Fortune's Railgun: Part 2

Thus began one of the longest times I have ever spent carving out a prop, ever.

This next one is the gun completely carved out and wearing its first layer of gesso. The hours spent carving to this point aren't even on my radar anymore, but it was a lot over quite a period of time. Over all, the hardest part was keeping the 'layers' of the gun working and making sure it would hold up as it was. Since the gun was made smaller than the actual gun would have been, some things I had to fiddle with to make them work and look good.

Here was my first work with the scope. It is a piece of foam that I went through with a wide drill bit until a piece of PVC pipe fit into it perfectly. This would give a perfect, clean look through the scope as well as giving it internal support.

Also, you can see the piece of metal I eventually had to cut to work as the rest for the scope.

This is the first layer of a resin called "Crystal Sheen" I decided to try for this gun. Light, protective, though not as protective as resin with fiberglass cloth beneath it! It was very thick, and at times hard to work with, but no more than any other kind of resin. I 100% approve of Crystal Sheen, which you can only get online. The 1 to 1 ratio of it was quite nice.

The somewhat hilarious trigger, designed to take abuse from someone holding it with their finger wrapped around the trigger. I screwed it in only when the resin was done in that area so that it would have a very firm base.

The very first layer of paint. I chose to do the first layer as pure silver, then realized it definitely needed to be a darker color of silver, thus began the infinitely hilarious amounts of time I spent hunting down proper silver paint, mixing it with black, and painting.

As you can see, the second (third?fourth? by this point?) layer of paint came out darker.

Then began layering the paint. I wanted to give it more depth, and give it the proper look the gun actually had, so I used darker layers of paint in certain areas to do just that. It matched the look of the gun I had working with the 3D model, so I was determined to make it work. (Definitely looks better and less strange after weathering!)

Here was the final gun. There were some issues on timing of when this was to be sent I won't get into, but as always, I will give a wrap up discussion on the gun.

I am pleased with my attempt to 'weather' the gun. I wanted to make the paint job look like this has been a gun that has been around a while, suffered through a lot. A gun with a perfect paint job, without the look of weathering, just looked... kind of dull, actually. Like something was wrong with it. Hard to explain, maybe, but I hope my thought is coming through. XD

I realized I somehow didn't take a picture of the scope when it was 100% complete. You can't see it from the final angle, but there are actually pieces of orange plastic carefully mounted in the front and back of the barrel of the scope so you get the real feel of looking through a scope! (Let me tell you, it was a hysterical attempt trying to find that bright orange plastic. I finally located a weird bottle of orange cleaner at Wal-Mart that I cut up, leaked everywhere on the way home, made everything smell like orange-disgusting...! Still have it though! :3)

What I am unhappy with was my inability to get certain parts of it 100% flat. I wish I could have my awesome client ship it back, give me a month or two with it, as now I'm sure I know how to fix that problem. Other than that, which still makes me frown, I'm quite pleased with it. (I also would have loved to install glass over the computer-y parts, but that was extra time and money.)

My client was pleased, and I am as well.

Fortune's Railgun: Part 1

Those of you who know me know how I love big props, so when a client asked me to take on a several foot long railgun... I was all ready for it! First, one of my friends, upon hearing that I would be doing this from Metal Gear Solid 2, was awesome enough to loan me a PS2 CD that has all the character sketches and 3D models on it. How I needed this, as the reference pictures I could find were generally terrible! So sitting for several hours in front of my TV, I built this full sized paper replica of the gun.

It is 5 feet long, 22 inches tall, and 2 inches wide. I decided that it would be built out of foam insulation for lightness topped with resin for strength (and several dozen layers of gesso between them!)

Here was the gun mostly cut out of foam. The scope is not going to be out of foam - it will be metal and PVC pipe, but it is currently remaining there so I can sketch things out to proportions. Speaking of proportions, the proportions of the gun are slightly off. The actual gun is easily six feet long, but for the size of my client it had to be reduced in places to make it work. I believe it will be next to unnoticeable in the final product.

Now one thing you might notice are the red lines on the paper gun. Originally I thought I was going to include a wooden skeleton for stability on the inside of the foam, but realized that this solution would not work and instead resin would be used to strength the gun.

Here is the gun completely cut out. A drill and my jigsaw finished what the bandsaw was unable to.

Here the gun has been sketched onto the foam. The wiggly lines indicate where the gun needs to be carved into while the clean areas are the most up-raised parts. I am really excited about this project. Next up is carving all of those details into the gun.