Varon-T Almost Complete

After spending far too much time puttying and sanding, I finally got the emitter head to a point where I was happy with it.



And it was only then that I looked at some reference pictures and noticed that the emitter on the screen used piece is shorter than the one I was working on.



I needed to remove a few ribs from my nozzle for it to be accurate. I pulled out my mini vice and coping saw. These made short work of it.



Here's how it looked after I sawed it. I spent about a minute with some sand paper getting the freshly sawed surface smoothed out.



By this time, I was pretty sick of all the puttying and sanding, and decided it was time to get this project finished. I sprayed the emitter with a coat of silver, then masked it off to do the black. I'm using a Dupli-Color bright silver, and a krylon semi flat black. It's always important to test these paints to make sure they work together before painting the parts. I did a test nozzle earlier to ensure no problems. Here you can see why I put those long screws into each piece. It gives me something to hold onto while painting.



Here's the piece after my first two passes.



I needed to do one more pass to paint the barrel itself. I made a stencil out of a piece of painters tape, using one of those multi-hole geometry class thingies that I saved from school. I knew it would come in handy someday. And to think, my math professors said I would never use that math stuff in the real world.



After the various masking and paintings, I was ready to do the final assembly.



I removed the screws, and used an exacto blade to scrape off some of the paint. This gives the epoxy something to bite into other than paint. That way, the strength of the bond isn't limited by the strength of the paint bond.



And here's how it looks after that operation.



There are still a few things to do before this is complete. There's another tiny piece on the trigger area that needs to be masked and painted black. I also need to apply some mirror vinyl strips. Then it will be finished. I'm quite certain I can finish this before the weekend hits.

In other news, tonight I finished editing the latest episode of Rise of The MattMobile. Episode 8, to be precise. Episode 7 still has not premiered on the youtube channel, so it will probably be a week before 8 airs. Stay tuned!