Razgriz25thinf
New Member
This excites me, so i'm gonna jump right in.
In my experience, no matter where you go, the vast majority of prop makers fall into two categories:
The first scratch build a mechanically or non-mechanically functional prop out of whatever materials they want.
The second take something that already exists and builds around it into what they want.
Now, neither of those are bad! They take a lot of effort and are to be commended heavily for their effort.
But a thought hit me, and that was the 3d gun printing fiasco. You can't really 3d print a gun... The materials just aren't strong enough.
But see, i play a lot of milsim airsoft. And there it is: You can't 3d print a gun, but you can 3d print an airsoft gun.
And thats what i want to do. Gut an airsoft gun for it's gearbox, hop-up, barrel, etc, and stick it inside a custom made 3d printed body, with slaved electronics tracking its fire. But that only really works for rifles, so... i can go further.
Gas Blowback. It's a method of taking Propane gas or CO2 and using it to propel the bb, while simulating a realistic recoil effect. Imagine a line of screen accurate, perfectly function airsoft replicas, with functioning blow back slides on a magnum, the bolt handle on an MA5 flying back and forth as you hold down the trigger, the strong kick of the gas system providing excellent recoil. All with functional electronics tracking the number of shots you've made.
So the basic idea for an MA5 is to take, say, a KWA LM4 gas system and bolt, magazine, all the functional bits, and hide them inside a body specially designed to contain them. The magazine would hide in an accurate "sleeve". A spacer inside all the magazines could restrict the capacity to the exact capacity of the game counterpart, 32 bbs for an MA5C for example. This would work for an M6, too, just need pistol parts. Like i said, all the normal electronics would work fine, so the existing technology from people like thatdecade wouldn't need to change at all.
Let me give a little visual demonstation.
1. trigger drops hammer
2, hammer trips valve on magazine
3. gas is ported to the barrel
4. bb is shot out of barrel
5. recoil forces the slide back, re-cocking the hammer, the recoil spring asserts itself and the slide comes back forward, chambering a new bb.
6. the gun is ready to fire again.
Like it says, all you need is the magazine, gas port, and inner barrel/hop-up assembly. everything else anyone could fabricate. So why not make it an M6C, for example? 1911 magazines would work, and just about any barrel/hop-up and gas port assembly could fit inside the body without much trouble.
Functionally, the hardest part would just be modeling them to fit perfectly. The scope of the project is not out of reach at all. Me and a friend did something similar, that really kickstarted this idea to begin with. We took the mechanical guts of a spare gun and built a custom wooden body to fit them inside(we canibalized a different gun for the rest, but we easily could have made the whole thing out of wood), not really trying to make anything in particular. And it worked, pretty much flawlessly, with the exception of magazine retention, which was not possible with the crude parts we had to work with.
Even kind of looks like a knock off pistol-caliber M395, in hindsight.
Anyways, the point is that with access to a 3d printer, ANY plastic-printing 3d printer, a talented team could churn out completely functional airsoft replicas of ANY sci-fi gun they wanted.
Comments, questions, suggestions?
In my experience, no matter where you go, the vast majority of prop makers fall into two categories:
The first scratch build a mechanically or non-mechanically functional prop out of whatever materials they want.
The second take something that already exists and builds around it into what they want.
Now, neither of those are bad! They take a lot of effort and are to be commended heavily for their effort.
But a thought hit me, and that was the 3d gun printing fiasco. You can't really 3d print a gun... The materials just aren't strong enough.
But see, i play a lot of milsim airsoft. And there it is: You can't 3d print a gun, but you can 3d print an airsoft gun.
And thats what i want to do. Gut an airsoft gun for it's gearbox, hop-up, barrel, etc, and stick it inside a custom made 3d printed body, with slaved electronics tracking its fire. But that only really works for rifles, so... i can go further.
Gas Blowback. It's a method of taking Propane gas or CO2 and using it to propel the bb, while simulating a realistic recoil effect. Imagine a line of screen accurate, perfectly function airsoft replicas, with functioning blow back slides on a magnum, the bolt handle on an MA5 flying back and forth as you hold down the trigger, the strong kick of the gas system providing excellent recoil. All with functional electronics tracking the number of shots you've made.
So the basic idea for an MA5 is to take, say, a KWA LM4 gas system and bolt, magazine, all the functional bits, and hide them inside a body specially designed to contain them. The magazine would hide in an accurate "sleeve". A spacer inside all the magazines could restrict the capacity to the exact capacity of the game counterpart, 32 bbs for an MA5C for example. This would work for an M6, too, just need pistol parts. Like i said, all the normal electronics would work fine, so the existing technology from people like thatdecade wouldn't need to change at all.
Let me give a little visual demonstation.
1. trigger drops hammer
2, hammer trips valve on magazine
3. gas is ported to the barrel
4. bb is shot out of barrel
5. recoil forces the slide back, re-cocking the hammer, the recoil spring asserts itself and the slide comes back forward, chambering a new bb.
6. the gun is ready to fire again.
Like it says, all you need is the magazine, gas port, and inner barrel/hop-up assembly. everything else anyone could fabricate. So why not make it an M6C, for example? 1911 magazines would work, and just about any barrel/hop-up and gas port assembly could fit inside the body without much trouble.
Functionally, the hardest part would just be modeling them to fit perfectly. The scope of the project is not out of reach at all. Me and a friend did something similar, that really kickstarted this idea to begin with. We took the mechanical guts of a spare gun and built a custom wooden body to fit them inside(we canibalized a different gun for the rest, but we easily could have made the whole thing out of wood), not really trying to make anything in particular. And it worked, pretty much flawlessly, with the exception of magazine retention, which was not possible with the crude parts we had to work with.
Even kind of looks like a knock off pistol-caliber M395, in hindsight.
Anyways, the point is that with access to a 3d printer, ANY plastic-printing 3d printer, a talented team could churn out completely functional airsoft replicas of ANY sci-fi gun they wanted.
Comments, questions, suggestions?