Arts and Crafts Time! My Cincinnati Bengals Helmet Project

I've been a Cincinnati Bengals fans for as long as I can remember. Part of what attracted me as a little kid was their awesome tiger striped helmet.

It satisfies every aspect of a good football helmet. It's 1.) unique in football, 2.) instantly recognizable, 3.) looks sharp from any angle, and 4.) descriptive.

That said, if we're going for accuracy, real Bengal tigers aren't exclusively orange and black. No, real tigers have white underbellies that fade into the orange of their back while the black stripes remain constant.

SHM's favorite picture

So I set out to make a zoologically (is that a word?) accurate Cincinnati Bengals helmet. To save cash and resources I decided to use mini helmets because they're smaller, cheaper, and easier to work with.

here's a quick mockup:

I started with a blank shell that I bought online. I used black because I needed black as the base color.

next, I removed the pads, chinstrap, and front and rear bumpers. and taped off the pad in the middle of the shell. 

I then masked off the stripes using the tiger stripes ripped from this Bengals mini helmet I bought online. Ebay is a beautiful thing.

With the black stripes masked off the next step was adding the orange top-coat. Sprayed the whole helmet several times with a plastic-special orange gloss spray paint. 

Now, I don't pretend to be a graffiti artist, but I'm kinda proud of this next step. To get the white to orange fade I was looking for I sprayed the bottom half of the helmet with white gloss using cardboard to  keep from spraying too much of the helmet. 

Once it dried I cut the stripes out using an exacto knife and peeled them off revealing the black layer underneath. 

The adhesive from the stripes left some residue on the base layer and some rogue orange paint snuck in, but it's nothing that can't be cleaned up later. Also, that is my real arm hair. My great grandfather may have been a gorilla. 

reattached the front and rear bumpers, glued the ear pads back in, snapped on the chinstrap, and fit the new white facemask (also purchased online) to make the helmet complete. 

All that's left is to clean up the stripes, and add the NFL sticker, bumper stickers, green dot, and warning stickers that are in the mail. Other than that, I think the zoologically (did I make that word up?) accurate Bengals helmet turned out pretty cool, but I am in no way endorsing a change from their current and classic 6-striped helmet. WHO-DEY

Bengals mini version 2.0 can be found here: http://sportshateme.blogspot.com/2011/01/bengals-mini-helmet-version-20.html

There you have it. If you agree, disagree, or have thoughts of your own. Share them with me at sportshatemeSHM@gmail.com OR follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/SeanMcCarthySHM