JeffZugale
New Member
Greetings, Spartans! I'm new to making stuff, just finished an Oscillation Overthruster made for an Xmas present, which you can see here: http://www.therpf.com/showthread.php?t=253309
To finish it in time for Xmas, I had to put off working on my first Halo weapon, a Reach M6G. Here's how it's gone so far...
Grabbed a bunch of reference from online, which I'm sure you'll recognize. I brought it into Illustrator and played with the scale; the stated dimensions on Halo Wikia matched the reference best with a version at .40 S&W (10.2mm) caliber rather than the game-canon .50 magnum (12.7mm) for both barrel diameter and cartridge size in magazine, so I'm building it at that size. It's a slightly more "human" scale, but still a very large pistol. In the shot above it's the one on the right.
I made my own set of blueprints, because I like doing that, plus this was before I joined the site, heh... I parted out a frame from them, printed it out twice and spray-mounted it to 1/2" plywood. Then I drilled and cut with a jigsaw to a rough edge, then cleaned up with rasps and files by hand. One frame is for a one-off fully finished piece for me, the other is intended to make a master buck for molding and casting.
I decided to carve the muzzle block from a big block of balsa wood I had lying around. Carving the barrel slot was easy with my table-jigsaw, but the slot for the frame was a lot more difficult, requiring hand-sawing, a wood chisel and much hand-filed cleanup. Before I started carving, I realized the bump on the top of the frame would force me to cut too far into the block, so I just sliced it off level with the base of the action slide plane.
Parting out some more from my blueprints, time to make the upper side pieces. Still with 1/2" (actually it's 15/32") plywood, I cut them out with the combo-saw and cleaned up that curved bout with sanding drums that go on a drill press. I made 2 sets, then with a belt sander took them down to 11/32" thickness to match the blueprints. At this point, I stopped working on them to get the Overthruster done in time for the holidays.
In between paint passes on the Overthruster I had a lot of wait time, so I put it to happy use carving out more of the barrel block. Turned out to be difficult to drill the large hole after already cutting the slot; careful attempts with a power drill going slow were chewing the balsa in a frightening way. I switched to turning a series of drill bits by hand and then filing. Once the hole was close to size, I wrapped 80-grit sandpaper around a 9/16" dowel to finish the work. Not shown here, I then hand-drilled a 1/2" hole for the steel tube I found for the barrel - the inside diameter is almost exactly the proper size for a .40.
Hope you like it so far! I'll be working on it more tonight, update to follow soon.
To finish it in time for Xmas, I had to put off working on my first Halo weapon, a Reach M6G. Here's how it's gone so far...
Grabbed a bunch of reference from online, which I'm sure you'll recognize. I brought it into Illustrator and played with the scale; the stated dimensions on Halo Wikia matched the reference best with a version at .40 S&W (10.2mm) caliber rather than the game-canon .50 magnum (12.7mm) for both barrel diameter and cartridge size in magazine, so I'm building it at that size. It's a slightly more "human" scale, but still a very large pistol. In the shot above it's the one on the right.
I made my own set of blueprints, because I like doing that, plus this was before I joined the site, heh... I parted out a frame from them, printed it out twice and spray-mounted it to 1/2" plywood. Then I drilled and cut with a jigsaw to a rough edge, then cleaned up with rasps and files by hand. One frame is for a one-off fully finished piece for me, the other is intended to make a master buck for molding and casting.
I decided to carve the muzzle block from a big block of balsa wood I had lying around. Carving the barrel slot was easy with my table-jigsaw, but the slot for the frame was a lot more difficult, requiring hand-sawing, a wood chisel and much hand-filed cleanup. Before I started carving, I realized the bump on the top of the frame would force me to cut too far into the block, so I just sliced it off level with the base of the action slide plane.
Parting out some more from my blueprints, time to make the upper side pieces. Still with 1/2" (actually it's 15/32") plywood, I cut them out with the combo-saw and cleaned up that curved bout with sanding drums that go on a drill press. I made 2 sets, then with a belt sander took them down to 11/32" thickness to match the blueprints. At this point, I stopped working on them to get the Overthruster done in time for the holidays.
In between paint passes on the Overthruster I had a lot of wait time, so I put it to happy use carving out more of the barrel block. Turned out to be difficult to drill the large hole after already cutting the slot; careful attempts with a power drill going slow were chewing the balsa in a frightening way. I switched to turning a series of drill bits by hand and then filing. Once the hole was close to size, I wrapped 80-grit sandpaper around a 9/16" dowel to finish the work. Not shown here, I then hand-drilled a 1/2" hole for the steel tube I found for the barrel - the inside diameter is almost exactly the proper size for a .40.
Hope you like it so far! I'll be working on it more tonight, update to follow soon.