genZOD
Sr Member
I finally finished this mostly metal kit. It feels very good in your hand. I found pictures of the original prop that I followed pretty closely: LINK
You can find the kit on this site. It's offed by DaveChaos.
The kit is well made, but all of the parts needed lots of cleanup. With no ability to putty, the quality of the metal parts was very important. A few of the pieces were warped. Who knows why. The metal is pretty soft, so this wasn't a huge deal. A few small parts had this level of distortion:
The Cylinder is cast resin, not metal. This is apparently a limitation that can't be avoided. I burnished aluminum foil onto mine and then aged it with aluminum black.
The gun goes together fairly easily. The grips required quite a bit of sanding. After The overall thickness & shape was correct I used guid coats to get the insides as flat as possible. Mostly I was concerned with getting rid of the "rolled edge" look.
The kit can't come with fake bullets because of some real rule. Anyway, AMERICA, I bought real empty 44 magnum cartridges from an online auction site and printed the slug part. I used Rub-n-Buff to get a reasonably believable lead color. In the second photo you can also see where I added bit of detail along the spine of the handle.
The lighting on this kit is really cool. My exposed wire is a bit thinner than the one that comes with the kit, to make it look a bit more like the real prop. I did add a bit of heat shrink tubing to protect the top, so it's still not it's not 100% accurate, but it looks OK after everything is weathered.
Anyway, this is a really cool kit that is worth the money and the wait. In hindsight, I would have done more rounds of test fitting. I plan to build some kind of "in-world" stand for the gun. I also have extra casings so I'll make some bullets for the stand. It'll need to be sturdy though, this thing is heavy!
Most of the finished was achieved by coating the metal parts with lots of pewter black. The handles were sanded and then polished. Some grunge was added (mostly to the white wires and switch) with black and brown washes. The black plastic parts were "scuffed up" with Ebony Rub-n-Buff. That part looks good in person but is nearly invisible in pictures. I made the switch more accurate by painting it white. I also just barely managed to paint the on-off text white as well. After everything was done, I polished the whole thing with a gun lubricant/protectant. That wiped off most of the Rub-n-Buff... so after the finish dried I reapplied it. Anyway, the final result is fairly convincing & I'm happy with it.
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