Halo 4 Light Rifle

[MrJamin]

We just wrapped up our annual Midwest Secret Santa so I can post about what I made this year.

This year I was making something for Fallen

The letter I got to go off was very open ended :-D

Props and display pieces are always where it's at for me. I love expanding my prop armory, but I'd also be ecstatic by pieces that I can mount on the wall of my office. As much as I'd love a Spartan Laser or energy sword with changeable lights I also have items like all the grenades or an H3 shotgun on my wishlist, and you can never go wrong with anything Banished or Covenant. And just to throw even more options at you we have a lack of Forerunner weapons in the community; we can fix that. I hope it helps when I say that I scale my own props to ~80% scale. Whatever you come up with I'm sure I'm going to love it.

After reading through this I was wavering between the Light Rifle, or a Banished Ravager. (The title tells you which way I decided to go)

There are some nice free files for this model up on Thingiverse - Link

There is a concept art from this weapon that I really liked and decided to try to make this prop look like this for Fallen.

One thing that I wanted to try to recreate was the orange glow down the middle of the rifle.

To do this I took the model and updated it very slightly to have a 10 mm channel down the middle. I also purchased some 10 mm clear acrylic rods with the intention of trying to use these to get that effect.

I've attached a zipped 3mf file with the way I cut this model up for printing and also the modifications to be able to use the acrylic rods.

 

[MrJamin]

I completed building my Prusa Core One from a kit right before starting this project. So it was one of the first projects printed on this new machine. (which worked awesomely for this)

I somehow managed to not save any pictures of the raw prints for this. However, it was pretty straightforward to print.

After printing was complete I slowly (very slowly) started to assemble and sand the print to get it ready for primer, etc.

I took so long that it managed to get cold outside and I could no longer paint outside..

This lead me to having to get creative... Thankfully I have a heater in my garage and I can easily get it to 60 degrees.

My wife was out of town for work for a week so I took over her spot in the garage with my painting tent setup.

Inside of the big tent I have a smaller tent with a filter + fan setup. I'd put on my respirator, safety goggles, and other PPE for painting sessions.

After a 2 rounds of primer and sanding I was ready to start putting down the black primer.

 

[MrJamin]

One of the things that I love about how this was modeled is how easy it was to keep things in sub-assemblies and do very little masking when painting.

If I had left a few things off a little earlier on I could have only needed to mask two parts.

Painting for this prop was done with two main colors. I've used these before and love working with them. Both were applied using an airbrush.

The darker areas are painted with the Gunmetal and the lighter areas are done with Aluminum.

The only other paint that I ended up using was some orange for the tiny details

 

[MrJamin]

While I was working on painting (in between coats + dry time) I finally had to tackle how I was going to do the acrylic rods.

One of my initial thoughts was to paint the rods using a transparent orange paint. However, after talking with a few other people I realized that I could use the same process that other people (like N8TEBB) have used for doing visors.

After getting some iDye Poly and a large stock pot from Goodwill I was ready to give it a shot.

I follow the instructions for the iDye Poly and started making the lovely soup.

Once it was ready I put the rods in kept checking them every few minutes to see how they were looking.

In the end - I think I had the rods in the dye for ~10-15 minutes to achieve the final results.

This worked out way better than I had even hoped and it added to the final effect of the prop so much.

Link for the rods that I purchased: Amazon

 

[MrJamin]

Everything was finally ready to be assembled. After a few rounds of clamping and super glue the project was done!

I used some simple Acrylic sheet to get the sight to "float" over the main body.

 

[MrJamin]

Unfortunately, due to my procrastination I was not able to get the prop mailed to Fallen before our call to open the Secret Santa Presents.

I did have it completed and showed it on my web camera via Discord.

I now need to get it packed up really nicely and mailed to Fallen so that this prop can go to its new home.

I can't wait for Fallen to actually see it in person!

(I might try to get a few more really good pictures before I mail it :-D )

 

[MrJamin]

The astute observers will notice that I dyed 4 rods for this project. However, the prop only needs two of them...

I loved making this so much that I want to make another one for myself. I also want to modify the file a little more to ideally add some small LED lights

The lights would live in one of these two places and would hopefully illuminate the acrylic rods to really give them a glow effect.