Monday, November 19, 2007

The Start Of Something Wonderful

It wasn't enough that I started a blog to track the progress of my voyager Endgame Tricorder. That can be found at mattmunson.blogspot.com, by the way.

But along the way, I've really started kicking around the build up of my Mangalore Rifle, which I would like to document also.

Here's an old reference picture I have of a finished rifle. This one probably came from the exact same mold I'll be using



I'll do a little more background info later on, but for tonight, I'll jump right in.

A few days ago, I poured a couple of resin pulls of one of the detail pieces on the rifle. It's a bit warped, as the mold is almost dead. The piece came out of the mold looking like this.



That had to be fixed. I turned to my old friend, the heat gun. As it's name would indicate, this thing gets REALLY hot. I blasted the resin piece for a few minutes to soften it up.



Then I plopped a nice, heavy R2-D2 battery on top of it to keep it straight as the resin cools.



About a half an hour later, it was all cool. There were still a few lumps in it, caused by a break in the mold. Now that the thing is flat, it was easy to file out the lumps, and also re-create one of the flanges that was worn down a bit by the filing.



Though I only spent about 30 minutes on this project tonight, it was a great start. I'm really very happy with how this piece turned out, and it was the state of this piece that had me the most concerned about this project.

I believe the only other piece of progress I have to report today is that I ordered some resin to use casting up the main body. I decided to go with a BJB product, TC-1630. The stuff cures pretty quickly, has a freindly mix ratio, and best of all, has almost no shrinkage. Because I'll be brushing it in to a pretty big two part mold, I'm not too worried about shrinkage. But if it's something you can control, you should.

For reference, I ordered my stuff from Burman Foam, at www.burmanfoam.com

Since yesterday was my birthday, I thought it only fair that I show off some of my loot. This is a very dapper shirt and tie combo that I wore with pride today.

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