Glued Up. Time To Sand.

I squeezed in a couple of hours of work tonight on this project. There's been a bunch of down time lately. I've been very absorbed in another project I'm working on. Actually, two other projects. First, I'm converting old VHS tapes and Hi8 tapes to DVD. I'm also sorting HUNDREDS of old family photos with the intent of scanning them. Those two have been consuming lots of my time lately, and keeping me out of the garage. But I found some spare energy tonight to head down and do some work.

We last saw our rifle in two halves. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to best get these two halves together. Along the way, I came up with a number of complicated and dauting solutions. But when it came down to it, I just glued the two halves together.

I squirted about a quarter of a tube of 5 minute epoxy onto a sheet of styrene, and mixed it up. I worked quickly, and used a popsicle stick to spread the stuff as liberally as possible along the lip. I then placed the two halves together, and taped them in place. The alignment wasn't perfect, but it is very close. The bummer is that the two halves are not the exact same size. I don't know if this is a result of the mold, or if one side of the pour up shrunk a little more than the other. It's only one or two mm smaller, and not really a big deal.



While that glue was curing, I went to the bench and did some work on my tricorder. After a while, it was time to take the tape off.

The next step was to go in with some thick super glue gel and a bottle of kick and fill in the gaps. It took some doing, but I went around the entire gun and filled in the crack. I let that fully cure for about a half an hour.

Now it's time to begin what will be the most time consuming, and least fun part of the entire build. Cleaning up the seam! I hate this stuff! Because the halves fit together pretty well, this shouldn't be TOO big of a deal.

The first step for me was to go in with my dremel and remove excess glue, and to level out the body parts. I don't want to chew away too much of the body, as that will just thin it out. So I'll be adding in putty to do most of the levelling. But the first step is to get rid of glue chunks, as those tend to be very difficult to sand.



And that's about where I left it for the night. I've gone around about a quarter of the gun, sanding down the glue chunks.