I Cried Over An Iron Man Helmet. Here's What Happened.
June 3, 2026 · 11 min · 1k views
The helmet is the first piece of the suit that actually moves. Two servos swing the faceplate open, the LED eyes light up, and one switch runs the whole thing. I printed the parts months ago on my old Elegoo Neptune 4 Plus. The moving arms came out rough, so I reprinted those on the Bambu Lab H2C. This is the first official build video of the full suit.
The first helmet
Three years ago I tried to motorize my first Iron Man helmet and bricked it. It was supposed to be my first YouTube video. The servos couldn't fight the friction of the printed arms, and I gave up too early. I ripped the arms out and held the faceplate on with magnets. I loved how it looked, but that failure has been sitting in the back of my head ever since.
Putting it together
Mechanically, not much went wrong this time, which is the strange part. The tricky step is scaling. You resize the helmet to fit your head without wasting PLA, but the servo housings have to stay at 100% because the motors are a fixed size. After that it's basically a model kit. Heat inserts get melted into the plastic with a soldering iron, screws go into the inserts, the lower jaw pieces get fused with plastic welding, and extra filament gets melted on top for strength. You become a human 3D printer for a minute.
The electronics are the Crashworks circuit and code from their GitHub repo: a battery, an Arduino, two servos, the LED eyes and a switch. I followed the instructions, barely understood what I was wiring, and didn't enjoy a second of it. And this time the helmet opened.
The day it opened
That's when it hit me, and it wasn't really about the helmet. For the first time, I was dreading going into the workshop. I'd been procrastinating on the helmet for weeks because I didn't like the way I was working: copying a guide to build something that matters this much to me. Add a few decades of failing at a lifelong goal, a deadline I'd just pushed back, and a camera running, and yes, a grown man cried over a plastic helmet.
Three years of better printers
3D printing has gotten so much easier in three years. Heat inserts weren't even in the model back then, and the precision of a modern printer takes most of the pain out of assembly. I learned how to scale a multi-part model around fixed components. I also learned that flashing someone else's firmware onto an Arduino teaches you nothing about electronics.
Copying a guide won't cut it for the rest of the suit. There's no Crashworks guide for a whole body that needs lights, sound, motors and parts that talk to each other wirelessly.
So the helmet is finished but not painted, and the challenge deadline moved to June 28. The next build is an electronics learning project inspired by the greatest game ever: Factorio.
Two servos and a switch
- 3 years since the first failed helmet
- 2 servos, 1 switch, 1 Arduino
- Challenge extended from 4 months to 5 and a half