Show All ItemsWhen I was growing up the vintage Lego Space sets were my favorite. This past year, The Lego Movie featured some of these old-school spacemen. I've always loved their iconic cylindrical helmets. I thought it would be cool to make a full-size, wearable version of the helmet worn by the Classic Lego Space minifigs. For the Lego nerds: The Classic Space Helmet has actually gone though a few modifications over the years. The character Benny from The Lego Moviehas a cracked chin strap because the original late 70s helmet design was notorious for breaking. They thickened the strap on subsequent designs. Mine is going to be the original design – sans crack.I took careful measurements of one of the helmets I have from my childhood Lego sets. The helmet is essentially 1:1 tall and wide. I scaled that up to a size that would look proportionally correct on my head.Step 1: SuppliesShow All ItemsPlastic Mixing bowl with 10" diameter12" Cardboard concrete foundation form – I had to cut and reduce the diameter to 10" for my mold.
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If you think about it, what a perfect world! They can do whatever they want with the blocks at their disposal, over and over again.There is something on the horizon that might catch your interest if you’re a hardcore Lego fanatic that constantly delves into the block world to build anything and everything. Designer and Lego pioneer, Jonathan Robson, came up with a really awesome way for children to get into their books through a life size Lego helmet. The helmet incorporates a USB memory slot where you can easily plug in a memory stick which holds the book they want to listen to.By putting that helmet on, you are sure to enjoy the audio books at your disposal. There are several comics out there, and with every issue of the Audiocomic book, you will receive a code which you can use to download the audio content for your memory stick. Then you just go ahead and start reading and immerse yourself in the world of Lego. It’s not only a way to read books or comics, it’s also a great way to learn how to read while understanding the connection between the text and the images in front of you.
It’s one of the coolest ideas this week if you ask me. But then again, I am an incurable Lego fanatic as you all know.While most LEGO fans are perfectly happy with providing an awesome LEGO-built world for their minifigures, some people decide to bring LEGO up to human scale, and create wearable costumes and accessories for a bit of magic. While this is a lesser-known area of the hobby, human size LEGO costumes are quite popular at conventions. Life-size cars, houses, spaceships, furniture, movie characters, giant dragons, and replicas of pretty much any real-life object can be recreated in LEGO, and they have been done so already. As long as the project is mostly static, rigid, and has a substantial bulk that can support itself, you just need enough LEGO bricks and a bit of engineering skill to build them. Wearable LEGO costumes however come with an extra set of challenges; they need to remain thin enough and flexible enough to use as a costume. There are a number of clever locking techniques to make a LEGO creation more stable, but they are designed to be used in smaller creations.
On a larger scale, they would add too much bulk. And the more bulk you add, the more you increase weight, and reduce flexibility. Most people get around this by just building the most identifying features of a costume out of LEGO, and then attaching them to a flexible material. So for example a belt, chest-plate, or shoulder-armor would be built out of LEGO, which is then attached with Velcro strips to a regular piece or clothing. This keeps the character identifiable, and the costume not too fragile or clumsy. As an example, take a look at the Boba Fett costume below by SIMAFOL. There are some new pieces however that were first introduced in the LEGO Mixels line, that makes LEGO costume building a lot easier, and even opens up new possibilities. I’m talking about these small ball-joint pieces that already revolutionized LEGO mech building. And this is why I wanted to show you the Halo ODST helmet created by LEGO fan Nick Brick. Take a look at the skeleton of the helmet below; it is entirely supported and shaped by those small ball-joints without adding much bulk.
While you may not be into Halo, this same structure could be used for any headwear or body-wear, so it is quite a significant discovery. Once the skeleton of the helmet is put together, you can dress it up any way you like by using plates, tiles, and wedge pieces, and even add lights and other features as Nick Brick has done. No glue or other non-LEGO materials have been used to keep the helmet together. It weighs four pounds, and took ten days to build. Below I have also included a video-demonstration for you of the helmet. Pretty awesome, isn’t it? If you have any LEGO Mixels characters lying around, you might be inspired to start building your own helmet right away! Again, it doesn’t have to be a Halo helmet (although it is definitely very cool), it can be any type of headgear, or other piece of body-wear that needs flexibility. So start dreaming and creating! I expect that we will see a lot more LEGO costumes as people discover the usefulness of those small ball-joints!