I UPGRADED Iron Man's Helmet (100% Carbon Fiber!!)

I have a bone to pick with Iron Man and  I know, I know unpopular opinion, but I got to say none of it makes any sense! Have you ever seen  anything made of iron actually fly? Well yeah, in World War II they... Shush! You're supposed to be helping  me justify this project. Look, the density of iron is 7.9 G per cm cubed titanium his second  suit 4.5 G per cm cubed it's 2023 we have all kinds of amazing cool fun materials like  carbon fiber which I might be biased towards cuz I like flying it but

anyway carbon fiber  is 1.75 G per cm cubed there's a reason that Aerospace people mostly use carbon fiber see I'm  just out here trying to make sure that Mr Stark has the best flying experience possible from  one pilot engineer to another. Your airplane is 78 years old and made of fabric... And aluminum and she hasn't bucked me out of the sky yet! and before you give me crap about the need for  bulletproofness, let me remind you that I have sort of, kind of a little bit already proven on  this

channel that carbon fiber can probably be made bulletproof when mixed with Kevlar so  anyway when I reached into the metaphorical digital hat and drew the name: James Bruton, I  figured it was finally a great opportunity to give YouTube's OG Iron Man himself the upgrade  he deserves. And if you don't know who our pal Jimmy B is, first of all, you're missing out but he is  an amazing robotics engineer and he builds all kinds of cool little robots and electro-mechanical  whimsical projects and he

's also a really great salsa dancer and the life of every party but I  couldn't figure out how to work that into a gift and his video will be right after mine in this  lovely little Secret Santa playlist you're in and so you can just click it when you're done  watching this video and then you can click the video where he made someone else something  and it would go in this lovely loop of 10 amazing channels that you should uh check out and  then eventually I'll see you back here So let's start!

Ahhhhh! It's that time of year again and once  again I am over booked, running behind, and really, really stressed out. Okay so I've wanted  to try making something out of forged carbon for a really long time and the thing is I don't  really want to try it for the first time on like a very structural thing and so this project  seemed like a perfect like application for it the problem is that 3D printing molds is really  really difficult especially when um you've been avoiding 3D printing like th

e plague for  years because you worked at a maker space when it was still the first MakerBot era and so  like 90% of your time was just debugging the God dang things turns out printers have come  a long long way since then but it still takes forever. I allotted 3 days for 3d printing all  the molds and it took me like 2 and 1/2 weeks now the CAD for these was kind of a disaster  so there was a bit of post-processing to do in the real world to get my 3D printed molds  to fit together but it was a

lot easier in faster than trying to fix those pretty borked  CAD models or reprint since each of those was like a full day or multi-day print and it turns  out I have learned it's really hard to play with meshes that were made in like blender or Maya or  something in a more like in a parametric or more engineering focused CAD software so I just used  a Dremel. And that's why you are safety glasses, kids. Once the molds fit together and were lightly  sanded and by the way I gave up on sanding af

ter this mold because I realized it's a lot easier to  just sand the carbon piece after, I gave them many many generous coats of Man206 mold release I  think like six coats per mold and then it was time to play with carbon! Look how pretty this  stuff is once everything was ready I mixed up my Botal Toat epoxy and like always I'm using the  High Performance 2-to-1 from Total Boat which is my absolute go-to for anything composites, like if it  didn't fail me at Mach 2.3, it's not going to fail me

flying DHL to James's house. To start, I painted  a generous coat of epoxy on the inside of the mold and then sprinkled my chopped carbon fibers in  there and then I added more epoxy sprinkled more carbon and used my paint brush to almost like  stipple them in place and I did figure out as I did more and more of these pieces like the more  vertical your paint brush the easier it is and don't be fooled by the editing this takes a while  and a good bit of patience it's pretty hard to get them nea

tly in there without like peeling up  from the mold and making a mess. Close this thing up All right so teeny tiny girl life hack as much  as I climb I never have the grip strength that I need so I take my clamp and I put it on my other  clamp and then I clamped my clamp with my clamp and this gets around the fact that I can't like...  if I tried to... if I tried to, see I can't do it but... and you can see it's working! And while that's curing, a quick word from our sponsor a huge thank you to

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elow and  use code xyla50 to get 50% off your first Factor box. So this stuff is peel play you've seen me use  this a lot it uh releases from epoxy so you can like do a layup put this over and then just peel  this off once the epoxy is cured. So here's the thing, I don't actually remember how to vacuum  bag... it's been a long time. I have all the stuff set up from when I did transparent wood, like way  back in the day, in that... when I was still in my one-car-garage, I don't know how many of y

ou guys  were here for that and while I could go look it up that would be the correct thing to do in this  situation I think I'm just going to wing it... it can't be that hard right? For these side pieces since  they're relatively flat I decided to try vacuum bagging them and my mistake here was not painting  a generous enough coat of epoxy on the mold first um but I got a lot better at that like at the more  pieces I made. So now that this is pretty good in there I'm actually going to throw jus

t like a  little sheet of carbon fiber over this to sort of neaten it up and hopefully make post-processing  this part a little bit easier. In hindsight, this sheet was not helpful and just made it thicker and  heavier than necessary alas! Live and learn. I put down my peel apply and then breather fabric and  then realized I probably should have prepped the vacuum bag film with the butyl tape ahead of time but  at least I remembered to put the darts in. Overall, I got pretty close to a good vacu

um bag but I  think there was a leak somewhere in the system because it couldn't hold like the fully strong vacuum  um without me pressing down, so overall I kind of only just got like -13 inches of mercury, so I'll keep  working on this setup. Good morning! It's tomorrow... it's the next day, I guess, it's today for me, but  it's the next day for you. Let's find out how this did! This is going to be really hard to demold... You know things are getting serious when Charis puts the camera on a tr

ipod so she can help me wrestle my 3D printed parts AAHHHH! Hey look at that! Alright, it sure as heck  ain't perfect but that's really cool this is just a solid carbon part and with a  little bit of post-processing I think it'll work Time to demold the big one  that's going to be way harder!! I'm so nervous I don't have time to print  these again and try again like it has to work. For the record, these are Harbor Freight  chisels so I don't feel bad about it at all. Tools are meant to be used,

kids! Overall I got  to say my hot take from this experience is that archaeologists would have probably had like a way  easier job if ancient civilizations had been kind enough to cover all of their artifacts in Man 206 mold release because although this little archaeological dig was kind of miserable once  it popped the mold release really did its job and it was ...it just like popped out really cleanly  and this interior was just so difficult because of those eye sockets and the surgery I did 

on the mold to like make them fit together Ruh roh! That's not good That's not good. There's  an exceptionally thin chance that this only crushed this side of the mold. So what happened  here is perhaps my clamping of the clamps with the clamp accidentally clamped the clamps a little  too much and it crushed the mold a bit so the pattern of the infill of the 3D print actually  became like imprinted into the final part. But, the good news is it can be sanded off with lots of  itchiness but it's

workable. It's starting to go! It is! OOOOH! Alright, ready? I can work with this! [Sigh of relief] I'm really jazzed that it is salvageable  because I basically only had one shot to do that so with some sanding and maybe like a quick  flood coat of epoxy it's going to work. Let's talk about the gloves for a second: wearing gloves with  tools like this is actually a terrible idea a lot of people yell at me if not wearing gloves  the only reason I'm doing it is because I'm working with carbon but

I'm going to be really really  conscious of the fact that if my gloves made contact with the blade I'm losing a finger. Don't  wear gloves unless you're working with something worse. Once I had the mask smooth and  looking a little bit less like Iron Man is having an acne problem uh there were a few air bubbles  and gaps and voids in the surface of the carbon and I'm not sure if that's avoidable if you don't  vacuum Infuse it but if anyone has suggestions like please let me know in the comments

below cuz  I'm super curious um but I solved this by just painting a thin flood coat of epoxy over that  and that will get into those bubbles and fill them so it's a nice smooth finish and it seals the  carbon nicely and really makes it pop so overall I think it's a win-win and then once that's cured I  could go in and like really give it that beautiful finished sanding make sure the shapes are exactly  how I want them um and I went up to 400 grit and then after a good wipe down with isopropyl

it was  time to start layering coats of spray-on clear coat and that's how I'm going to get my final gloss  and look how pretty it is it's just so shiny another day another sheet of sandpaper now I do  want to point out that the side panels were the only ones in this project I didn't do a flood coat  of epoxy on and I regret it a lot I think that the air pockets and the voids like that puckering  is really distracting um and I wish I could just go back and like fill it in but by the time  I deci

ded I needed to do that I had ran out of time. For the top helmet portion I actually skipped  the vacuum bag all together and wanted to see if I could pull off basically a standard wet layup  but with forged carbon and not cloth and the answer was yes I actually think it came out a  little better than the vacuum backed parts. The key was that the first coat of resin needed to be  super super thick and you have to do a really good job of like stippling the fibers on I think it  behaves a little b

etter if the brush is is hitting the fibers vertically um the other thing I found  really helpful is you paint on the thick coat of epoxy and then let the fibers sit on top for a  little bit and soak in on their own before you go in with a brush and it kind of behave --once  you're going at it with the brush --it behaves a little bit like felting like once the fibers  start matting together it holds its shape really well okay that's workable that's about  kind of what I was expecting. But you ca

n see here how much it really still needs  that flood coat to fill all the little voids. Oh my god! Wow! I was not expecting that! Maybe  we're getting better at this. For this chin piece, I... it's so deep and I was really dreading  the demolding process because also the CAD for the file was terrible um but somehow it just  popped out. I imagine that this use is exactly what Wiha had in mind when they designed  like the best screwdrivers known to human kind. The surface finish looks great I thi

nk I've  figured out how to do forged carbon fiber the right way now So that's cool Again with the rushed CAD  disasters on the mold situation and I did start reprinting this one since it was like so far off  of canon, but I realized that I could just sculpt it in post and cut off all that extra carbon  uh and not have to remold the whole thing so I just carefully crafted the chin by hand with the  Dremel and I think it looks pretty good and the last piece this is the back of the helmet  and I r

eally needed to ship this thing out ASAP so I light it up with medium hardener and then I  put it out in the sun to bake and kick that epoxy faster and I was able to demold it in like 2 hours  but I don't recommend that... that uh advanced epoxy usage usage woo oh hell yeah I'm getting good at  this and then it got its epoxy flood coat a quick sanding and is the clear  coat last piece is getting clear [Music] coat it's starting to lose the magic  like spraying clear cut onto forage carbon is so

pretty and now I'm just  like got to get it done all right so I got this weird like metallic anodizing  spray paint at the auto store I'm I want to see if it can still show the carbon fiber  through it I'm letting my intrusive thoughts [Music] win yes and now it's just time to  turn this thing Iron Man [Music] colors all right so we just accosted the  Amazon truck to get our yellow spray paint um but it looks a little green I wasn't super  sold on the yellow and I considered doing more of like a

mark five paint job and leaving  the mask black but in the end I am really really glad I went for it the yellow looked  way better once it dried and then it had a clear coat over it and like in the sun it  really looked like carbon Iron [Music] Man all right now I know what you're thinking and  it is maybe did this girl just spend that much time custom making a 100% forged carbon fiber  Iron Man helmet just to hot glue it together and the answer is yes because she spent  too long making the hel

met and ran out of [Music] time yo it's so good I'm really glad we painted  the yellow the hot glue held up really well and it felt really strong but the more thought  I put into it and since it has to ship via cargo plane it'll get really really cold and  the hot glue might break so early morning the day I needed to ship this out I trundled out  to the workshop and actually just fiberglassed the seams and as a quick Finishing Touch I  just 3D printed this display stand and oo look at her shine

I am so obsessed with the  way forged carbon looks especially in the sunlight like it glints so beautifully and  I think that the this weird like anodizing spray paint tied the look together so  well I'm just I'm so excited about how this turned out and I hope that James likes  it I can't wait to watch this video and find out feel like this is the hardest part of  maker Secrets San every year is figuring out how to ship whatever the heck you built  without it breaking in the mail and this is the

first year I've done it actually  that I have to ship internationally so the saddest part of all of this is I  had to redo it into a new box at the DHL store so it could get inspected for customs  I put packing peanuts all over the DHL store too with that shipped it is time for me to  sit back relax and do you hear that what is that sound wait is that Santa's sleigh whoa  that was cool oh my gosh it's my gift from Santa and it looks like my Santa this year  was Becky Stern which is actually rea

lly funny because I just filmed a collab with  Becky at her house while the secret santa builds were happening and the lengths she  went to hide it from me are like comical I should not cut so deep cuz Becky does really  cool work and it would be very sad if I slice it oh instruction video that well kind of want  to open the present I don't read the instructions let's be real I want to know what it is sorry  Becky here the original Kit Kat clock oh and it has a wire coming out of it I should pro

bably  watch the instruction video I come back bearing both my laptop and tea because my laptop was dead  so I had to charge it for a couple minutes I look at my cute mug shop atx.com okay so we have our  Kit Kat clock this better not be making fun of the fact that when I stayed at her house she  had to vacuum everything cuz I'm allergic to cats Becky if this installs malware on  my computer I'm going to be so mad at you okay Z here are your instructions sorry  it isn't as straightforward if jus

t plug it in so then you press the reset button  wait that's such a cool idea open here 100 greatest gifts top 100 gifts of the  last 100 years starting strong this is so cute we got to make sure our batteries  are seated and then I plug it [Music] in this is so fun give him his bow tie  voila and I'm pretty sure it watches you oh [Music] yeah see the little camera in the [Music] Sno it's so cute and so creepy  Becky why would you make it watch me did you see that what are you looking  at litera

lly what are you looking at that's so cute thank you so much  Becky I love it I'm going to put in my office