Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Hey I've been saving GJ pics for years and several have popped up in this thread that I've never seen before. Is there a reference for new pics available?
(Sorry for the double post)

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

sean said:

Thanks Rob. that's were I'm looking. but so far only found a sheet in china. i will keep on looking.

Sorry asalaw. don't mean to take up your thread. any update's. or Is the law getting in the way..

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I fought the law and the law won... Also true of my wife...

Not at all, where to get the materials for this stuff is as relevant as it gets! As for updates, not yet -- new gig (and I really have to get my patooty into the shower cuz I'm late now). I also have a deadline for 85 trivia questions for the Museum Of Science Fiction's upcoming app, so that's going to take my free time till Sunday night.

I usually use Online Metals. Their shipping costs are pretty high, but they have a pretty huge selection and do small orders.

Also there's Access Metals in Baltimore, if you're in the DC area. Their metal is more expensive than Online Metals, but again they do small orders, and if you go pick it up, you're paying less than Online Metals' price plus shipping.

There's also Speedy Metals, but I have yet to order from them because they always come out more expensive than Online Metals.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Thank you for the links asalaw. I will use one of them soon hopefully. one small question If I may. the ribs on the side of the handle. Is it possible to get a thickness of those? or ether a measurement from one side of the ribs to the other on the handle Itself? playing with a smaller project to work my way up to a bigger one..


I think I over think my project's.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

sean said:

Thank you for the links asalaw. I will use one of them soon hopefully. one small question If I may. the ribs on the side of the handle. Is it possible to get a thickness of those? or ether a measurement from one side of the ribs to the other on the handle Itself? playing with a smaller project to work my way up to a bigger one..


I think I over think my project's.

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Nothing wrong with that, as long as you actually do get started at some point.

I initially just measured my MM handle, and came up with 1/8" thickness and 1/4" width. The length is the same as the handle without the bottom plug, which is 3 5/16". The groove between them is also 1/4" wide.

What I did was measure the MM handle, and then compare my measurements to some pictures I had of the GJ phaser with a ruler next to it. I played around with it till I managed to match the MM measurements to the photos, which was a confirmation of sorts, but not very precise. For instance, I had no idea if the MM handle had shrunk in casting as the pistol had, which could have undermined all my other assumptions.

Later, I got a couple of actual measurements from someone, and it turned out the MM handle was spot on, and my own guesswork as a result had been very, very close. These are averages, BTW -- the original popsicle sticks are not uniform in their width, and in fact one of them is pretty wonky.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Cool bean's. thanks again asalaw.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Update, since I've been quiet...

I'm home sick (I was in the emergency room the other day), my wife is having surgery today, and we just got news of a death in the family. In other words, RL is being a massive buzzkill right now. I'll be down the rest of this week, but I do hope to get back into the shop this weekend and dive back in. Meanwhile, I'm bouncing around the boards and trying to get my jollies vicariously, and there are some great builds going around here!

Meanwhile, the downtime has given me space to think about my future builds, and I've firmed up two more.

Based on a balance of various factors such as the level of challenge, new skills to learn, old skills to upgrade, and of course general awesomeness, I've added:

3. TOS Tricorders -- I have an old HMS that I'm going to tear apart and upgrade with improved aluminum parts and Kydex shells, an while I'm at it, I'm going to scratch-build at least two heroes since I've got plenty of metal, Kydex, and parts on hand. One will have the Jewelarama, NONE of them will have rotating moires. Because that's just disgusting and evil.

4. Scratch-built studio-scale hero X-Wing -- I don't know which one yet, though I'm leaning toward Luke's Red 5, but a lot of that will come down to the quality of reference material I can gather. I've been through the RPF reference and other stuff, but I know there's more out there, so I'll be taking my time. Plus, acquiring all the donor kits will take a while, even allowing for recasting certain parts (I am NOT buying six F4Js!).

Much more distant future plans, in no particular order: 48" TOS Enterprise, 48" TMP Refit, 22" Galileo, 5' Millennium Falcon (ask me how I've solved the "where to put it" problem... go ahead.. ask... )

So there you have it.


Meanwhile, there's a very hot dispute in another thread about blue phasers. I say there's no such thing and Queen Victoria has backed me up (kind of her to rise from the grave for this, I thought). Other denizens of this board are putting up pictures of what can only be Mark English forgeries in an effort to besmirch Her Majesty's honor. So dive in. The water's highly acidic, and possibly has been peed in by third graders, but otherwise it seems fine. Pretty much.

Weigh in here.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

redshirt said:

So are you grinding the angled front edge part of the fin where it meets the P2 body on the sides?

View attachment 426076

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Sorry, I didn't see this before Tom. That's definitely the look I'm going for, though I'm likelier to do it with a file than on the grinder. I think my fins will wind up being evenly ramped rather than staggered like the hero, since getting them even seems like it might be less hassle (have I mentioned I'm REALLY desperate to get to the internals?).

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Update:

First, WOOHOO!!!! My translucent PLA filament arrived!



A whole kilo of PLA filamenty goodness! So now I can print my spacers for the fins and finally get the fin thing done.

By the way, a little filament math for you: I paid about $27 on Amazon Prime for 1000 grams of filament. At Techshop, if you use their filament, it's 25¢/gram.

So, over the life of a 1 kg spool, that's $250. That means that when this spool is gone, I will have saved myself $223. DAY-UM!!

(Now, the Techshop thing is on the honor system. There's a box by the printers, and a scale, and you drop your money in the box when you're done. Needless to say, there's going to be a lot of free-riding on that, so to keep from losing their shirts completely, they "charge" $250 for a $30 spool because they'll be lucky if they actually recover 10% of that.)

However, this is going to be a 55-hour job week for me, so I won't get to print my spacers till Friday night. But I will be putting in a long weekend at the shop, after which I absolutely expect to have a closed phaser (fins, clip, and screw) and be ready to move inside with the mechanicals. I'm using the nozzle John sent me years ago for this, so I don't need to machine it this time around. The rest of the internals are not hugely complicated, with one exception. The only thing I can anticipate seriously kicking my ass for a while is the P1 catch, but I'm 3D printing that and I have a plan B if my design doesn't work.

Finally, the P1 kit is a no-brainer. It's not at all my first one, the soldering is already done, and I figure it needs 8 - 12 hours of shop time to finish (not including dry times).

Point is, despite appearances, I think I'm rounding the corner on this build and approaching the home stretch.

I'd better be, because come April 2, I'm starting construction on the 44" Eagle come hell or high water. I think six months is long enough to finish a phaser.

Anyway, I'm WAY past my bedtime (up at 5:30 tomorrow). I'll duck in here and there to answer questions, but apart from that there won't be anything new till the end of next weekend. However, this is my last week on this gig, so next week I'm in the shop 24/7 till I get another gig. Well, 24/7 minus a law article I'm writing...

If anyone has one of those Hermione time turny-things from Prisoner of Azkaban, I could stand to borrow it for a couple of weeks. I'll return it yesterday.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Very nice day in the shop yesterday, and got a lot accomplished. Even better, almost nothing went wrong. I'd already made all my mistakes on the fins, so those went very smoothly. (If anyone knows of any mistakes I missed making, please post them here and I'll consider going back for a do-over.) Also, the screw mount for the front just came together almost without a hitch, though I may (or may not) decide to redo it. In any case, the phaser is now closed!!! WOOHOO!!

I'll write the post as soon as I can, but meanwhile, here's your teaser:



Starting to vaguely resemble a phaser!

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Well, my gig ended yesterday. That's bad news for my landlord, but great news for this build! So this week I'll have time to dig back into this and draft that article I have to turn in on Sunday. Starting today -- as soon as I'm done with this post and taking out the trash, I'm off to the shop for two straight days of phaser luvvin'. My goal for today and tomorrow is to install the top of the front window frame, cut and bend the front clip and install it, and finally, secure the nozzle by mounting the interior screw in the left side of the pistol body.

So, Sunday I went in with the goal of finally getting those fins together correctly and creating that little screw assembly in the front, and holy crap -- I got both done!!

So first, let's get the dimensions out of the way: I'm very confident now that the fins should be 0.032" aluminum (20 gauge), and the spacers should be 0.050" or 0.060" clear plastic (preferably acrylic). The source info that I have calls out 0.034" aluminum, but as far as I know that's not a standard size, and the 2/1000" discrepancy could easily be an inaccuracy in the calipers used, or user error. The acrylic I'm using is 0.050" after removing the clear plastic film, but my source calls out 0.057". Again, it could easily be that the original stuff was 0.060", and the 3/1000" discrepancy is just an error. But that's not accounting for glue thickness...

Here's the acrylic I'm using, $1.50/sheet from Skycraft Surplus.

The Wand phaser fins are slightly thicker for reasons we've already kicked around here (right or wrong), but the spacing is 0.054". But the most important factor for me is that these dimensions produce fins that look just about right:



Mind you, I haven't shaped the fins at all, just stacked and glued them, so they're not final yet, but you get the idea. Or at least I get the idea when I use my patented Phaser Beer Goggles.™

[EDIT: Very interesting development on this topic -- turns out the thicknesses discussed above are correct, including the acrylic spacers. As I said, I hadn't accounted for glue thickness. Tonight, as I was wrapping up at the shop, I finally remembered to measure the final spaces between my fins now that they were glued together. Remember, I used 0.050" acrylic spacers. But I measured anywhere between 0.054" and 0.058" on my finished fins. That means the glue thickness is significant.

As a result, I am now satisfied that the original prop used 0.032" (20 gauge standard) aluminum, and 0.050" acrylic spacers. Whatever glue they used would account for the extra space. The trivial discrepancies in our source's measurements are likely user or instrument error, IMO.] [Added 2/5/2015.]

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I created the fins with the same process I figured out above: I cut strips of aluminum at 0.906" wide on the metal shear, then used my acrylic stencils to scribe my cut lines with a scribing tool. I cut those out on the bandsaw, then filed away the excess from the inside notches using the stencils as a guide. The last shot is the only fin I had to remake from scratch, because it slipped out of my filing jig and got badly bent. I tried the hammer, but that didn't work out very well...


I number the fins 1 - 4 starting from the bottom because that's what makes sense to me. Then again, I'm also into Enya, so YMM definitely V.


Also totally into moving into her castle. I bet she has
a killer metal shop in there.

Once the fins were all cut out, it was time to prep the jig. Nothing major, just painter's tape and vaseline, a little trick I learned on my wedding night.



Finally, LET THE GLUING BEGIN!!!



I glued one step at a time, putting down a spacer, letting the epoxy cure for 5 minutes, then putting in the fin above it, letting that cure, and so forth. That prevented any slippy-sliding and misalignment, which would have been a royal pain in the ass...


Curses, I believe I've found Her Majesty's Mace. Summon
the royal pages, I need tongs and a plunger!

I also used the acrylic fins that resulted from cutting the stencils as spacers for the tines, and that kept the fins nicely parallel.



Finally, and this is pretty important -- When I was filing away the insides of the fins, I frequently checked them for fit both on the jig and on the phaser. They have to be a snug fit, because you don't want them falling off, and they hold the back end of the pistol together. I'm happy to report that I got a perfect fit this way.



The gap between the top fin and the groove on the pistol body is probably from sanding and such (I think), and I'm going to address that with some putty at some point. I'm also going to file and sand the fins to the correct contours. I left that loosey-goosey on purpose, so I'd have some room to shape them for this particular pistol. I'm not jumping right into that, though, since my goal here was just to get the phaser properly closed so I could finish the outside construction and start on the interior metal work.

Next post coming up in just a bit, and that's the screwing. I don't know about you, but that's always my favorite part.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Okay, so the screw thing...

So, I couldn't figure out whether the tab and the nut were supposed to be brass or steel (and my confidential sources are being typically confidential). From the pictures I have, it's just not clear:



Well, that is, it wasn't clear until I went looking through my pictures again, and I found a picture that was submitted for John's article in Star Trek Communicator #146 but not used. It looks an awful lot like steel to me:



But, in this replica made after he examined the original, John used a brass tab with a steel screw soldered on:



So I may very well revisit this part before I get too locked into this part of the pistol. There are a couple of other things I'm not happy with you'll see below, but for now it's doing the job of closing the phaser very well -- so I'm not sure it this is something I'll address tonight/tomorrow or not.

Also, on the original, the tab is pitched back at an angle from the floor of the pistol. I have no idea why that is, but I certainly don't want my flathead screw canted like that. I want it nice and flush, so that's one feature of the original I won't be trying to slavishly reproduce.
So, back to what I actually did...

For the hardware size, I went with a 4-40. I was going to use a 6-32, but when I looked at it on the outside of the pistol, it just seemed too big. On the original, the screw is definitely steel, and much longer than it needs to be for some reason:



For the plate, I went with 0.040" brass, since I had some scrap on hand left over from making the plate for the handle. I figured the best way to do it would be to punch a 1/8" hole in the brass piece, open the screw hole in the right location on the underside of the pistol, and screw it onto the outside so I could start eyeballing the interior fit.


I used a scribe tool to mark the rough locations of the interior walls, took it to the grinder, and got lucky the first time out:



Of course, now my hole's no longer centered...


Tell me about it...

But I just kept going -- I was gonna have a closed phaser Sunday night if it harelipped everybody on Bear Creek...


Now let's get this thing on the hump, we got some phaserin' to do!

So then I screwed it back onto the phaser and made sure to clamp it nice and tight...


Clamp it, not Clampett!!



Soooo..., back to the bandsaw, then the grinder...



Then I soldered the nut to the plate. This took a little sliding the nut around with my little sliding-stuff-around tool and part-time scriber, but I got it lined up without much trouble:



Then I just screwed it in place, dropped in a gob of JB Steel epoxy putty, and pressed it in. I wound up with the putty erupting through the bottom of the pistol because I'd hogged out a bit too much resin to accommodate the plate, but that's one of those problems that solves itself when the putty sets. As you can see, the whole thing does the job very nicely, which automatically makes it beautiful.



Finally, I had a little time left, so I decided to open the hole in front for the nozzle stem. I figured out the simplest way to locate and mark the hole:



Then I just ground it out with a burr bit and parked the nozzle in there for pictures:



The hole's very rough, but that'll get straightened out when I have the nozzle properly secured.

That's it for now -- see you again in the next few days with more!

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Scroll up -- I've added a significant edit to post #290.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Okay, guys, fast teaser -- on my way to the shop. I just got a new gig starting next week, so I'm going to have to race to get as much work done by Sunday evening as I can. Here's where I ended up last night:



I framed in the front window and created the base for the aluminum clip. However, today I have to remove the sides of the window frame, because it turns out the original doesn't have them -- that's what I get for not carefully reviewing my source photos before starting an assembly.

Main goals today: creating the aluminum clip and creating the hardware to secure the nozzle.

Catchya later!

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Looking good asalaw. shame you have to work real life stuff. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this build. small question's If I may sir. Is there any type of diagram chart etc. that shows the workings of all the springs and stuff that go Into the P1 P2? putting the P1 into the P2 extends the nozzle right? or am I wrong on that?

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Yes. That part of the build is what's going to be kicking my ass after I'm done securing the nozzle.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

but it looks like so much fun....great job so far. I look forward to seeing more of it. The level of detail is amazing. Thanks for doing this.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

The birth of a hero phaser is always so much fun to watch.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

redshirt said:

The birth of a hero phaser is always so much fun to watch.

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Hehehe... babies, not so much.

Update:

Sorry it's been so long, RL has been kicking my ass. Upside is, I'm on a decent new gig (with a funny vibe though -- if I'm still on it next week, I'll be a little surprised), and I got a very nice attaboy from the Museum for an article I'm helping them with. Downside, I'm exhausted, and ready for an extended coma, after a very stressful couple of weeks.

But it's a three-day weekend, and I aim to be in the shop on Sunday. I've sussed the problem of the front clip -- um, that is, I realized after a great deal of pain and frustration that the lazy way wouldn't work, and I'm just going to have to make a little jig to fold it properly. So Sunday I fully expect to get the clip made, and successfully secure the nozzle (using more or less the same technique I used for the little screw plate). I'll post it, warts and all (as usual), on Monday.

One thing's bumming me out though -- I have to flip my next two projects. I'm doing the tricorder(s) next starting April 2, and putting off the Eagle till after that. Simple economics. I have everything I need to make at least two hero tricorders (plus mod my old HMS one), but it's gonna take much longer than I'd hoped to assemble the bill of materials for the Eagle.

For now, though, I'm going to take my evening brain-hammer pills, curl up with Dredd (the movie, not the guy -- this ain't Fifty Shades of Gay), and enjoy Karl Urban as a WAY better Clint Eastwood than Stallone was. I mean, Stallone took off the mask. What a pµssy.

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Not much to say right now, cuz... 4 am, and exhausted. Long day at the shop, then off to a friend's Mardi Gras party, finally got home, and got the fins sanded and finished, making the last part of my target progress for today complete. Posting tomorrow, here's your teaser:

Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

Nice tease...