Boba Fett’s helmet. A holy grail for so many prop enthusiasts. The crusade to capture the original screen-used piece from The Empire Strikes Back, or even one from Fett’s final appearance in The Return of the Jedi, will endure for years to come.

But until we raid and loot George Lucas’ fortress at Skywalker Ranch, we’ll have to be satisfied with the next best thing: as faithful a replica of Fett’s helmet as possible from the moments before his death in Jedi. With this piece, we’re recapturing one of film’s historic characters – and also paying our last respects!

Take a look at our gallery here.

First, a brief history of the Fett helmet.
In preparation for The Empire Strikes Back, each of the original Boba Fett helmets were repainted from their initial concept as “supertroopers” into the visage of the new bounty hunter character. The character earned a second appearance in 1983 when Return of the Jedi premiered, albeit using a different helmet from the original batch of six. While each helmet was made from the same cast, each version acquired individual details in both construction and finishing.

The Jedi helmet was among those originally painted a gloss-white color. The helmet was later repainted, giving us the iconic color-scheme seen on screen and in exhibits today. Its unique characteristics include a white interior and a nearly impossible to reproduce gray-green main color. The exact painting techniques used on the original helmet are unknown. But as a former Floquil/Polly-S VP and master modeler once put it, the original artist must have been talented. No single color was isolated, a technique common to many Fett props.

For replica builders who want to inspect the original, remember that the helmet now on exhibit (the Jedi helmet and the target of this replication) is over thirty years old – with an aging paint job to boot. Its only screen appearance was twenty-six years ago.

And this helmet has been through hell. It has endured a life of promotional appearances, rough handling, and shifting storage conditions where it accumulated many actual scratches and dents that tend to blend into the scenery of the original artwork. Now, the gelcoat and paint are cracking in places. The dust has settled. The paint has aged. Previously painted areas are unmasked or chipped, and new marks of various colors scar the finish. Paint on the metal pieces has shed greatly over time. In short, it is a remnant of its former self.

A replica maker faced with this history has a decision to make: Recreate the prop as it is best known to observers today or attempt to produce a replica of the original as it was seen on screen decades ago.

The Sources
To recapture the magic of the movie-going experience, I decided to replicate the Jedi helmet as seen on screen, rather than make a duplicate of its tattered present-day form. As source material, I used a unique image set by photographer David Heilman (circa 1980), which captured a moment in time for this piece unlike any other. It became our primary reference in order to ferret out the twenty-six years of extraneous scratches. The result is a much cleaner helmet, with less damage and random confusion. Only on the ear sides did I depart from Heilman’s images. Those areas would be slightly more worn to match the screen appearance.

Other sources included an original buck owned by Motion Picture Prop Company CEO Lee Malone.

The Build
The first challenge was to recreate the accessories, such as the ear pieces and Rangefinder. Using the original buck, the ears were visualized in AutoCAD and machined in aluminum. Along the way, out-dated techniques re-emerged by way of our machinist, since computer-driven machining didn’t rule the day in 1970s when the original pieces were made. Later, I had the right side inner ear cap re-machined to gain accuracy and accommodate the correct micro switch (Rangefinder’s LED activation). The mounting points are also unique in the Jedi helmet.  Cheesehead screws, fasteners unique to the UK, secure the ears to the helmet.

For the Rangefinder’s clear block, Perspex by Lucite was sourced from from the UK, rather than an American-grade acrylic. I created the clear viewfinder by hand from 25mm Perspex sheet and drilled three uneven lines to match the Jedi version. The Perspex was dulled with a fine sanding using the original grain angle, and I applied the remnants of adhesive that once affixed a Polaroid camera eye piece on the original. Other helmets retained the eye piece, but it was absent from the Jedi version long before shooting began.

The Rangefinder body was scratch-built around the Perspex piece using previously obtained dimensions and cross-checked against Master Replica’s 3D scan results. Both were essentially identical. The Rangefinder stalk was a machined-aluminum part with a hole drilled through its length in order to route wires to the vintage LEDs in the Rangefinder top. The stalk’s front edge has a horizontal gouge near its base, visible inside the ear cap and also unique to the Jedi helmet.

The Rangefinder body was secured to the stalk with two brass screws. This demanded precise placement and accuracy in both the Rangefinder construction and the stalk’s dimensions so as to allow a tip of the back “T” corner to protrude by 0.5mm while the leading corner barely met the front face of the Rangefinder body. This became one of the riskier moments of construction — risky because I only had one stalk to work with and the holes would be permanent!

The front hole needed to be offset right, and a few millimeters from the front edge. To get an accurate hole I would have preferred to make my approach from the underside. Unfortunately, the size of the drill interfered with the stalk itself, and the only clear path was to drill from above. I had to act with the hope that both holes would pop out correctly underneath. In fact, I couldn’t even convince a machinist to accept the responsibility of getting holes that accurate in an existing piece.

Nights and Weekends
This helmet was previously cast using Malone’s buck. Interestingly, the helmet is not perfectly symmetrical, lending to its hand-sculpted master as in most original Star Wars prop helmets. It sits with a slight list; the mandibles show the lean common to all versions and other unique asymmetries were nicely reproduced from the buck.

On this base, I set out to recreate the physical scratches on the surface of the helmet. Working on nights and weekends, measuring and scaling took the better part of a month. Another three weeks followed, drawing every physical scratch on the surface with a set of calipers. Another month on top of that was spent etching and carving out the damage in the gel coat surface. Getting these carvings right was critical because so much of the paintwork goes in and out of the physical damage, with the paint and physical damage depending on each other to match the original subject. I essentially mapped out the same “damaged” areas twice: once for physical scratching and once for masking and painting.

Later, I cut out the visor area, painted the interior white, and finished the outside surface. First, I painted the forehead arrows. Then, I masked the ear platforms (a departure from the original technique since the Jedi helmet was painted with the ears installed) and airbrushed the entire helmet in a bright silver color allowing some silver overspray into the arrows. This left the ear platforms with their white gel coat.

Then I tackled the hardware. I fabricated chin strap mounting brackets and metal tabs to keep the visor’s “chin” in place. I again used cheesehead screws to match the original. The visor was also cut and formed from a smoked Perspex of suitable thickness and test fitted.

Painting the Helmet
Knowing that each original helmet was from the same mold, I was comfortable in choosing to paint this helmet in any scheme. That’s because any post-casting differences between versions would be so minimal that we would never be able to identify or measure them to justify a change.

Like the original, this replica was painted using mostly vintage Floquil brand paints out of the bottle. Some of the colors used are long out- of-production, and finding them was a separate adventure.

I incorporated several errors seen on the original prop, such as the trim color overspray, a dark red that appears around the right cheek greeblie and also forms a faint line across the forehead, temples, and under the kill stripes. Many of these details are difficult to photograph on purpose and don’t always appear plainly in images of the helmet. In other places on the original, paint had leaked through the masking, and I simulated this on the brow trim, ears, and around the right cheek inset. The right ear also incorporates the inverse overspray shadow of the aluminum parts on the underlying white surface between the ears.

In many places the silver base was shaded with a darker metallic color. In some cases it would be exposed, and in others it would influence the top color as a pre-shade. For the applicable areas, this meant a third re-mapping for masking. The kill stripes were re-mapped four separate times due to having so many scratches and colors coming together in the same area.

Finishing Touches
I found a vintage Casio calculator, identical to the original prop, and pirated its circuit board. This was secured behind the helmet’s rear vents. Its lower micro screw was turned to match the Jedi helmet. I tinted the epoxy with an acrylic mix to give it the right color. Placement was important because I wanted a faithful reproduction, all the way down to a small leak of beige-colored epoxy that can be seen looking into the vents from an obscure angle. The lower half of the vents was covered with scrap-tinted acrylic from the visor-cutting job since it had the same curvature and appearance to conform to the vent area. The salvaging effort gave me a grin and struck me as something that might have been done in the creation of the original.

Then I painted the ears and scratch built the vents’ red knobs out of jeweler’s screwdriver handles (since I hadn’t identified the original parts to create the knobs). The number 15 was inscribed onto each one.

Finally, the Rangefinder stalk was bolted into place using brass hardware as on the original. Additionally, I simulated the build-up of crusty yellow cement around the Rangefinder and ear pieces with a gradual application of Ambroid. The chin strap sides were modified with the appropriate hardware and screwed onto their mounts.

In the original helmet, the electronics were largely stripped and the head-liner was not present. Crude foam padding was needed inside to be accurate, so I cut some old foam to shape. I secured this with duct tape, cut to mimic the random tearing. The epoxy patches holding the interior visor chin tabs were also colored, shaped, and weathered to match the original as accurately as possible. A butter knife gave me the right scrape impressions in the curing epoxy.

In the end, the result is a satisfactory replica of the 1983 Boba Fett helmet as seen in Return of the Jedi. Please stay tuned as I advance to other projects. There is so much of Fett left to explore!

Credit Where Credit is Due
Many thanks go out to all who helped this project come to life. You know who you are.

For this herculean build, I conducted the research, AutoCAD design work, part sourcing, detailing, scratch building, preparation, painting, and assembly. The initial casting and metal machine work were executed by skilled professionals.

A Word from our Lawyers
Statements of fact in this article are derived from first-hand accounts and sources connected to the construction and preparation of the original prop. Accept them at your own discretion. Some names have been withheld to protect the privacy of the sources and contributors.

Can’t get get enough Boba Fett? Read more from some of the MPPC’s resident Fett hounds, Chris and Lee.