When pedants pointed out that bullet-proof vests weren’t absolutely impervious to all bullets, they became bullet-resistant, and then ballistic.
Ballistic masks also exist, but they have plenty of downsides.
To the geeks at The Post Apoc, the chief downside was cost:
I once saw a kevlar ballistic mask in a tactical catalogue for $400. I’d just finished playing through Army of Two, an Xbox shooter in which the protagonists wear heavy body armor, including ballistic masks. So, naturally, I thought “Sweet! I want one!… but not for $400 effin’ bucks.”
Thus, I decided to build my own. First, a base. I thought about starting with a plaster mold of my own face, but I wanted something a little stouter — something inherently designed to take punishment, but also light weight and simple. I found a vintage street hockey mask on ebay for $10.
I knew kevlar would be the main ingredient, but I’d never even looked into purchasing any — I assumed it would be expensive. Not so. I typed in “kevlar” on ebay and… oh. You can just purchase rolls of the stuff for next to nothing. We’ll I’ll be damned. I bought a square yard of it for $20. I knew I wanted to layer it with a flexible glue — something that wouldn’t stiffen the kevlar and make it brittle and less effective, so I used plain old Mod Podge crafting glue. I laid the first layer on whole, which was WAY too hard. It didn’t want to stick to the plastic at all, and I basically had to continuously smooth it out with my hands for fifteen minutes until the glue dried completely. So, after that I cut the kevlar into strips with tin snips and started laying the strips on in alternating directions, each new layer overlapping the seams of the previous one.
I used the tin snips to clean up the edges of the mask, then went around it with the thickest duct tape I could find, just to hold everything in place a bit better.
I’d heard somewhere that aluminum did a good job of slowing bullets down because it bent and stretched. In testing, this proved negligible at best. I had a sheet of aluminum lying around that my brother had used for another project, so I cut it up into “scales” and armored the mask with it. I started at the edges and worked my way in toward the center so the plates would overlap outward and hopefully deflect the bullets toward the outside edges of the mask, like rain running down a shingled roof. Again, in testing, this did not happen AT ALL — but damn, you’ve got to admit that those metal scales look pretty damn cool. Out at the edges, the metal was only one layer thick, but on the forehead and nose, it was three layers thick. I glued the metal plates on using silicon glue — again, because I wanted everything to be flexible, not rigid and brittle.
I needed something to hold all those plates to one another. Enter, epoxy. I painted a thick, gooey layer of epoxy over the entire mask. Granted, epoxy by itself dries brittle, but this wasn’t intended to add protection, it was only intended to hold the plates in place, and it worked pretty well. After the epoxy dried, I painted the mask with spray on truck bed liner… just to add the final, scary touch.
Then they put it on a watermelon and started shooting: