Custom Sensei Half Face

I thought I'd do a write up for my custom made half face mask. All you need for this is a Sensei mesh full face mask and a few basic tools. I find there aren't enough airsoft full or half face masks on the market with proper lenses as opposed to mesh ones. So I decided I'd make my own. What you will need:

• Sensei face mask or Chinese clone
• Wire/plastic cutters

You may also need, depending on your mask and what exactly you want to do with it:

• Pliers
• Power drill (or cutters again, with some persistence)
• E-tape
• Draft excluder strip/sticky back foam

Firstly you're going to grab your Sensei face mask and separate the goggles from the lower half. On some more masks this will be easy as the plastic clips will just pull out, on others (such as the very cheap on I used) the two halves will be riveted together, it should be fairly simple to get the rivets out with a pair of pliers just be careful to not damage the mask. Once you've got the rivets/clips out your mask should look something like this:

Next you need to pull out the tabs that connect the mask to the goggles where the strap is, like so:

Once that is done you should be able to completely remove the goggles. Then you just need to take the strap off the goggles. I found it easiest to twist the strap fastenings forward and then un-hook them from the goggles.

Now the goggles are completely removed from the lower part of the mask and the strap and can be put to one side.

Now comes a choice, you can either remove the limbs that are connected to the mask. I would advise you do this the fastenings are poor quality. The strap can then be either hooked through the holes on the mask or replaced with a a different strap and tied through holes. Alternatively you could reinforce the connection with glue or e-tape. The connections on my mask were big rivets and are more than strong enough. If you are looking to exactly the same as me then I suggest you buy on of the very cheap masks from ebay. Mine was the cheapest one I could find and came to less than £5 posted. So the next thing you need to do is drill a hole in the limb to hook your strap through, as I mentioned at the start you could probably achieve the same thing with your plastic/wire cutters and come persistence.

You can then simply hook the strap though the hole, the smaller you can keep the hole the better so the strap won't fall out.

Then cut the limb down so the strap sits tight on the end, you could reinforce again with e-tape or glue. However I found no need for this as the it held very well by itself.

Now your mask should be pretty much finished. You may want to use your draft excluder strips or foam to pad the mask and make it more comfortable. I trimmed the top of the nose a bit to make it sit better on my face.

So there we have it, not the most comfortable mask in the world (I think with some more padding and maybe some trimming it would be much more so) but is very cheap, light, low-profile and easy to breath through. Here are a few pics of it on me, the first pic it is too far up my face, I adjusted the padding before trying it with goggles, I didn't have any shooting glasses to hand to try with it but I assure you they would work fine with this mask:

- Wisey