itself is made from fiberglass and is perfect for painting but boy has it seen better days……
Step One…
OK lets strip everything off this and work out what we can and cannot paint. As always with a restoration project take extra care with all screws and fittings, if they are not a universal part then you don’t want to have to hunt for a replacement, on this helmet due to the corrosion from the ice we had to drill one screw out of the face-guard, we have a replacement item.
So we have drawn a diagram as to how the helmet fits back together and have stored all of the parts in a sealed bag with the exception of badly corroded screws and fittings. They will be spending some time submerged in coca cola good for stripping rust.
Step 2.
OK so we have two paint-able parts the helmet itself and the back panel, the face grill can also be painted but judging from the abuse this one has had we decided to send it off to the chrome shop while we prepared the ice hockey helmet for paint.
Whilst the paint-able parts are in the paint-shop being prepared and filled the face guard arrives back from the chrome shop looking good. The hockey mask will be prepared using normal preparation techniques, we will do a how to? section on preping and filling in the near future.
Once preped the boys in the paint shop blast the helmet with a 2 pack white top coat. It arrives back at the studio looking “brand new”. So what do we do next? good question! The client has given us a clear brief so that we can demo our work, at the moment our fall back idea is a tiger design with some chains text and green neon paint, lets see how that develops.
