Lit-up Plasma Rifle

Now its time to attempt a lit up plasma rifle. I had done something similar to this before, but this was before I knew how GOOD the flying bases conduct light! However, since I did this before, I already know what bits will fit what and where, if yaknow what I mean.


Here I sanded down a flying base with the sanding drum seen above, carefully sanding it down all around to get a constant diameter smaller than the plasma rifle barrel to be, and high-speed ground the rear end to its smooth finish (high speed cutting wheel actually polishes quite good and quickly)

Then I got a piece of tubular styrene, and reamed the inner diameter out a bit, so that it would fit both the sanded flying base stand, and the 3mm LED bulb.

This piece was going to be the jacket that would fill in the gap between the rifles' barrell and breach/stock... but at the end of things I discarded this piece entirely. I also ground away the rounded tip of the led... this is kindof dangerous (for the LED, not me), as the high temp and vibration can often break the LEDs' internals.


But in the meantime, I fitted everything together, and tested the light after all the abuse I put the LED through


This pic shows the real work part of the project: the barrell. I hollowed it out enough to fit the clear rod. This was time consuming, as I had to be carefull. First, I drilled through the center with a teeny drilbit, then a medium sized drillbit. Then, very carefully, I manually spun the cone shaped router bit through the barrell from rear to front, using the drillbit holes as an auto-centering guide as the teeth slowly dig through. When the tip finally got to the end, I stopped just soon enough so it wouldnt widen the barrell tip, and rounded that area out with the little ball router bit, again manually. Then, With the tiny drillbit, I drilled out the barrell tip vents (cant really call it a recoil brake, seeing as how its plasma), so that the light will come out of there too.



Here we see just how thin the barrell walls are after running the router through it. This light is shining through, and thats with the roughed up plastic rod in the way, so it shows just how good the plastic rod conducts light as well! Plus, you can see how much light shines out in weird place, like the rear! All that is no good for the purposes of this model!


Here I went with a simpler arrangement, after seeing how much room I had in the breach/stock... which was not much! I routered out a good sized cavity, for the LED taps to lie in, and drilled 2 45 degree holes through one of the mounting blocks for the wires. If you look closely, youll see a bit of whire inbetween the wires where the hole is. This is a piece of styrene strip, so that when I cram the LED and taps in the hole, they cant ever touch each other; resulting in a short, resulting in none of the lights working. Also, if you look reeeally close, youll see some milky white stuff. Thats school glue, good ol schoolpaste. I glob this on over all the taps, and cram it all in the hole so the paste fills in the voids, to mount the LED in a temporary way, and to keep things from moving around and possibly messing up inside. Also, in the pic, clearly seen, is the blacked out areas with paint... I left the li of the LED clear so that there will be a glowing ring of green at the point between the barrell and stock, which looks cool and techno. The beginning bart of the barrell is blacked out as well, to cover the LED-clear rod gap, and the clear rod is blacked out as well, but not all the way: I left the tip exposed, for lighting up the vent slots.



These two pics show the gun assembled without teh plastic rod, and this is a close match to my first attempt, and while it looks decent, it seemed... I dont know... fake somehow.


And heres the gun with the clear rod... much much better, in my opinion. plus all the stray light glitches went away, thanks to the black paint.



Now, on a final word: The wires emerge from the arm mounting block in such a way that the wiring can be continued on up the arm, within the arm and out of sight, all the way to the chest. no wires is god wires, in some peoples' opinions.



But maybe I'll have the wires clearly visible: having them serve as modelled power wires for the actual weapons, looping out and around to the reactor in the backpack.



Either way, the Plasma Rifle itself is done, for most parts.

Lit-Up Shield Generator

This time I wanted to make a fancy Shield Generator look all glitzed up. The Shield as is is just a small frisbee on the forearm, and is supposed to be a forcefield that protects the entire suit! Anyway, I mostly started this project because it seemed simple, and would look extremely cool!

So, starting from top left, and going clockwise: First is the shield generator piece itself. I smoothed away the bumbs on the bottom so it would lay flat on its forcefield. Next, is the arm the shield attaches too. I put a big hole in it (big is relative, its actually 5mm!), big enough for the next part. The LED. I trimmed the wires very close and soldered wires in a very compact little arrangement, so that it could be covered by- The rear cover. I used a Fusion Blaster to make this vented 'box' to cover up the solderpoints, and to cover the light emmiting from the base of the LED (yet still allow some to spill out of the vents I carefully carved out). Below is the forcefield itself: a large flying base. The LED wil poke through the forearm, and the base will fit over the tip of the LED, and the shield piece will cover the hole on top, and block the main beam of light. Last, the metal bit is a dremel attachment, and the only tool, besides an exacto knife to do this whole thing! (ok, and a soldering iron too) That little router bit is simply amazing! And it eats through this plastic like butter.

The plastic of the flying base conducts light so well, that the flat surfaces didnt light up at all, resulting in a bright blue ring around the edge only. That was not good enough. So, I scratched the flat surface of the base with an exacto knife, first by holding the base in my left had, and sweeping from the center hole to the edge using my wrist, then rapidly repeating that motion as my left hand spun the disk in small incements (Red arcs). Then, I reversed the procedure: holding with my right hand and sweeping with my left (Green arcs), to get a nice 'weaving lines of force web' effect, that should light up as the light passes through.

Pretty straightforeward, all in all. the result?

Hrrmmm not very awesome... wait! lets try the pic withOUT the flash...

yeah, thats much better, and more how the eye sees it. As a preview, heres the shield mounted on a suitably posed Suit, with a sneak peak at my next project: a lit-up plasma rifle!

I dont know about anyone else, but to me: this is the height of coolness, and the techno-flashy style that made me pick the Tau race to begin with! Stuff like this just wouldnt look right on any other races' models, but fits this races style perfectly!

Kitted Burst Cannon

'Kitted', as I define it for my little hobby, means 'bunch of gizmos added'. This little side project started as a 'wouldnt it be cool if..' replies in the forums... The idea was:

"Mount a motor inside a burst cannon so that the barrels spin. AND, have one spot on the gunbarrells lit up by an led, so that as the gun spins, the light looks like the gun firing."

So, I just jumped right in!

First, I had to find a motor small enough to fit in the small small area of the burst cannon 'breach', and luckilly I found a neat, cheap little toy that might do the job!

Opening it up, I isolated the motor, and tested its sie to see if it would work. (a term called kit-bash), and looking at it, the motor may juuust be small enough!

Getting the motor free, I got to planning on how to make the idea actually work in practice. Above is the general layout, in relation to the gun itself. I really would have loved to use that 5mm LED, as its bright and very very blue. But, all things tested, only a 3mm would actually fit without massively changing the appearance of the whole gun (making it look stock is one of the primary goals)

Finally, I settled on this config, and reamed the plastic out to fit the motor within. The cylinder at the back of the gun was removed, and I plan on using the body of the motor itself as part of the gun body, and would fit the cylinder over the end of the motor. The power wires for the motor will be coming out of the rear of the gun, and slung under, and back up to the 'magazine', where the wires would run up and inside the vehicle where the batteries are.

The barrells will be made of clear plastic flying base rods, which actually conduct light very well! In this pic they are roughly ruberbanded together, and need to be made with a stiff and strong centered axle, and be balanced for spinning. This was actually harder than it even sounds.

Here is the near final test fit for all the components. I got the barrell arrangement all finished, and actually quite balanced as well.. while at the same time looking not too shabby if I do say so myself... hehe You can see the green LED tucked in, and its 'wires' bent and fitted to route up the magazine feeder as planned. The superglue left some frost visible in this pic, but thats easilly scraped away after drying. The plan is to greenstuff the rear of the led and wires to blend them into the bottom of the gun: all told, the only change will be a slight bulge on the underside of the gun.

If you look closely, you can see that there are two separate pairs of wires going to these two systems: light and motor. That was because, after many attempts, there was just no way for a 3v pair of AAAs to power both at the same time. So, for purposes of this project, it had two separate battery packs.

Here is the view with the LED lit up, obviously, and you can see, with high speed grinding/polishing of the rear, how well it conducts light! I was impressed with it, to say the least! The light spills out a bit too far to the adjacent barrels and I hope to later greenstuff around the LED to make its light a tighter beam.

Finally, we come to the 'test run', where I got everything moving smoothly, and couldnt wait to fire this puppy up:

WOW that little motor is a speed demon, even with the weight of the barrels it had to spin (the axle and barrell grid weighed about twice what the motor itself did)!! Its more of a phalanx chaingun speed that a gatling gun where you can actually see the individual barrels light up in turn.... but that wont be very visible at 10000 rpm!!

Thats as far as I got with this little project, still with some things to do:

- Try adding a rheostat to the motor circuit, to see if it will slow things down without losing all of its power.

- Try to rig up a 555 flasher chip to the led circuit, to make it flash (even a flast of 40/sec would looke better)

- rig the two separate circuits through a relay so they both activate at the same time.. activated by a pushbutton switch somewhere on the vehicle model itself.

But this little project has stalled. I am in a frenzy (binge?) of lighting projects, and maybe when it comes time to mount this to a vehicle, work will progress on it. But in my head, the challenge was met, and it works.. sorta. and theres more stuff I wanna work on! So, so be it for this!