The 2001 Spacesuit Restoration Project
Dennis Gilliam is, piece by piece, restoring one of the spacesuits used in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s movie classic 2001 : A Space Odyssey.
About the only intact piece of the outfit however was the helmet… sans visor.
Since the visor in the original red helmet needed replacing, I had to come up with a method for making accurate visors. I built a fixture to hold a piece of Plexiglas cut to the correct shape. The fixture with the Plexiglas is placed into an oven, and air pressure is forced into the fixture cavity. This causes the Plexiglas to bow outward until the correct curvature is achieved. It took a few attempts to make a correct visor (one actually blew up due to too much air pressure).
