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Bo's head was comparatively easy. I decided to go back to the tried-and-true method of making a tension wire frame and building from that, rather than relying entirely on bent plastic as a base. Bent plastic is good for certain things, but not all things. It's also harder to correct errors than wire.

Bent plastic still had a place, though. I used it to form the helmet. With Brooklyn and Xodiac and Marian, I used street hockey helmets, but what was a good idea when they cost $25 or so wasn't so viable when they were $90. But the headpiece design Legend thought up that I used for Onyx would serve me well enough. I'd just have to add some tabs to attach the tension wire to and it'd work fine.

I started work on Bo by measuring the curvature of my head. I did this with hanger wire, curving it around my head in three places: over the center of my head from between my eyebrows to the back of my neck, from jaw to jaw over my head, and from temple to temple across my brow. With those measurements, I had a blueprint for how to curve the plastic to make the helmet base, from which the rest of Bo's head can be built. For the sake of reference, all those tracings of the wire are on standard 8-1/2" by 11" printer paper, and the scans are uncropped. I'll leave you to decide whether or not this constitutes evidence of a swelled head.

Once I had the curve down, I started bending plastic. initially I just used the paper, bending the plastic by hand to match it. I quickly realized this wouldn't work. The only way to make the curves match exactly was to concentrate on a small section of plastic at a time and wait for the plastic to entirely cool before working on the next area down. Now only was this slow as molassas, but frequently when I worked on that next section the first one would unbend a bit, making me frequently need to go back over work I already did. Eventually I metaphorically threw my hands up in that air and decided to make some jigs to work with. (I'm not sure that's the proper word, but it's the one I'm going to use — so there!) For that I bought some lumber, cut them in the proper shape, and sanded them smooth. The little nibs on the ends of the jigs are so I can shove the plastic right against it, rather than eyeballing whether the end of the plastic matched the edge of the jig. And I cut out the insides as well as the outside so I could clamp the plastic down should I feel like it. Without that inner cut, the form would be too thick, and the angles too far from parallel, for me to do that.

This is the plastic I used, pre-bent. From left to right, they're the piece that goes around the forehead, the strip that goes from the nose over the head to the nape of the neck, and the one that goes from jaw to jaw over the head. Initially I thought they'd be simple rectangles, but that turned out not to be quite true. The second piece has a narrower end because I needed something to attach the muzzle wire to, and if I didn't have that little bit there on the end I'd have to get it under the padding, somehow. The jaw-to-jaw strip has those ends that go into an L-shape because where the jaw hinge attaches will be a little further back than the strip itself, and I couldn't put the strip further back because my ears would be in the way.

And here's the plastic during and after bending. As you can see, clamping was, indeed, required, or at least damned useful. But the jigs worked beautifully. It took me three days of tedious, painstakingly accurate bending to get halfway done using just paper and hands and eyeball. It took about two or three hours to get the curves exactly as I wanted them once I had the forms to wrap the plastic around.

And here's the three strips assembled. It kind of looks like a headpiece now! How 'bout that?