Federation Trooper - Louise and Simon's Blakes 7 Fan Site

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How to Make a Federation Trooper Action Figure	Back to page 1
Model and Instructions by Paul K. (Thanks Paul, it's brilliant!!)	Fwd to page 3

HELMET

Take a hollow, thin walled plastic sphere of 40mm in diameter and cut it exactly in half.
I used a large clear gobstopper packet, but a ping pong ball would do.
The edge where you cut it will be ragged and weak, so take a strip of .5mm plasticard, 10mm wide and 100mm long (Length not required to be specific, you can overlap and trim any excess!)
Glue it around the circumference of your helmet with a 5mm clearance hanging below the rim of the semi-sphere. (See FIG 1.) This will strengthen the finished helmet a lot.

The face plate is a simplified version of the 'real' helmet, the convoluted moulding of which is a bit too hard to reproduce at this scale.
Some dextrous cutting is required to chop the piece of 1mm plasticard into the pattern seen
in FIG 2.

Once cut, sand all the edges smooth and gently use your own body heat to tease the piece into a gentle curve.
To give a better match to the TV prop, I cut an extra piece (See FIG 2a) out of the .5mm card. This is identical to the lower half of the face plate, but with an overhand of around 3mm.
Once glued to the back of the face plate, an extra three-dimensional look in acheived
Now take this assembly and glue it to the inside of the reinforcing strip attached to the helmet until the shaded area in FIG 2 is concealed.
The visor trim is 1.5mm platic coated electrical wire, and the 'respirator' section, a 13mm curved disc, is a screw cover from a DIY kitchen unit!!
With these elements in place, the whole thing can be sprayed matt black and left overnight.

VISOR

The visor is a piece of blank photographic negative, doubled over to make it darker, and attached to the inside of the face plate with double sided tape. DO NOT USE superglue for this, as it fogs clear plastics!! The visor divider is a small 3 x 10mm piece of the 1mm plasticard, again stuck on with double sided tape

GREEN TRIM

Now the hard part!!

The green feature that circles the helmet is actually two strips, one inside the other.
I used a Canada Dry Ginger Ale bottle, as it already has a curve moulded into it!
Two strips, 15mm wide and 170mm long (Again, the length is approximate; overlap and trim the excess.) This green plastic must be backed with some non-yellowing 'invisible' cellotape to give it a translucant look.

The first strip is glued directly to the helmet reiforcing strip. Then four roughly cut 'spacers' can be added (See FIG 3) at the compass points, and the second strip added.
A cross section of the helmet is provided in FIG 4, to try and illustrate the various layers of the finished product.