Alien Padd Still Cooking

As always, I'm a big fan of juggling many projects at once. I don't know why, but maybe it's my lack of focus.

Sorry, I lost track of what I was saying there for a second. Where was I? Oh yes, lack of focus. Sorry.

(see how clever one can be on one's blog? Who knew??)

Anyhow, I did some more work on that alien Padd today. I had to do some scraping around on the back side, to make sure the plex sheet would lay flat into the viewing area. There were a bunch of knobs and bumps and things that i missed last time that caused the plex to sit at an odd angle. And we can't have that now, can we??

You can't really see too much in the first picture, but this shows the ring all cleared out. I did scrape some paint off some vital surfaces by accident. Rather than trying to spray paint the whole thing again, I just used a q-tip dipped in paint to touch it up. I suppose I should have used a paint brush, but I couldn't find one.



And here's the padd with the plex installed. Held in place by my favorite five minute epoxy. Very versatile stuff, you know. I suppose it's kind of hard to see the screen, as it's clear and all.



The next challenge that really awaits with this one is building out the back panel. With any luck, I'll have some styrene stock on hand that is the precise thickness that I need to fill in the gap. I doubt that will be the case, so It'll be time to get creative. Just need to make that back panel, paint it, install the graphics, then seal it all up. Then it's done. So not a ton of work left, but knowing me, this will wrap up sometime in December.

Plenty of Painting Action

Lots to report on, but I'll try to keep it short.

First up, tons of progress on the oddball alien padd. I finished masking off the green parts, and blasted the entire thing with a coat of dupli-color bright silver.



Here's how it looks with the masking tape removed. Turned out great.



Next, I prepared the remaining part for painting. This little guy gets painted blue.



Got a little more work done on the left hand size of the Mangalore Rifle. Definitely slow going on this bad boy.



I've also prepped the Zorg remote for molding. This is another Fifth Element prop. So yeah, I'm trying to keep my plate full.



And laid down a coat of primer on the TNG padd. Still some work to be done on cleaning up the back side of this padd, but it's coming along very nicely. The front looks great.

PADD Updates Galore

I've been on a real PADD bender lately. Good stuff.

The other day, I laid down the first coat of the green highlights for this weird alien padd. These will need to be masked off, and then the silver will be painted. If you flip back a few blog entries, you can see where I cleaned this up and primered it. It's looking quite good right now.



I also pulled out an old TNG era padd. I recently watched season 4 of TNG from my DVD library, and this padd shows up all over the place. So I thought I would give it a try. The padd is a little wonky. I think that's partially due to wonkiness in the master, and partially due to some wonkiness in the pull. Not a big deal, as it still looks quite nice.

I spent about an hour cleaning it up and doing some minor puttying. Nothing serious, just filling in some bubble and straightening out some lines.



And then it was on to the primer. I'll need to round up some of the proper Krylon paint to finish this up, but so far so good.



The PADD has remnants of the original graphics on it, so I'll be able to precisely recreate that brown LCARS "T" shape that was on this style of padd. I'll need to get those plotter cut in vinyl, but that's a no brainer.

Bits of Progress, Here and There

It was kind of an "all over the place" day here at the shop. Er, I mean, in my garage. I'm still pretty sick, but I find the strength in the evenings to head down to get a few more little things done.

Fortunately for me, I moved the rifle itself up to the living room, so I can work on it in the comfort of my home. I have finished masking off one half off the gun. The other half is probably about half way done. So I'm making progress. Here's a picture of the right side of the gun. This is the side that is finished.



After the fiasco with the incompatible paint types on the Vulcan Phaser, I finally got that first little dome re-primered, and painted it the correct copper color. Here's how it looks with the masking tape removed.



I'm plenty happy with the results. I think it's close enough to the original that only the makers would know for sure. I also did some tests with the paint, and have determined that as long as I spray a coat of primer over the silver paint, the copper paint should stick fine. Which is cool. Means I don't have to strip it down and start again. Now it's just a matter of masking off all the parts that need to be painted copper. And you KNOW how much I love doing that type of work.

I also did some work on that alien padd. Here's a shot of where I used the super putty to fill in bubbles along seam lines. The spot glazing putty that I use on flat surfaces does not work well in these types of places. Because it doesn't bond very tightly, it tends to snap out of those little crannies when sanding. So I switch to "the good stuff" for these types of problem areas. It's coming along really nicely.



After that putty was all sanded and smoothed, I zapped it with a coat of primer. I may make one more pass with the glazing putty, but that will be it. It's getting very close to being finished.



I also managed to pick up the paints for this padd today on my lunch break. I don't think I got the colors exact, but that's OK. I'm just going for a "flavor" approach on this one. Because they probably made a number of variations of this padd, I'm not too concerned about matching the colors perfectly. I think it will look cool just being finished.

That's it for today. Thanks again for reading.

Primer Good, Primer Bad

Couple of news items on the primer front. I'll start with the easy one.

I've blasted the new alien padd with primer. Nothing much else to report. The good thing about grey primer is that it helps reveal any tiny flaw in the casting. I suppose that's also the bad news.



But I ran into a problem with the Vulcan phaser. I had it all masked off and ready to apply the bronze/copper paint. However, when i sprayed it on, it went all "orange peel" on me. Basically, the paint reacted violently with the paint underneath it. The two types are incompatible. Lacqer vs. Enamel. Classic struggle. So I had to knock the paint down with sand paper, and put down a few coats of primer. Hopefully, the copper paint won't struggle with the primer. If it does, I'll just pick up a can of tamiya copper, and give that a try. I don't want to spend the rest of eternity sanding and primering hard to reach places on that gun.



That's it for now.

We're Ready to Pump You Up!

A bit of work got accomplished today. Still no movement on the Mangalore Rifle, which is a tad ironic, as this blog is supposed to be dedicated to its build. I'm thinking of re-branding this blog as a general purpose "bulding blog", instead of focusing on the rifle. After all, what would happen once the rifle is finished? Will it simply go the way of my R2 blog?? Unclear.

The first thing I did was cut out the padd screen template that I had drawn up last night. I expected to use my coping saw, but it was going too slowly. I deferred to my fiberglass cutting wheel for my dremel tool. It made short work of the thing. I ended up using a set of coarse files to get it down to shape, but it ended up fitting quite snugly inside the padd body.



I expect I'll need to do a little more work on the screen once I paint the padd body. The paint will add a bit of thickness to it, which will necessitate some further sanding. NBD.

But next it was time to do some molding. I poured up a batch of silicone, and let the vacuum pump work its magic.



Turns out I didn't need to do those silicone repairs I did last night. The force of the vacuump pulled that ring into whatever position it wanted it to be in, stripping it straight off the glue. NBD. (That stands for No Big Deal, BTW. [That stands for By The Way]) At the end of the day, the pump worked great, and did a darn fine job of sucking all the air out of the silicone.

Here's the molds all filled up with silicone. Notice that I put the molds on a piece of wood, on top of a box. Why? So I could level it out. You can even see my level on top of the wood. this makes sure that the molds are sitting flat as the rubber kicks. That way, when it comes time to pour up some resin, I can get better pulls. When the molds lay down perfectly flat, the resin will pour flat. Assuming I'm pouring resin on a level surface too. Oy, so many variables.



Long story short, they're all set. I can probably start pulling pieces out of them tomorrow night, but I'll probably let them go an extra night just to be sure. I'm in no rush.

Ex Post Facto

It's a bit after the fact, but I now have photos that document the stuff I was posting about yesterday. Here be they:

First up is the vacuum chamber that I am repairing. Just a little silicone glue around the bottom seal, and it should be ready to suck.



This is the Vulcan hand phaser circa Enterprise. This is the base coat, all finished. I personally am not a fan of the finish, but it seems to match the screen used piece, and that's what I'm after. next up is the bronze highlights.



And finally, here's that other alien padd that I was talking about. I drew out a template on a piece of plex. Now I just need to cut that out, and it will serve as the main viewscreen for this little gem. Once again, big thanks to "It's A Wrap Hollywood" for getting so many of these weird little pieces into circulation.

Non Rifle, But Still Progress

I'm still pretty sick, so work is limited. I've been distracted lately with other, smaller projects. Those have taken a front seat over the rifle. I'm a big fan of results, and the rifle is just moving too slowly. I figure I've got another two or three hours in masking work to be done before I can lay down the black spray paint.

I don't have any progress pics of the other things I'm working on, but I'm currently kicking around a vulcan hand phaser and another alien padd. I have some pictures of the screen used props, that I'll post here for reference. Just to give you an idea where I'm going.

First up is the padd:



Hard to visualize from this picture, but all I have is the outer ring. The back is just a piece of styrene, and there's a layer of plex in between, protecting the graphic. No work has been done on the resin, but I did mark out a cutting template for the plex this evening. I'll attack that with a coping saw later on.

Here's what the vulcan pistol looks like



The keen eye will note that this is a simple redress of the Hirojin hand phaser from Voyager, with the nose tip sawed off. I took a close look at some of the other photos I got of this prop from "It's A Wrap", and determined that the main color was a rustoleum "hammered" metal finish. What I was not sure of is if it is silver, or a very light off green. My monitor is not perfectly calibrated, so it's hard to tell. I think it's the green, but I went with the silver. Go figure. I'm a walking contradiction. I'm pretty sure I've nailed down the copper highlights paint too. It's a rustoleum rattle can.

My replica is just about done. It's been sanded and primered, and tonight I zapped it with two coats of the hammered metal silver. I'm going to let it dry overnight, and then mask it off for the copper highlights. With any luck, I'll have some photos to show soon.

In other news, I'm prepping a few items for molding. I would have poured the rubber tonight, but the lower seal on my vac chamber is shot, so I had to glue it back to the base. I used some silicone glue, but it too needs 24 hours to dry. So I'll take another look at it tomorrow.

So lots going on right now, just not a lot to show. One of the things I'm going to mold is the "Zorg Remote" from The Fifth Element. it's a little hand held game that took me about 8 months to track down. It'll be good to get that project finished.

All Taped Up With Nowhere to Go

I'm in the middle of a really nasty flu, so progress has slowed to a crawl. But given this project, that's not really unusual. With the silver paint coat all finished, I've begun the process of masking off the areas that will remain that color. The plan is to cover up the silver, then blast the whole thing with a coat of black. I suppose there's more than one way to skin this cat, this is just how I chose to do it.





How on earth they managed to crank these out for production at a rapid clip is beyond me. It's taking loads of time to get these areas masked off. What you see in these pictures is probably about two hours of work. And it's only one side of the rifle.

In other news, I've been working on another project on the side. It's an alien padd from Enterprise. This is a nifty little oddball padd that I picked up recently. With all the "Its A Wrap" auctions introducing new props into "the circuit", it was inevitable that a few goodies would fall into my hands. This piece is almost complete, save for a few little bits of perforated brass. I'm hoping to round those up within a week or so.



The graphic is slightly larger than the one that was won at auction, and I've oriented it differently. Oh well. I like it better this way anyhow. Consider it a bit of "creative license" that I took with the prop. I'm quite pleased with it. It looks good, and it came together quickly. It's also a rare little piece, so that's cool too.