Farscape Comm pin
- Thread starter p00k1333
- Start date
The RPF started me thinking about making my own props again, and one of the simplest I could think of was the comm pin from Farscape - a layer of brass, aluminum screen, and red plastic, held together with two pop-rivets and a brooch-pin on back. So, here are two bits of red plastic that were big enough, relatively undamaged, and flat enough to salvage. And horses don't like red, plastic bits, so I was safe there. Sorry. Groucho keeps trying to channel through me, but the channel just isn't big enough for the ships to pass through.
After salvaging a piece from another tail light, I had three bits to work with. The third bit was textured on back, so I ground that side down with 180 grit on a rotary sander. A heat gun softened and flattened the pieces pretty well. I then wet-sanded the pieces with 320 until the scrapes, sanding marks, and most imperfections were gone. They really didn't need to be perfect, since these will be mostly covered in the final prop. Mostly.
I had no luck finding brass plate locally. I remember seeing plates at hardware stores and art/hobby supply shops before, but no, not now, when I finally had a use for them! I thought of using a brass kick-plate or push-plate, but every one I found was brass-colored aluminum - useless for my application. I had to order this on the net - a solid brass kick-plate, 6 inches by 30 inches. Ordered from Hardware and Tools at Amazon.com. Now I have plenty brass plate to play with.
A very fine sculpting wire mesh. I remembered seeing this in a local art supply store too, but as my luck runs, I couldn't find it again. Ordered from Dick Blick Art Materials. And I have plenty of wire mesh to play with too. One of the slightly blurry reference photos seemed to show a wire mesh with a brick-type pattern. I determined that this was a regular woven wire screen mesh and the brick pattern was a trick of light and shadow. Wait, what was that first thing I started with? And your car is parked where?
Using various and sundry photos, and reading other prop maker's posts, I came up with proportions of 3 inches (7.8 cm) tall by 2 inches (5 cm) wide, and drew up this template. I figured I needed to start with at least 2 communicators, because, well, you need someone to talk to! I cut off a piece of the kick-plate to make handling easier, using the templates to figure the smallest size I could squeeze two on. To. Onto. Whatever.
I glued the templates to the brass sheet with spray glue, and using a drill press, drilled out the pop-rivet holes and drilled larger holes in the cutouts. I carefully Dremeled out the cutouts to the template lines. This took the longest time of all the steps. I really need better and more types of Dremel bits! And a better drill press! And a million dollars! And another million dollars! But, I digress. No one's getting the hint anyway.
I cut away the outside edges close to the template lines, and finished up with the Dremel. The plates were then wet-sanded with 400 grit to remove a clear protective coating on the brass, and then sanded with 600 grit, 1200 grit, and 2000 grit sandpapers. I stopped short of polishing them because the original was polished at the beginning, but as the series progressed had a very tarnished appearance which I realized would be achieved by simply allowing people to handle the prop. Work reduction justified!
The red plastic was rough cut to the shape of the brass plates. One of the pieces still has a little texture left over from the diffusion pattern of the tail light. It was very difficult to grind the texture off without melting the plastic over and over again, and I didn't want to go too far and destroy the piece. I wasn't too worried about it since it would be on the back and only be seen through a wire mesh with a similar pattern. Ha! Work reduction justified again! If I keep going like this, I won't have to do a thing, and I'll be finished!
I taped the pieces together, and marked the plates and the accompanying piece of plastic with a sharpie to avoid mixing them up and to maintain the orientation. Don't you hate it when your plastic gets disoriented? Or 'dis oriental plastic gets hated? Ah, quit yer groaning!
I sanded the edges with 180 grit to remove the Dremel marks, and went through wet-sanding them with 400 grit, 600 grit, 1200 grit, and 2000 grit. Again, I stopped short of polishing them, because this way they're transparent and slightly diffuse without being reflective.
I had to search around to find the most common brooch pin type seen on the reference photos - a 38 mm x 5 mm bar pin without the turning lock. The photos also seemed to show that the pin was super-glued to the back - the white super-glue haze was obvious. But that made that "screen-used" example suspect in my opinion, because wouldn't that haze have rubbed off during extensive use and shooting? Anyway, super-glue was still my best bet, I just made sure to clean up.
The finished props! Now, a few of the things I realized I should have done differently.
- Rough cut the red plastic a little closer, so I wouldn't be throwing so much hot plastic onto my forearms with the Dremel. Ouch!
- Wait until the plastic was fitted before final sanding on all pieces. The Dremel roughened up the edges of the brass plates, and had to be re-sanded to clean up.
- Use a finer bit on the Dremel to finish the edges of the plastic. It took some time to sand out the marks on the edges, and that reduced the size of the plastic slightly, so it's no longer the same size as the brass plate.
- The pop-rivets are a little too small. All I had on hand were these small ones and some rather huge ones. I thought the small ones would be close enough. Eh, not quite.
- The mesh is too fine. I sort of estimated from the photos that the openings were about .0625 inch, and that was the listed size of this mesh. Seeing it all together... it's a little off.
- Holding it in my hand, the overall size seems a little big compared to screen captures in similar poses. I know that two of the main characters in Farscape, Ben Browder (Crichton) and Anthony Simcoe (D'Argo) are 6' 1" (1.85 m) and 6' 5" (1.96 m), respectively. Some big guys, but I'm about 6' (1.83 m) myself. It probably should be more like 2.75 inches (7 cm) x 1.75 inches (4.45 cm).
- Rough cut the red plastic a little closer, so I wouldn't be throwing so much hot plastic onto my forearms with the Dremel. Ouch!
- Wait until the plastic was fitted before final sanding on all pieces. The Dremel roughened up the edges of the brass plates, and had to be re-sanded to clean up.
- Use a finer bit on the Dremel to finish the edges of the plastic. It took some time to sand out the marks on the edges, and that reduced the size of the plastic slightly, so it's no longer the same size as the brass plate.
- The pop-rivets are a little too small. All I had on hand were these small ones and some rather huge ones. I thought the small ones would be close enough. Eh, not quite.
- The mesh is too fine. I sort of estimated from the photos that the openings were about .0625 inch, and that was the listed size of this mesh. Seeing it all together... it's a little off.
- Holding it in my hand, the overall size seems a little big compared to screen captures in similar poses. I know that two of the main characters in Farscape, Ben Browder (Crichton) and Anthony Simcoe (D'Argo) are 6' 1" (1.85 m) and 6' 5" (1.96 m), respectively. Some big guys, but I'm about 6' (1.83 m) myself. It probably should be more like 2.75 inches (7 cm) x 1.75 inches (4.45 cm).
