Wednesday, March 12, 2008

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.

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