Allerg3n

Congratulations Bill! I've been using your thread as a build resource - great job so far and best of luck on EIB.

Thank you sir! That's an honor coming from someone of your skill and caliber.

Quick follow up - I strapped the helmet to a box fan and let it run for two weeks. The smell has mostly dissipated. Plasti-Dip is still probably a better option.

Thanks guys! Last build update - here's pics after weathering and clearcoating. Weathering was pretty much a thinned out black acrylic wash (probably 25% acrylic, 75% water), followed up with silver drybrush, especially on raised areas. I used a gloss clearcoat because it was the only thing we had lying around. Will probably re-coat with a semigloss eventually, but it looks badass enough for me right now. She's finally done! Thanks again - moving operations to the armor assembly thread.

I'm 5' 10" ~175lbs and have purchased/started assembling ATA. It's a good kit and very straightforward; I haven't had many issues but I'm only through my biceps/arms so far. It's definitely one of the more affordable kits out there, IMO.

Thanks guys. I've had my bucket mounted to a fan for the past several days and it's still as strong as ever...I'm tempted to sand out the interior and re-spray with Plasti-Dip, since everyone seems to love it. If anyone else is looking at Rustoleum Leak Seal for something like this though, I'd avoid it!

Big [PIC HEAVY] post inbound... I'll leave descriptions a bit short and try to let the pics speak for themselves. Picking up from where my last post left off, at this point I started to build in the attachment for the legs. I carved out the front PVC piece and ran a screw through it, and sealed it with epoxy putty. Used a piece of scrap oak as the coupler for the legs. I was a dullard and did not take pics of carving. In order to make the legs functional, I drilled a 3/8" hole lengthwise through the coupler and carved a perpendicular channel into the hole. Then I used some 3/8" dowels and crafted a T-shaped axle. Some pics of the T-part: You can see the nut resting in the top of the T section below. That's what screws into the PVC above. I cut the angle brackets to the proper length and joined them together with some pins, nuts, and magic. A little sheet metal trim later and I ended up with this: Back (faces the underside of the barrel when closed) Front Magical contraption in the open position: And closed: Recessed channels on either side to allow legs to expand: Used another piece of dowel and a thumb screw to secure them to the barrel: Then, on to carving the sights. I started taking short cuts here because I'm rapidly running out of time to complete all these projects by Labor Day, and I honestly could take another 6 months just to finish the detail work on this gun. Sights were all carved out of spare balsa wood or pine. Front sight closed: Front sight open: Fun perspective shot; Rear sight closed. This is not as complete as it could be (the wing attachment to indicate distance isn't there) but I can always carve that and add it later. Rear sight open: More detail work... Carved a notch into the rest for the rear sight: Added the ejection hole (props again to Vince): Underside of leg attachment piece: I narrowed the strap attachment on the main barrel: And on to things that were irritating me. The rear metal piece had gone all wonky when I first attached it and was not sitting level with the top of the gun. So I popped it off and shimmed it up, then re-set it with JB Weld. Nice and level now. Repair from the side: The unscathed side (for reference): Corner shot of the repair: I added a "screw" disc to the top piece. This is attached to the wooden side because I need to open it to get to the electronics. Next I carved grips. This was done freehand using a Dremel (it shows), but from 5 feet away you can't much tell the difference. Did the same to the butt of the gun, and installed a disc as well. I thought this came out much better than the grips. For T-Track, I decided I didn't want to shell out major $$$ for exact replicas, since this whole build is neat but not exactly exact. So I took the more general advice to "find a rake" and dropped $10 at a hardware store. Trimmed up the pieces and attached with superglue and wire. You can also see in the following shots that I added some basswod to make the leg attachment piece stand out a bit more. This was glued on. I noticed when trying to attach the T-Tracks that I had inadvertently misaligned the barrel holes when I first drilled it several months ago. While this sucks, it's not *too* severe, and the added bonus is that my light effects will show through a bit more than they would have. The downside is that I have no place to attach a wire around the leg attachment screw because there aren't any holes in the barrel nearby: Rounded the edges on the legs: Assembled immediately prior to painting: For paint, I chose black Rustoleum Primer and Rustoleum Oil-Rubbed Bronze. I picked Rustoleum because it'll cover just about anything and I'm using a variety of materials in the build. Oil-rubbed bronze has a nice dark metallic look to it, so it comes out looking gunmetal black. Like this: The butt only got primed - I didn't use the bronze on it. I used some Raw Umber acrylic on it but it needs a bit more work to make it look like bakelite. I was a dunce and didn't tape up some of my joints, so I'll have to sand those out (that's why the front piece is crooked and the barrel doesn't screw in all the way). But all together, here's the "final" product (minus weathering and more "bake" in the bakelite): All that's left is the (minor) painting details, and a coat of semi-gloss polyurethane to protect it. It's been a long road, but boy will it be fun to troop with a working DLT-19! Thanks again everyone - looking forward to putting my armor together (hopefully it will go more quickly than this).

Quick update - finished the gun this weekend. Big post with lots of pics inbound soon. Had to make a few sacrifices (and discovered that I misaligned my barrel holes) but I think it easily passes the 5 Foot Rule and it looks pretty badass to boot. Standby...

Hi all, Quick question - I picked up a bottle of Rustoleum Leak Seal a week ago to line the interior of my ATA helmet. Application went fine - overspray came right off with some mineral spirits. The issue now though is that it's been a week and the fumes are still pretty strong when you put on the helmet...that won't do for trooping. I was wondering if anyone else has used this, and if so, how long it took for the fumes to dissipate. I'm thinking I may coat over the Rustoleum with Plasti-Dip as people have had generally good experiences with that as a liner, and hopefully it would seal in the fumes. Thoughts? Should I be more patient? I still have to build armor, so if I need to let the helmet sit for a month to air out I can go focus on other things. Thanks for your advice!

Hey skyone, Sorry for delay in replying! The batteries are Panasonic NCR18650B Protected Rechargeable 3400mAh 3.7V 18650 Lithium Batteries I ordered them from FastTech. I actually have two speakers in the ammo feed cover but they are wimpy 1.5W. I have to dial the volume on the Arduino down halfway or it blows the speakers out. I want to upgrade but there's not much room left for a bigger speaker.

Updates! Bought a new camera - it is a joy to use. Pics from now on will be taken using it, so hopefully quality should be much better. On to the build! Carved out the middle barrel sight with some scrap oak and fixed it to my PVC ring. Used JB Weld putty to form the rest of the ring. Lots of sanding - still some left to do on the surface of the sight. Started sanding/crafting the tip of the barrel. My legs won't be removable, but I'm going to try to make them at least functional. I cut/sanded part of the PVC ring to match the gun as much as possible, but unfortunately the original gun is just a bit too narrow in some places. I don't want to have to cut into the barrel underneath, so I'm leaving this for now. I also hand-filed the notches into the front section. This is the top: Here's the left side of that piece: A look down the barrel... I added a shield to cover the electronics and to imitate the feed cover tray. The mesh isn't canon but helps contain the wires and let sound through, and when it's all finished in black it shouldn't stick out too much. Here are some of the condensed electronic guts of the gun. In this first shot, (looking top down) the Arduino is buried on the bottom left, and the mp3 board from China is oriented vertically on the right. Here's the inside of the ammo feed cover box. Speaker amp, batteries, speakers. Tried brushing up some of the sanding around my inlay. Some examples: Looks ugly, but feels really smooth. Hoping it will look better when painted: And one shot for funzies: ### I found some angled shelf brackets at Lowe's that will make perfect legs. Need to assemble the attachment to fix them to the barrel. After that, minor detail work. I need a sight for the very front of the barrel, a rear sight, a carved-out depression for the spent shell casings (as discussed earlier), and grooves in my grips and on the back of the butt. Then t-track and wire. Then on to painting! Saw some cheap paint today and picked up white primer, silver undercoat, black top coat, and satin finish. The end is in sight! /also, if anyone would like me to take pics of a part of the gun with the new camera, just let me know. I can capture a lot more detail a lot more reliably now.

This is awesome, sky...I used your E11 tutorial to wire up my DLT-19. Might hold off on buying an iComm to see what sort of magic you weave with this...would kill 2 birds with 1 stone for me too, since it solves the fan/mic situation in one go.

OK - so I thought it would just be simpler to make a video showing where I'm at now and the lighting effects. Here it is on Vimeo: Here's a second one where I turned a light off so you can see a bit better: Apologies for picture/audio quality - I was using a 2012 Nexus 7 to film this and the front-facing camera isn't all that great.

OK all, time for next round of updates... lots of little things accomplished. First off, after installing threads in the barrel, I realized that I'd inadvertently made my barrel about 2" longer than it was before, *and* I'd messed up the spacing between the holes in the barrel. Oops. Off to the hardware store I went - $5 later and I had another PVC pipe and thread insert. Went ahead and glued all that up, trimmed the barrel to the proper length, and now I just need to add new holes. The gun now appropriately measures right about 48". Here's the right side: And the left side: I also reshaped the right side a bit - brought the front back and put more of an indent in back. Since my batteries should be arriving soon, I needed to make space for some of my electronics. The metal feed cover is big enough to hold batteries, amp, speakers, and wire - but my Arduino and mp3 player had no place to go. I started carving some room out in the feed section: My Dremel was my friend :-) None of this is actually wired yet, but with the lid closed you'll be able to see the chips inside. I need to come up with a good way of anchoring them so they don't rattle around, and possibly a screen to cover them and the wiring from view. I may create a shield that gives the appearance of a feed tray which also doubles as a screen for the electronics. Will probably be one of the last things I do. I cut a ring of PVC and used plumber's putty to sculpt the rest notch for the main sight (which I haven't built yet). Glued that in place and also cut and glued a thin strip of metal which will sit at the bottom of the base of the barrel: I probably need to screw this in for additional reinforcement (plus I believe the original had two screws installed here): Anyway, lots of details. Work continues down the barrel - will be drilling holes with my dad's drill press this weekend. Progress! Cheers mates!

Last night I incorporated some PVC connector pieces into the barrel components - just jamming them together and taking them apart was making them a bit too loose. Installed a 1/4" connection in the main barrel with some JB Weld PVC Putty. Cut up the female connector for the larger end of the barrel Doesn't look pretty, but works and the barrel is straight

Tiny update inbound...Now that I have all my switches working, I wanted to figure out a way to mount the weapon selector switch on the gun. I figured the safety selector would be a good place. I know the original switch would slide up and down, but I rigged up a pushbutton alternative instead. I carved the switch components out of spare balsa wood and glued a 1/8" magnet to the top of the switch. Then I carved out a furniture button and drilled a hole for a second 1/8" magnet. This way if the switch needs maintenance I can take the switch cap off to replace it. A little glue got it all in place. I did a little bit more detail work around the top edge but forgot to take pictures before I went to bed. Will update with that later.

Electronics are working! Here's a Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/86566355 Now I can focus on doing more detail work to the body of the gun without having to worry about if this will all work in the end. Nothing like a little win to keep one motivated! Thanks again for your encouragement - I'm looking forward to pulling this whole thing together. Batteries are on order and should arrive in 2 weeks, and in the meantime I'll be working on the barrel and other details. Cheers mates!

Quick update - it's been a while! I finally got through the electronics hurdle I've been facing. Basically I was having a problem with the Chinese MP3 player I ordered - it wouldn't play sounds from any of the SD chips I had. After several weeks now of trial and error and ordering different SD chips, I finally found a combo that worked. I managed to fry my audio amp in the process but have another on order from China. Should be here in the next week or two. This is big news because I'll finally be able to stuff the electronics into the gun to test it out, once I get all this stuff together. Most of the gun is sculpted and I have to do finishing details on the barrel as well as build the stand, but other than that I think I'm in good position to finish in early spring. I need to get T-Track too but that's small potatoes. In the meantime I did some more detail work... Added the on/off switch to the side of the gun: Added the bottom (non-functional) release switch: Fitted the ammo feed cover for my Li-ion batteries (haven't purchased these yet - they're expensive!): In between all this I've been working on my helmet - I will update that thread in the next week or two, as I've been slowly hand-painting all the decals on it. French Blue MM enamel paint is on its way for the tube stripes.

Yup, saw that in the datasheet. I've encoded my mp3 files at many different bit/sample rates within that range and still no dice. I might just order another chip...I'm running out of other things to troubleshoot.

Hi all, This is a pretty Arudino-specific question...Not sure if anyone out there has much experience with getting this chip (WT5001M02-28P - mp3 module) to work with Arduino, but I'm hitting a brick wall... I've got it hooked up to an Arduino Nano using the connections/code in onesky's thread:http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=150535.0 (he's also got a thread stickied to this forum) My issue is that I can't get the chip to play back a complete file for the life of me. It won't play back any WAVs (even with the sound delay onesky describes) and it will only play the first 20us of MP3 files before stopping. My busy light will only flash for the 20us duration too, so it's not like the chip is doing anything in the background from what I can tell. I've tried 3 different microSD cards, all formatted FAT. Same results each time. I've also tried encoding at different bit/sample rates with no change in behavior. For those that have used this unit, is there a particular bit/sample rate combination you find works for your MP3/WAV files? Did I get a dud chip? Thanks for any help you might have.

More progress! Sculpted more of the side: Finished details on the side/bottom for the "rail": Added the metal plate behind the top piece and the dividers in the feed section: Added the ammo feed cover box: Replaced the acorn nuts on the handle with pegs: Here's a couple shots from the front: I got my battery holder today - it almost fits into the ammo feed box (I need to do some slight trimming where I folded it on the bottom). This weekend I'm going to try to get that fitted along with some fake switches/details on the left side of the gun and along the bottom. Will probably try to drill the appropriate holes for my on/off switch as well. Moving right along! PS - if anyone is noticing things that are incorrect or small details I could correct, please feel free to point them out! I'm going for "reasonably accurate" since I didn't order a kit that was molded from an original :-D

That's awesome mate! I may try my hand at an E-11 at some point - will definitely be using your thread for reference! Looks great all around.

Great work as always! That blaster board is mighty impressive. Methinks I might design a wall mount for the DLT-19 I'm building, but we'll see if my wife will let me hang it up in public

Thanks everyone for your support & comments - this is slowly but surely coming along as I get time in the evenings (and it's keeping me from playing too many video games, so there's that). Here's what I've been up to: Trigger: I carved out two trigger pieces and sandwiched a micro momentary trigger switch between them. Drilled the wire hole and verified it worked, then pulled it out of the gun - this will be one of the last pieces I glue in place. Top: I finally found furniture buttons to use on the top piece - got them at Hobby Lobby. This piece is pretty much finished now. Left side update: Finished the left side handle and sanded the handle down to fit my grip pieces: Added the (non-functional) flange on the bottom: Carved out the side piece where the sight will be mounted. The shaded area will eventually become the location of my on/off switch - I've got to carve it out and install a sliding switch, and inlay some material that will preserve the look of the release switch on the mg-34. Right side update: Installed metal "track" for the grip handle: Carved out the side piece: I was working on forming the metal box today - got something roughly cut out but the dimensions are a bit wonky. I'm wondering how to attach it while still preserving my ability to pull the top up & open - if anyone has any thoughts I'd certainly welcome your advice. Part of me wants to do a hinge, but I'm not quite sure where I'd hide it. The other complication is that it will be stuffed with batteries, a speaker, and possibly even my arduino (if I can get it all to fit). The other thing I've been wondering over - what have people used for the selector switch on the left side of the gun (above the trigger)? I'd like to make that a functional piece to change the firing mode on the arduino, but I can't seem to find a switch like that anywhere...my thought for now is to carve/make something up to put in place there, and put a momentary switch underneath it. It'd be a bit counter-intuitive because you'd have to press it in rather than turn the selector, but I'm not set on doing it that way either. Cheers!

Updates! It's been a busy month. For starters, I got pretty much everything sanded down to the proper width. I also installed the right side grip (used an old flashlight handle) and started installing hardware/greeblies. For the most part this has been a mix of post screws and threaded rods that actually serve a purpose (like holding the thing together). You can see the Arduino Nano knockoff in the pic above. I fried the first one by not paying attention to my circuit and had to order a second (whoops). On the bright side, I successfully wrote a program that lights up the barrel and creates a cool effect. Here's a closeup of the handle/grips: I sanded the grips down from 3/4" board so they're about 1/4" thick now. I'll engrave details later with my Dremel. It's not perfect, but my goal on this build is only "rough approximation", so with a little more work I think it'll do just fine. I've also been making use of a lot of wood epoxy - in the pic above you can see where I had to epoxy my trigger guard back on after I accidentally snapped it off. Here's a shot with the top in place - that took a lot of sanding (could still use more, probably): I drilled wiring holes for the barrel lighting and worked it into my barrel attachment: And my major accomplishment so far: the track-mounted LED assembly: I used an old 2-liter soda bottle and cut sections of it out, hot glued them together, and glued posts onto it for the LED mounts. Using clear plastic helps spread the light around and you can't really see much even with the barrel full of holes (it'll have T-track in it anyway as well). Here's closeup of the front assembly for the LED track: All the LEDs are Adafuit Neopixels - at first I tried using the bare versions but they were crazy hard to solder with my big fat soldering gun. Neopixels are easy to program for - Adafruit publishes the library - and crazy easy to install. All in all, things are really coming together. I've been trying to work from the back of the gun forward in terms of adding details (there are lots!). I have all the electronics to start programming sounds, but I think I'll hold of on that for a month or two so I can maximize the nice fall weather to work outside. It gets dark early nowadays...