thederek

Holy cow, is there a way to update the title from "threat" to "thread"? I'm such an idiot!

Aaron, your templates were perfect and more visually appealing/easy to use than a few others I saw (I suppose it's all preference). Thanks again so much for your help, and I encourage anyone to contact you for the PDF (credit to all past and prior I am forgetting who also reviewed/tweaked the plans). More pictures of my build when parts are glued using 2 part epoxy, and then I'd like to share some paint ideas.

If anyone can chime in on spring/bolt that'd be great, if not, what I"m thinking is the end cap goes on last; bolt goes in first and gets secured in place (since mine will be non-functional); spring goes in behind that; seal end cap.

Thanks Aaron! I've seen a bunch of your input around, along with about 5-7 other folks. I sanded the slot down a bit so the "grain" on top and bottom edge of the lever slot looks more smooth. I would much rather gouge out round holes with a dremel than cutting straight lines, that's for sure!

Canon.

Haha, see the one of the benefits of me being a bachelor, I suffer my own brokeness as much as I spend, no one else to give me grief, but I get it. The scope wasn't that much, still under a full resin kit really. I thought that too, but if you forget there's even a template, say the paper is BLANK, it doesn't fit around the pipe at all. I'm honestly baffled. I can't turn the paper landscape and do it heh, it's not so much about proportion as it feels about the outside diameter. Look at how snug it fits on the 1.25", printed the same exact way. Thanks for the info on even sanding the FULL resin kit. That means I'll just sand this until it fits. I will post more and keep you all updated. I'll also show the level trac/slot once that's fixed too.

So there's my stopping point for now. I have a few questions: 1.) Do you put the bolt in, then the spring, then the end cap? I haven't seen a detailed tutorial on this process, only making the spring. How do you all do it? That's the part that has me scratching my head. 2.) The barrel plug and bolt are too big for the internal diameter of the pipe, but only by a bit. Is it normal to sand it to fit?

This was "Dremel day" and to be honest, I am not Mr. Handy Man, nor have used a dremel before, but I figured I could learn it. I marked the lever slot on the template, so I could remove the paper a bit on the bottom half of the template to see what I was doing with the dremel. No point in showing dremeling pics. Everyone has their own method, and I took my sweet time since it was Easter Sunday, and was socializing with family. Here are the results. I highlighted some areas I am going to puddy to fix up a bit. All in all, I was really happy for a first time drilling/cutting with a dremel. I know, I know, I don't know what I was thinking with the 2nd hold close to the ejector port. I was thinking it needed to be a bigger hole than the level track, and quickly realized my error. I am not discouraged though, I have put some puddy on and will sand it until it looks like a uniform "U" ending track, like in the template above. Everything sanded, looking nice. Now just to fix those red circled areas.

Some of these pics show intermediary steps to even get to the "first phase" which I seemed to see a lack of in other builds (you pros jump right into the nitty gritty ). Hopefully someone can make use of them if they're browsing the web or trying their own builds. I glued the template on the pipe with a glue stick, and was liberal with it as I knew I could wash it off after I was done doing what I needed to do. I used a drill press not a hand drill as I didn't trust my skill with that. I think the drill press was easy and made short work of it when I knew what I was doing. I left the template on, drilled right through it after I made pilot holes. This is important, as if you go straight to the "correct size" 7/16" holes, you'll mangle the thing to heck and back and cause the bit to jam. For drilling the pilot holes I used a drill bit size that almost exactly matched the smaller inner circles of the template for all the muzzle holes (I just visually eyed it up, I forget the bit size, 5/32" or something?). After drilling: When it looked like this, I was horrified. I knew I could make it look a lot nicer though. Before I did that, I cut out bits of the template and used a permanent marker of where important parts should go, so that way I didn't have to work around the paper anymore. Once the pieces were marked, I removed the upper-half of the template from the barrel. Here's how I marked areas: Once the template was removed, I exacto'd out the extra flashing/scraps, and sanded until I was satisfied. I spent a lot of time on this when I then realized that the T Tracks will cover most of this. (I blame this on my history of building model tanks). Anyways, I puddied I think 3 of the holes when they came out a bit wonky. Puddy to fix some holes: The next day:

Greetings everyone. I've decided to start a build thread. I'd like to preface by saying I'm totally new to this, and read other builds for quite some time before deciding to do a pipe build. I will include some pics here and there. This will be a work in progress. I appreciate all constructive feedback, and while I'm striving for a good blaster to eventually have when my armor gets here, mine will in no no way be 100% accurate to what I see some discussions devolving into mm's and correct 1970's imported paint with pixie dust and unicorn tears. I decided to use plans provided by Aaron (usaeatt2), which he tweaked from a bunch of other people who've worked on them in the past, so kudos to all those guys. I bougth a scope from Striker which has yet to arrive (I really took the lazy route here and didn't want to attack building one from scratch), and ordered some T tracks from Marv. I will keep posting pics as time and life allows (I'm working two jobs), and any input is helpful. One of the things I got hung up on for a while was 1.25" electrical conduit PVC vs. 1.5". The paper plans I printed simply would not fold/wrap around the 1.5" tube completely as they did when I compared it to a 1.25" electrical conduit pipe. That told me the 1.5" was too large. However, now that I got my DD's resin pieces, the bolt, barrel plug, and end cap are a bit too snug to fit into the PVC pipe. We're talking just a BIT off, not a huge amount or anything. Is it normal to have to sand these components down a bit? It took me a while to get access to a drill press, and finally got a dremel, so I've finished the pipe which was a real pain in the butt, but think it came out great after some puddy repairs and a lot of sanding. I had a piece of old 1.5" electrical conduit laying around, athe pieces are actually a bit too small for a snug fit, which tells me sanding is in order. Starting a pic with comments on next post. The 1.5" diameter: The 1.25" So, I went with the 1.25".