This is a project going back maybe a year, planning and wondering, you know all that pre-doing anything phase.
I'm building a small stormtrooper army's worth of costumes for use in fanfilms locally, and while the armor will come when it does I will need to arm them as well. There are a lot of excellent replicas and Sterlings out there, but multiples I cannot afford much better than one.
So I came up with a plan to make them, film-worthy ones more than actual movie-accurate.
TE once had a chopped and rebuilt Sterling, and I couldn't afford to buy it when the time came, so I made some poor man castings of certain parts. Most of them failed, but the tip and stock grip were somewhat salvageable.
I built a primary set of molds with pvc, clay, putty, and styrene pieces, the castings mentioned above and a real Sterling grip I got from Chingon. Yes....I cut it in half. (sorry!)
It had a trigger guard, didn't survive the process.
Vac'd over the primaries, packed them, started refining:
All original builds. I'm not 100% happy with them yet, but it's all a WIP. So that's the counters, tracks, clips that are about 90% done at this time. The body is also coming along nicely:
I got impatient and HAD to take a pull, just to see, and it wasn't a disaster but showed where I had a lot of work to do, and because of it the work got done.
So..next is adding the dimples to the molds for the barrel holes, smooth the surface and finish the t-track forming mold. I have more pics of early steps should anyone want to see them.
Bonuses: these will weigh NOTHING, be easy to assemble and replace should they be ruined, and will take a fall that would kill any replica 100X their cost. Not to mention that they are not blaster replicas strictly but sterlings; not wild about fleabay but hopefully any auctions I post won't get yanked.
I'm on the fence about making them all in black styrene or trying glossy ABS.
Any suggestions? They're welcome here, as these can end up as idealized as possible, not a sterling copy but what stormtrooper guns should have been to begin with; I'll leave perfect copies to better makers.
I know it shares a moniker with a famous sink knob many of us know, but I like it and am going with "Starlite blasters" if no one minds.
The chief armorer on whitearmor.net asked me to bring these to the local gatherings of troops, as they needed holster fillers and "kid safe" weapons for pictures, and I plan to have one done to carry around at Emerald City Comic Con this coming weekend. You might see it there, should you be going.
Starlites! The name you know
JJ
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The clear piece on top of it is the negative.
