Multipass Tutorial - Step 4

In this step, I assemble what I call the "Battery Case".

For this step, you need two parts from the kit, and some styrene gule. You'll need the large circle with no hole in it, and one of the thin washers. Do NOT use the thick washer.

Take your plastruct glue and brush some on to the thin washer. You don't want to soak the piece, but get even coverage. Before it has a chance to dry, press it onto the large disk, lining up the edges as closely as possible.

When this step is done, it will look like the photo on the left. You've finished constructing the battery case.

PLEASE NOTE: I have included in the kit an extra thin and thick washer. If you want to make a working version of the pass, and need some extra room for a battery, these may come in handy. It will make the pass less accurate, but you may want to sacrifice that in order to fit in a momentary switch or something. I will leave that as an exercise for the student.

Though not manditory, I chose to sand down the edges of the battery case here. This makes for a nice smooth edge. You must sand carefully, and be sure not to introduce a bezel into the shape. When you glue the battery case onto the body, if you have sanded it down too much, it will be too small in comparison to the rest of the body.

You can easily skip this step and just sand the edges once you get the body assembled.

Multipass Tutorial - Step 5

In this step, we prepare the dome that is used as the "button" for the Multipass. Key to the success of this step is a simple battle of psychological warfare. In the process of cleaning up the dome, it gets really trashed. The sanding an filing ruins the transparency of the dome and makes it look awful. But have faith, and stay the course. By the time this step is done, the dome will be as clean and see-through as it was when you started.

I was once convinced that the dome for the multipass was a google eye that can be found on stuffed animals and such. I'm no longer convinced of that for a couple of reasons. First, plastruct parts are a mainstay of any prop/miniatures shop. It is very likely that the propmakers on the movie had plastruct stock sitting around. Second, the domes I use are precisely the right size for the doughnut shape that appears on the multipass, as scaled from a known critical measurement on the pass. Third, to get the google eye to work in this context requires a lot of labor. So much labor that I have decided not to include a tutorial on how to make it work. Frankly, it's very difficult, very problematic, and does not provide results as nice as you get with the plastruct dome.

Here is the dome as it comes straight from Plastruct. You can barely tell from the picture, but the main problem with this piece as it stands is the ejection port nipple on the top of the dome. It's basically a big hole in the top of the dome that is created when the part is made. The first thing we need to do is remove this so that the dome appears smooth.

Note: The removal of the nipple is totally optional. if you don't care about the nipple, then you can skip the first few steps of this part of the tutorial. Go straight to the part where you put the yellow vinyl on the back. In fact, there's even a shot in the movie of Korben's pass where it looks like the nipple is in tact. So it's really up to you.

The first thing I did was file down the sprue on the side of the dome. I did this using a hobby file. The dome is a tiny little bugger, and one of the more challenging aspects of this part of the process was simply getting my fingers around it in a way that will allow me to attack the dome with whatever tool I'm using. I do not recommend using a clamp or clasp to hold the dome in place, as the plastic is pretty soft and will damage easily.

Now it's time to wear down the nipple. I started in with a flat hobby file and basically just filed away the top millimeter or two from the dome. Keep filing until the nipple disappears altogether. You'll be surprised at how deep it goes. After you sand off the main lip, there will still be a small white dot in the middle that will take some work to get rid of. Keep going until it's totally gone. Don't worry about the shape of the dome and how it's changing. We'll fix that later.

This picture shows the dome after I filed the nipple down. It looks like there's a flat plateau on the top of the dome. There is! Our next task involves fixing that.

I start out with some 220 grit sandpaper. I wouldn't recommend using anything lower than that, as it may carve lines in the dome that will be too deep to polish out. If you want to start with a higher grit, you'll just need to do more work. Basically, with the 220 grit paper, I reshape the dome. I smooth out the transition from the dome to the plateau I just created in the previous step so that it resumes it's domed shape. You can also use this opportunity to flatten out the dome a bit more if you chose to.

After using the 220, the dome looks pretty foggy. We've scratched up the surface pretty badly. However, it has the proper shape, and that's what we're after.

This picture shows the dome after I hit it with some 1000 grit sandpaper. I went straight from the 220 to the 1000, and used water in the process. Wetsanding will always provide smoother results than dry. Just take a bowl of water, dunk your sand paper in it prior to use, then go to town.

Now that we've gotten any grooves out of the dome that were cut by the 220, and gotten the dome into the shape we want it to be, we're ready to polish it. Grab some colgate, a sock, and some water. You can probably use any type of toothpaste, I just happened to have Colgate sitting around. You know... for my teeth.

Place a gob of toothpaste on the dome, wet your sock with the water, and rub the thing down. You actually won't need to polish it that much to get it perfectly clear, assuming that you did a good job with the 1000 grit sandpaper. After rubbing the toothpaste on it for a minute or so, wipe it all off to see how it looks. Repeat if necessary.

I'm not convinced that the breath strips in the toothpase add any advantage!! hah! But hey, it's what I had on hand.

Here's a picture of the newly improved, nipple free, recently polished to perfection dome.

I've noticed that sometimes, the back side of the dome is not completely flat. I think this varies from dome to dome. I was not satisfied with the back of my dome, so I used the 1000 grit sandpaper to flatten it. I drew little figure eights with the dome in order to avoid wearing down one side more than the other. After it was flat, I polished it with toothpaste.

In the next few steps, we're going to give the button its yellow background. I use a piece of yellow vinyl, but there are probably a million different ways to do this. You could paint the back of the button, you could paint a piece of styrene and then glue the button to it, etc. Feel free to improvise.

In this step, I'm peeling the backing off the vinyl circle. This exposes the adhesive side of the vinyl.

Here, I simply plop the button down on the adhesive side of the vinyl. Assuming I haven't screwed up the dome, the underside of it should be pretty darn flat, meaning that I shouldn't have much trouble getting the vinyl onto it.

I now use an exacto knife to cut away the excess vinyl from around the button.

There you have it. One yellow dome.

Multipass Tutorial - Step 6

As "The Dude" from The Big Lebowsky is fond of saying, "New S&^T has come to light!!!"

In this step, you perform a modification to the kit. But allow me to ramble for just a bit. First up, big thanks go out to user Charles Kline of the Replica Props Forum! Charles got ahold of one of my kits, and during his build up did a little bit of "Above and Beyond" research, and actually discovered an answer for a long standing question of mine that I was never quite able to answer.

One of my common laments about the multipass project is that there are a few details which I describe as "Irreconcileable". These are things that look one way in one picture, but different in another. Or there's just a detail that I cannot seem to make sense of. Take for example this picture.

This is one of the most valuable pictures of the multipass, as it's a "straight on" shot of the pass, and is of decent resolution. Well, THIS pic isn't, but for my project, I scanned it directly from the "making of" book, and relied on it heavily for the overall shape, and the graphics. One of the things I recognize from this picture is that it has a clipping path around it. This is basically a way that book makers can isolate graphics from one another on a printed page. The bummer with this is that the clipping path may not follow the contours of the prop precisely. Since I'm ALL about precision, this was of course a bummer for me. But I digress. There is one detail that I see in this picture that I could never completely make sense of. Take a look at the horizontal line running along the top of the pass.

To MY eye, it's kind of hard to figure out what is going on here. Is that rounded? Is it a step? Is it an illusion, or a trick of lighting? is it an artifact of the clipping path? I could never really tell for sure, so I just made some assumptions and proceeded with my multipass kit design, not really worrying about it.

But Mister Kline managed to find this screen cap, which CLEARLY shows that this is indeed a hard step, just like the one at the bottom of the pass.

I'll throw in some arrows, just so you know exactly what I'm talking about:

In my mind, what this capture reveals is that the "lip" sticking out is the same height as the lip on the bottom. For reference, here's a great screen capture that shows the lip on the bottom of the pass, as seen in Korben's apartment.

The punchline is that in this step of the tutorial, you make some modifications to the front and back plate so that the lip on the top is the same as the lip on the bottom.

HUGE thanks to Charles for his dedication to building the most accurate Multipass, and for sharing his insights and discoveries. Though I cannot guarantee this link will be active forever, here is the original thread showing Charles' build up.

For this step, we are going to modify both the front and back plates.

To make the modifications with a level of precision, we are going to use the plates themselves as guides. Flip one of the plates around so they line up like this.

Then slide one plate over the other.

The trick here is to align the two pieces using the arches at the tips of the arms. Click on this picture to see some arrows that are pointing to what I'm talking about here. Once you get them aligned, you can either tape the two together, or just hold them in place for the next step. I chose to just hold them in place.

I took a mechanical pencil, and used it to mark where the cuts are going to go. Just follow along the lip of the plate on top. Repeat this step for both pates. This means you will have to flip over the two plates, re-align them, and then mark where you're going to cut.

This is what the plates look like after you've done your pencil work.

Because the cuts we are going to make run the full length of the plate, you'll need to extend your pencil line. I pulled out my trusty straight edge/ruler, lined it up with the marks I had already made, and then just drew them out.

Here's the fully extended pencil lines. You're now all ready to cut.

Using a brand new x-acto blade and my straight edge, I make the cuts. Just line up the straight edge along your pencil mark. If your pencil lines were not PRECISELY where you wanted to make the cuts, but sure to slide the straight edge away from the cut a bit to allow for any fudge factor.

When cutting with the blade, it is MUCH better to do 10 or 12 shallow cuts than to try to cut it all in one slice. More pressure = bad, and usually results in you slipping or losing your grip on the plate.

And here are the completed plates, with both cuts done.

While you are here, take some 220 grit sandpaper (or whatever you are happy with) and sand down any ridges you may have created with your multiple x-acto blade passes. Also sand out and residual melted plastic from those arches.

For reference, here's a shot of how the newly modified top plate looks on top of the center plate. You can see how there is now that step on the top, whereas before there was none. I notice that mine is a tad too shallow. I will probably go back in with the x-acto and straight edge to extend that a little bit. As per the screen capture above, it looks as if the step height on the top should match the step height on the bottom. It's really up to the builder to decide how crazy you want to get on precision at this point.

Multipass Tutorial - Step 7

In this step, we attach the back plate to the center plate. Alignment is key.

These are the two pieces involved in this step. The center plate is pretty easy to identify, but don't confuse the back plate with the front plate. The main difference is that the front plate has an opening for the LED next to the big circle part.

Apply glue liberally to the back plate. If you're using the plastruct glue, you may need to do a couple passes with the glue to get good, wet coverage.

Gently place the back plate onto the center plate, and nudge it around as necessary until it is properly aligned. Once everything is lined up, press the halves together with your fingers. The key areas to make sure are aligned are the edges of the circle, and also the arches along the arms. If you've got those three points aligned, you should be golden.

In case your glue dried before you had a chance to get the whole thing in place, you can lift up an edge using an exacto blade, then brush some glue onto the inside of the back plate. Don't be sloppy!

Once the glue has dried, I recommend doing a light sanding of the surface to remove any glue you may have gotten on it. Don't worry too much about the edges just yet. Just make sure it's clean.

I did a little bit of sanding here, but didn't go out of my way to make sure everything was flush. I've still got a few layers to glue on, and that could change the dynamics of the edges, meaning more sanding.

Multipass Tutorial - Step 8

This is a fairly simple step where we attach the battery case to the back of the pass.

Keep in mind that I am doing a static build up of the kit, meaning no working electronics. If you are going to add electronics to yours, you may chose to do this step differently. Perhaps you would drill and tap small holes for screws instead of just gluing it in place.

The parts you will use to complete this step are the body of the pass, and the battery cover that we prepared in an earlier step. This is the disk with the thin ring glued to the inside.

I used my Plastruct glue again here, though you can use any type of styrene glue. Testors, or whatever. Put the glue on the battery case, then press the case into place on the body. Hold it in place firmly while the glue kicks. Before you press it down, you'll have a few seconds to align the case so that it's properly positioned.

And here it is all done. Pretty simple.