FACIAL ARMOR

The SPARTAN was handed off to me as concept-level surfacing on a virtual helmet and headform. I was tasked with turning this concept into a production ready design and making a handful of useable prototypes that performed as a production unit would.

I developed a simple production process to create the armor inserts, and designed the carrier to completely mask the armor edges, which saves multiple finishing steps that are normally required.

The carrier was designed for injection molding, so a flattened form was designed to minimize tooling cost. All drafting was taken into consideration and the model was flexed post draft to confirm that it maintained functionality on the helmet.

For prototyping, multiple urethanes were tested before settling on a product normally used in the mining industry. It was able to accept pigmentation, and after post curing, was highly UV resistant and extremely tough. It is not able to be torn by hand and is a very convincing substitute to the injection molded TPR that we planned for production use.