Sly11

Piece in place, you can see i had already started weathering the blaster.

From this image you can see there is a large gap between the inner pipe and the out side of the barrel. of coarse the real depth would only be the actual thickness of the steel barrel, so I made up a piece of plastic to take up the difference. You can see the gap that will be filled with the plastic piece.

This is were it gets fiddly, you need to slide the pipe into the barrel, then screw the lever to the pipe while it is in there. I drilled a hole in the base of the lever, then screwed a bolt into it, cut it off to the desired length. Inserted the pipe into the gun barrel, placed the lever down through the side hole and the tricky bit.....screw a nut onto the thread tight, so the lever is locked in place. Trust me when I say, you don't have much room to play around in the back of the blaster.

moving on to the spring and cocking mech, this was a little fiddly, but by no means did I go to the extent that some of the better builds on here went. bought a short piece of irrigation hose which fit inside the barrel nicely, drilled a hole to be able to screw the cocking lever to, and CA glued a washer inside. The washer is needed as you need to counter sink the lever into the tube for clearance, leaving a rather thin bonding and screwing area.

And here it is mounted with the ammo counter.

The lenses are simply laser cut CD, thanks to Oevil1, a member of my local garrison.

Now to another fun bit, the lettering. On the original scope the lettering was white, this is a really simple and effective technique to get the same look. Tools needed. 1 x white crayon, a soft cloth and a modeling knife. First rub the crayon into the groves, I like to use a reasonable force to embed it right in to the lettering. then simply, wipe it off, towards the end of the scope, this may take a bit of work, so when the friction from wiping creates a small amount of heat the wax softens and most will come off. I then lightly scrape, and i mean, lightly any surface wax that doesn't come away. Then for an added touch of realism, i like to dig a little out of some of the letters, it gives that used worn look.

It's hard to not go overboard with the weathering, but trust me, a little goes a long way, so bare this in mind, when you are at this stage of your build.

You spend a lot of time watching paint dry in this hobby, so while that was happening, i moved onto finishing the scope and weathering it plus a couple of extras. I used a dry brushing technique. (small amount of paint on brush, then get as much of it of on a piece of paper. you then lightly brush back and forth over the areas you want weathered.) this is usually the highest points and those are the ones that would come into contact if it were a real weapon and used in the real world.

I decided to do several coats on the gun barrel, Primer, Flat black, Hammer coat and then flat black top coat. I did this for weathering the final product. The barrel is a flat black. The grip and T tracks are a gloss, so first the gloss parts were painted, no masking was required for this, then once dry, I masked the gloss parts and painted the rest to be flat black.

Gluing and starting to take shape

Primer coating the parts

the folding stock will also be screwed, pinned and glued. More to come soon

Primer time, before top coats go on Also some more work in preparing other parts for assembly, the pistol grp will be pinned, screwed and glued in place.

You can see a couple of the pins, these were just cut off an old coat hanger

Time to start gluing some things together, I did pin everything, but again cant find the photos. I used 2 part epoxy resin for my bonding agent

Lets have a look how it is coming along

Testing for positioning.

The diagram on the paper underneath the power cylinders, is a pinning template for the gun grip. I must give credit to DarkCMF for this, as if not for seeing it in his build, I'm not sure how the alignment would have gone, or even how I would have attempted it in the first place.

Power cylinders mod time, grind off the resin drill holes and put in the real stuff, then cut off bolt heads and your done. you can see by my notes on the paper, i was researching Armour at the time

Drilled out the resin and placed Hex bolt in, the threaded part has been cut off using a Dremell. A little more trimming required to make it fit better