Re: John Long Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration
And here we go!
Last night was Dickensian. Totally the best of times and the worst of times. I felt like I was in A Star Trek Carol, with the Ghosts of Phasers Past, Present, and Future laughing their butts off at me. Revealing, though! I learned I have an amazing talent I bet no one else has. I can waste good brass like a mother***er!
Seriously though, in the end I had a very good procedure for cutting the brass to exactly the right size, annealing it, bending it, and soldering it. So, if you want to make an omelette, you gotta break a few hundred square inches of brass. Or something. Crap. I'm hungry now.
I started with one last trip to the laser cutter (well, last for the time being). I've always wanted a bag full of popsicle sticks, my birthday's coming up, and I was gonna get one. Cutting to the chase:
I'M RICH, MA!!!!
That's 60 sticks,
theoretically enough for 15 handles. But if the way I went through brass last night is any clue, I'll be lucky to get three.
And I've got the artwork nearly perfect, though the cutouts need a little nudging here and there, and at least there wasn't any wasted wood. So when I run low on sticks one far-off day (or this Saturday), I can just pop out 60 more. Long time and lots of work to get here, but from now on at least making the wood parts of the handle will be very simple, quick, and rare. One step closer to a house full of phasers!
I shot quite a bit of video last night of the process, and while I was going along I got the idea to make a short video just on making the handle, from start to finish. Since I enjoy making films as much as making TOS props, this is just going to add to the fun. I'll have it posted in the next couple of weeks (first I have to finish the handle, then I have to edit the video, and that may take a while). Of course I'll post the link to it in this thread.
For the record, after much trial and error and much scrapping of brass, the size I came up with is 3 5/16" H X 3 3/8" W. The longer side is the one that wraps around. This got me perfectly butting edges on my form, and a handle that matches the MM one as perfectly as I care to get.
Of course, these are ad-hoc numbers and not from measurements of the original. You've seen the process, so I needn't tell you that YMMV.
Most of the waste I generated was from getting the width of the brass sheets exactly right, so they'd butt up perfectly together instead of overlapping, like this:
The brass relaxed a bit in the second photo by a trivial amount because I wasn't holding it closed, but this one was actually perfectly cut. These, on the other hand, were wrong:
So were these:
In fact, I started the evening with a roll of brass 6" X 100"...
And now I'm down to this:
I decided to solder it differently from before, since I wound up with pretty crappy results (those will be in the video, unless I threw them out in frustration). I got the handle edges together by bending them slightly out of shape and putting it in the bench vise and
GENTLY squeezing it till the edges butted up correctly. It hardly takes any pressure at all to hold the shape in place in the vise, and just a teeny bit more to keep the edges butted together.
But when I soldered it, I got this crap:
This is what you get when you completely space out on cleaning your soldering surfaces and using flux. Yeah. It was
that kinda night.
So I cleaned the surfaces on both sides with a coarse sanding sponge and some Scotch-Brite.
You can use a wire brush, but I hate those. Also a wire brush bit on a Dremel will work (I have several), but I didn't feel like breaking it out and changing collets and bits, even though it would've gone quicker with the Dremel. Yeah, it was definitely
that kinda night. Then I fluxed the crap out of it and soldered.
This time, I got much better results:
Eventually I'll get it nailed down to where I can get a perfect solder along the entire length of the joint, but structurally this will do just fine. The third one came out fine as well:
It would have come out better, but I thought I'd get clever and solder it on the outside instead of the inside, and that just gave me a clumpy mess, which I had to re-do. As you'll see in the video, the easiest way I've found is to lay the solder along the joint on the
inside of the handle, and bring the torch in underneath from the
outside. This pulls the solder downward into the joint very evenly because there's room to work your flame around freely. If you're trying to put the solder on the
outside, your flame has to be
inside the tube, and that restricts your movement, causes your heat to be uneven, and leads to the crapulent result you see above. The video will show this clearly. Plus it's incredibly cool - I had the shot focused closely on the inside of the tube and you can really see what's happening.
So that's all I got done. It ain't much, but it was 8 hours of work to get there. Now that the huge brass roll has served its purpose, I'm going back to hobby sheet. It's more expensive to purchase, but it's a
LOT easier to cut to size in the sheet metal shear when you're not fighting the curl you get when drawing from a roll. I wasted a lot of brass because the curl threw off my measurements.
So that's it for last night's work, except for the video (did I mention there will be a video?). Next session, I FINALLY will assemble the first handle, including the Hubbel plug, and get it puttied up and possibly even primed. I have my tang nut, but it's the wrong size, so I'm ordering a new one today plus the matching threaded rod. Fortunately, those two parts are cheap! I like cheap.
