I've finally completed my long in-progress build of the excellent Tip Top Workshop kit of Anders Pedersen's wonderful PKD blaster. Thanks to his generosity, the original STL files are available free on Thingiverse. Tip Top Workshop have worked with Anders to produce a pre-printed resin kit of all the parts, including a few that are only available through them. The kit comes in two options - just the resin parts, or with a 'hardware pack' containing all the screws, bolts and other fixings required to assemble the kit. There's also an add-on pack of some of the parts cast in metal. Tip Top also supply a pair of beautifully cast clear amber resin grips, which was a real incentive for me to splash out on the kit rather than print the parts myself.
I purchased the 'resin-only' kit (no hardware, since I already had some of what was required). I also bought the metal-cast upgraded parts - triggers, hammer, cylinder arm and pin(s), bushing (which is lathed from aluminium) switches, sight, weaver knob and binding post.
Having bought from Tip Top before, including their
Hellboy Samaritan, I knew the quality would be really high, and I wasn't disappointed. The parts are beautifully printed/cast, and require only the necessary minimal sanding and filing that any well-printed/cast kit requires to lose any fine layer lines, flash or printing artefacts that remain.
Ander's kit has some great functionality - the triggers are 'pullable' (although not connected to anyhting mechanically). The cylinder spins and can be swung out to load the supplied bullets. And the bolt action works too. The tolerances on the well-designed parts are deliberately really fine, so at the sanding stage, there's some fettling to do to ensure the moveable parts will still operate smoothly once there's added thickness from the priming and painting. had to judge the final fit and make the raw parts just a little bit 'looser'. The fit of all the parts, though - metal and resin - is absolutely spot on.
I laid all the parts out, along with their respective hardware bits, before drilling and tapping all the necessary holes and doing a couple of dry fits between sanding/filing sessions with increasingly finer abrasive pads. At this stage, as suggested, I also added an M10 threaded steel rod to the barrel and an M8 rod to each of the individual bullets (which are designed with exactly this in mind). This adds a nice bit of weight to the gun.
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yes, I know I fitted the sight the wrong way round in the above photos 
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I was happy with the fit. There were a couple of extra things to do before moving on to the priming and painting stage, though. I wanted to add a hammer spring, since that can clearly be seen through the grips on the original gun. Tip Top provide a metal hammer and also a small domed part that fits into a depression in the bottom of the hammer. So JB Welding this to a short length of steel rod and adding a compression spring gave me something that will be close enough when viewed through the grips.
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The kit comes with a metal weaver knob, as seen on the gun nowadays. I wanted to have the slotted screw that's seen in the same place in the movie. But I wanted to retain the option of swapping this out with the weaver knob in the future if the fancy took me. The supplied weaver knob has an M3 thread. The closest slightly domed slotted screw I could find in the UK (a fillister head screw) had a much larger shaft. So I removed that, drilled out a socket in the back of the head and JB Welded an M3 bolt in there. Now I can easily uncrew the slotted and replace it with the weaver knob if I want.
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At this point I also assembled the metal cylinder arm/sleeve/pin with the internal spring and JB Welded the sleeve to the arm so that the whole thing was one functional piece. I also JB Welded the metal cylinder switch arm to the back of the cylinder switch. The parts were all going to be painted separately, since the replica is assembled very like the actual gun, so with that the parts were all ready for a final inspection, rub down with fine steel wool, polishing and priming...
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