A Glitch in teh Matrix -A ReBoot Guardian Keytool Build

[Snarkticon]

I finally cracked open my wallet and bought a 3D-printed Glitch from Shapeways, designed by the RPF's own Technoboots (See his original thread here).

It was delivered by UPS to my garage door (which I thought was odd. Why leave it there instead of my front door?) yesterday and when I got home from work I opened the box and got right to work!

As is common with 3D printing, the pieces have a grainy, striated surface. I didn't spring the extra $3 for the "polished" version.

Here are the individual pieces. You can see where I started with the glazing putty on the main box.

And everything glazed, ready for sanding.

And sanded. I used some 220 grit to gently knock off the surface glazing. I plan to do another coat of glazing and then wet sand with some 400 grit to get a nice smooth surface on all the parts.

I intend to use these parts to mold so I can have a resin copy to actually make my prop (Yes, I got Technoboot's permission to do so. He was very gracious about it.) The 3D printed material seems a little too soft and flexible to me to use for an actual replica, plus I'd like to make some other keytools with custom configurations and I don't want to modify or destroy the original to do so.

More progress to follow as the project moves along.

 

[drknotter]

Re: A Glitch in teh Matrix -Guardian Keytool Build

Oh man, I LOVED that show! At first I thought you were talking about the movie The Matrix, but this is way, way better! The episodes where the computer would say "Game Over. User Wins." leaving a charred cube behind really freaked me out as a young kid. It made me want to purposely lose at the games I would play on my computer so the people inside could live. Ha! Thanks for posting this, looking forward to see how it turns out!

 

[seancoleman]

Oh man I want one of these badly!!

 

[Snarkticon]

Ha! Thanks for posting this, looking forward to see how it turns out!

No worries, thanks for looking!

I probably won't be able to get more work done on this piece until Friday evening. Hopefully I might have a minute or two before then, but my evenings are pretty busy this week and I have some more pressing projects to finish for other people as well. But I plan to work on this during downtime between steps of those other projects.

Oh man I want one of these badly!!

Stayed tuned. I'm currently in talks with Technoboots who's asked me to do a short run of replicas as long as I'll be molding this anyway. No set timeline, though on account of the aforementioned projects taking priority.

 

[Emmabellish]

My childhood....... Looks great!

 

[Technoboots]

Looking forward to seeing your progress, hen I got me copt I just went with the polished version and painted it. Looks like your copy has a better print orientation, mine wasdone at an odd angle.

 

[Snarkticon]

Thanks. Funny, you'd think they would print them all the same?

Anyway, I did get some more work done on it last night. I put down another coat of glaze and sanded it down, then laid down a coat of primer paint. It's SO much smoother now than it was before! Bonehead me didn't take any pictures, though. I'll get some tonight after I get home.

 

[Technoboots]

Nope, they tend to arrange them so they can get as many items printed at once, there are no set orientations.