This is a bit of a random one as its not bike related, but as it is BMX related I thought I would post it up in here.
Long story short I recently got my hands on a set of team issue Hyper Racing kit from 1994. I was a big fan of Eric Carter back in the day, and as I have a Hyper Metro from the same year, I was really excited to get my hands on the matching kit. With the bke and the kit the only missing piece of the puzzle was the custom painted helmet that Eric and the rest of the team used to race in. I always loved the custom paint jobs the pro's of the 90's had on their Ecko helmets, so decided to try my hand at creating a helmet to match the kit.
NB: This was just done with spray cans, and all materials used were purchased from my local Halfords so its a pretty easy thing for anyone to do.
The man himself wearing the kit and one of the custom helmets. Taking inspiration for the helmet he used, as well as the pattern on the race jersey I decided to give it a go.
I started out with this Ecko helmet that I bought from the USA (Dont panic it wasnt a real Hutch lid!)
After stripping it back the helmet was in OK shape. There was paint peel that had been covered up by the Hutch stickers, and I also needed to remove all of the visor studs as I was going to use a Troy Lee Intrepid peak like Eric Carter did.
I drilled out all of the visor studs I didnt need, and filled them with car body filler. I then sprayed the helmet down with white primer, before sanding the whole thing back. I had to do this about 5 or 6 times before the whole thing was smooth and ready to paint.
After that I took a pencil and drew the design onto the helmet. I took inspiration from the swirling lines on the race jersey, and tried to replicate that onto the helmet. Once all the lines were drawn, I used masking tape to cover the areas I didnt want the first colours to go on to.
Finally I was able to put down the first few coats of colour (it had taken ages to get to this stage). The jersey had a black fade to white, so that is what I did on the helmet. After finishing the fade I sprayed metal flake over the whole thing.
I then peeled back the masked areas which started to give me my first look at the design. Once the paint had dried I had to revers mask the entire helmet again so that I could paint the colours onto the white areas.
The jersey had a fade from pink to yellow, so I used off the shelf luminous yellow and pink rattle cant to try replicate the same thing. I also tried to keep the one side of the helmet different from the other, so had to paint one side at a time, once again masking the side I didnt want to get overspray on.
Once the colours had dried I could pull off all the masking and paint the purple line work. This was by far the hardest part, and getting clean lines was almost impossible. There were points during the line work that I almost packed it in because I was really struggling to get clean lines, but I got there in the end. In the pic above you can see how rough the incomplete lines are. it took ages to smooth them all out.
After all the lines were finished I did about 6 or 7 coats of clear enamel. All the different layers of colour, as well as the metal flake had made the surface very rough so it needed a lot of coats to smooth it all out and bring up a glossy shine.
After that all that was left to do was reassemble the helmet and apply the decals that the legend Del has done for me.
Now that its done I really enjoyed the whole process, and would definitely like to do a few more to go with other builds of mine. Its quite expensive to do when you count the cost of all the materials, but its very rewarding when you see it finished.
Below is a pic of the finished helmet with the team kit and the team issue GPR number plate. I also added a few other angles of the helmet for you all to see.
