Back Door Action

With the hinges coming along so nicely, I thought I would take another look at the back door of the main body. In my initial rough assembly, I noticed that the back door didn't fit too well. It was too small.



I took the old back door, and traced it out onto a sheet of styrene of the same thickness. It would make for a good starting poing.



I cut the styrene out using some sharp scissors, but left extra room around one side. This would account for the material I needed to add in to make it fit better.

After a few minutes with a couple of files, I got it to fit pretty well. It's not perfect, but when I paint it up, some thickness will be added. That should iron out any kinks.

Screwing In The Hinges

With the hinges now properly in place and aligned, it was time to get the screws put into them. This will fully secure them to the body, and make it near impossible to snap the door off at the hinges.

I knew drilling the holes for the screws was going to be a drill press operation. I was not confident that I could get the precision I wanted from a hand drill.

I placed the tricorder into a vice, so that it would be held steady inside the drill press.



I then took the vice over to the drill press, and very carefully drilled out all 12 holes. I tried to center the holes as best as I could inside the hinges. There's always some bit wander as you start to drill, but I find it can be minimized if you chuck the drill bit deep into the press. That way, there's only a tiny bit of the drill bit sticking out. Less wobble.



Here's how it looked when all was said and done. A couple of the holes weren't perfectly centered, so I took my dremel with a grinding bit to the holes and expanded them a bit. Just enough to make it so that the tapered head of the screw wasn't likely to push the hinge out of alignment.



A few minutes later, and all the screws are in place.



So far so good. The tricorder still opens and closes smoothly, and all is looking good.

Installing The Hinges

Now that my hinge well depth problem was taken care of, it was time to get the hinges in to place. Again.

I started by filing down the hinges a bit. I wanted to have a little more wiggle room within the wells so that I could get them all lined up perfectly. I rounded out the edges of the hinges, and also took a little bit of material off from each side.



Here's the center hinge glued into place with a tiny bit of epoxy



I used a piece of styrene cut from the border of a sheet to align the hinges as the epoxy dried. Because this was a pretty darn straight edge, I knew I could rely on it to provide quality alignment.



Here's how all three hinges looked once the glue was dry.



However, opening the tricorder up was the real test.



It worked! The hinges were all spaced VERY nicely and evenly, and the tricorder swung open without a creak or a hitch. Very nice! It turned out great, and I was happy to see my bondo squish efforts pay off.

Bondo Squishin' The Hinge Wells

On my last post, I lamented the fact that I had neglected a detail on the hinge wells. They were of varying depth. So In this post, I'll explain how I fixed it.

The idea was to use the Bondo Squish method I described in an earlier post, but this time, I would do it in the hinge well.

The first step was to figure out how deep the shallowest well was. I did this by finding a piece of styrene that matched the approximate depth.



I found a thickness that was close, but not perfect. I needed to glue a very thin shim of styrene on to this piece to make it the right thickness. To do this, I used my favorite glue from Plastruct, which is custom designed to go on thin, and to hold together styrene.



Here's the finished piece, all ready to go.



Now I mixed up some putty, and used my spatula like x-acto blade to put a tiny amount into the hinge well.



And then the squish! I placed my sytrene strip on a large sheet of styrene, set the tricorder part on top of it, and pushed down on it. The extra putty squirted out the sides, and I was in business.



Once it had a chance to dry, I carefully peeled the piece away from the styrene. It turned out very nicely. Only a bit of clean up to do, and I'll be all set.





Since I was all rigged for squishing, I went ahead and did the other well too. That way, it should all be pretty well balanced out.



Next step is to get the hinges prepped and installed.

Resin Bits

Since I had some troubles with the side detail mold, I thought it would be prudent to approach the larger molds with a keen eye towards preservation. For all I know, the mold is going to completey crumble upon my first pull.

With that in mind, I set about making some resin castings of the smaller detail pieces. My thought process being that the finer details would be the first thing to go, should the mold decide to collapse. If I have resin castings of those pieces, I can always mold them and cast them up again later.

Here's one half of the mold. I sprayed in some primer to the areas I was planning on molding. Not only is the primer acting as a mold release, but it will also mean that the parts coming out of the mold are already primered.



For the record, this is a "stuido" mold. It was made for use in the movie, but was acquired by yours truly years later. Nice!

Here's the resin parts I got out of it. they all came out pretty nicely. I mixed up more resin than I needed, so I ended up brushing it into the mold, just to see what kind of results I would get. I pulled it out way to early (That's what she said - Michael Scott) and it ended up warping a bit, but I don't really mind. It was just a test.



In other news, my order of 1630 showed up today, so I'll probably do a pull from the molds shortly. Should be fun!

Mo' Hinges, Mo' Problems

Tonight was not as successful as previous nights, though I did learn a lot about the kit. Not much about myself, but that's another story.

Things started out really great. The primer I laid down last night had time to dry, and the upper body was looking really great. No seam lines to be found.



I did a little tiny bit of sanding on one corner, but I consider the upper body done and ready to go.

Now it was time to put the hinges in place. I started by cutting to size the styrene shim I had cut previously. I just used a pencil to outline the general shape, then cut it with scissors. Precision is not important for this piece.



I then taped the two halves of the tricorder together using really low tack painters tape. Great stuff. Doesn't take any of the paint with it when you remove it.



Here's how the hinge holes looked, all lined up perfectly and ready for hinges



The instructions say that you're supposed to drill out holes, and then just screw the hinges in place. This seemed like a bad idea to me. If you drill the holes wrong, the hinges will not be seated properly, and the thing might not open smoothly, or properly. So I devised the idea of using epoxy first to hold the hinges in place. Once I got them all lined up, I could then go back in and crill out the screw holes and go from there.

I'm VERY happy that I did it this way, as I discovered a flaw in the kit a short time after finishing the hinge installation.

Here's a quick tip for ya. Whenever I'm applying epoxy to small areas, I always like to have a tool to do it. If I had toothpicks handy, I would use those, but I don't. Instead, I just twist apart a popsicle stick! This provides me with a nice pointed tool.



But back to the hinges. The first one went in easily, and with no problems. It lined up perfectly along the center seam.



After a little bit of work with the dremel tool, I got the other two hinges in. It all looked good.

Things fell apart when I tried to open the tricorder up. It looks like the wells that the hinges sit in are not of equal depth. The one on the right hand side (if you're looking down at the face of the open tricorde) is about 50% deeper than the others. This means that the hinges don't quite sit level on that axis.

The good news is that the epoxy bond isn't as strong as other adhesives, so I was able to pull the whole thing apart without causing any damage.

Next time, I'm going to repair the hinge wells, and make sure they are all the same depth. I've been kicking around ideas on how to do it, and I think I've come up with a doozy. We shall see if it works tomorrow!!!

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.

More Body Work

Tonight was more of what I had shown before. I'm just doing some final clean up work on the body, trying to hide the seams, and finalizing the "bondo squish" clean up.

Frankly, it's all going VERY well. Things are really looking good.

Here's how the upper body looked after the paint had a chance to dry over night.



The bondo squish thing worked out really well, and it's very nice looking. There are a couple of tiny little imperfections that I'd like to work out. I spent some time sanding it with the 320 sand paper, and also some 400. Now that it's getting to a point where I'm happy with it, the 400 seems more appropriate.

Here's how it looked after a little bit of sanding



With it looking pretty good, I hit it with another coat of primer. Primer is really NOT a good filler tool. You should not expect to be able to hide anything but the most trivial of seams and problems with primer. Use putty for filling in cracks. Primer is best used as a way to reveal the work you still need to do.



Though the body clean up work is not completely done, I don't think I'm going to document much more of it. It's kind of on a repeat cycle at this point, and I'm sure all two of my readers are going to get tired of the same old pics. I'll probably just do one or two more passes at the body, and then move on.

Speaking of moving on, here's what the bottom half looked like when I came in tonight



As you can see, I'm still patching a couple of little imperfections. I used a file and my 400 grit sandpaper to knock down that primer, and it ended up looking like this:



Naturally, I applied some primer to it after that. During the dry time, I switched gears. Since the next op I'm going to do is attach the two body parts via the hinges, it was time to cut a couple of shims. The shim will be used to take the place of the paint that will eventually go on the body. I will temporarily place a sheet of styrene between the door and the body when I attach them to each other. That way, when they get a little thicker due to a couple coats of paint, the door will still close properly.

This gave me the opportunity to bust out one of my favorite tools of all time, the digital micrometer. I used this to measure the thickness of the styrene. The manual recommends between .010" and .020".



Once I found the proper thicknesses from my styrene stash, I just roughly cut a couple rectangles out using scissors. I will cut these to the proper size later on.



While I was still waiting for the paint to dry on the body pieces, I actually did some more work on a different project. It's an interesting project, and I think i will actually start another blog for it. I think it will make for an interesting blog, as it will use some different techniques than the ones I'm using here. Since the discovery of this website, I've found that writing a blog is much more easy than the old R2 days, so I may end up spawning multiple blogs to track different projects that are running concurrently. No decision has been made at this time, but I'm leaning towards that.

Perhaps the most exciting news for today comes all the way from the east coast. I was talking on the phone today with an old friend of mine who lives out there, and w were putting together a trade deal. On a whim, I asked him if he happened to have any cans of old Plasti-Kote paint lying around. He went out to his garage, and found out that he had TWO large cans of paint that he's willing to trade. Both 1004 and 1006, which are the main colors that were used on federation props in the later years of trek. So I'm pretty stoked, as those paints are no longer made and are impossible to find. This way, I'll be able to paint the tricorder with the accurate paints, rather than have to resort to a dupli-color "close enough" match.

That's about it for tonight. I hope to have more progress tomorrow.

Running The Conduit

The body parts are really taking shape now, so I need to always be looking ahead. One thing that is coming up soon is attaching the hinges. Before I do that, I need to make sure the wires have a place to go. So in this session, I make room for them.

The first thing I did was simply drill a few holes. I drilled two in the upper body, and two in the lower. The main thing here is making sure the hole drilled is wider than the wire itself.



The next thing I did was go in with my dremel and widen the top part of the hole. Recall that when I soldered the wires in place onto the hinges, I left a big blob of solder. Well, I have to make room for that blob. I tried using my countersink bit, but because of the way the hinge holes are shaped, it would have chopped into the sidewall. Can't have that now, can we. Here's the two halves of the body, all dremelled out.




All this dremel work reminds me that it's time for another PSA.

Kiddies, whenever you're doing ANY kind of work that involves some kind of hand tool with something that spins really fast, be sure to wear eye protection. Your eyes are one of your most precious resources. I'm guessing that building props would be a lot harder with one eye. Even if you think you're in no danger, it only takes one stray bit of resin or wood to really ruin your day.



And yes, I know those glasses look a bit dorky. And I'm sure I look a whole lot dorkier than normal when wearing them. But I figure, no matter how dorky I look, it's a lot less offensive than a dude with only one eye.

With that out of the way, I've got one more picture to show. This is the lower lid after I blasted the front with some more primer. I did a little more fill work, and a little more sanding. This is coming along well.

More Putty

Before I headed up from the garage, I did one more putty pass at the door. There was a little hole in the corner that I wanted to fix.

Here's the piece prior to sanding, but after putty was laid in.



And since I've got your attention, I thought I would show off a couple of the tools of the trade. First up is the exacto blade I use to lay in putty. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but in case you have trouble envisioning what it looks like, here's a picture.



Lastly, here's another one of my favorite tools when building resin kits. Compressed air! Before I get started each day, I blast away all of the filings, shavings, dust and powder that have accumulated while working. It's great stuff, and makes for a nice clean work space.



That's about it for now. Today is my birthday, so I've got some partying to do! Probably won't be much more time for tricorder action, but that's cool. Tomorrow should be a decent building day.

Thanks for reading!