CB's Snake Plissken presidential tracker Build from Escape from New York

[Cbstudios]

Well, Its time for another ill advised prop build.

Last year, I did a last minute Snake Plissken cosplay from Escape from New York, being a huge John Carpenter and Kurt Russell fan, it was a no brainer.
I did a last minute life clock and presidential tracker based off Sean Field's 3d print files on thingiverse, printed on my Photon S resin printer. Aside from it printing reversed, I was pretty happy with it.

BUUUUUUTTTTTT......
Resin is brittle, and I can never resist making a prop project way harder than it needs to be, so i ordered some 3mm Copper stock and stole some 3mm brass that my has had kicking around his workshop for a while, and got to swearing. I printed some FDM copies of Seans files and used those for basic measurements, cos I rather liked the fit and sizing. First up is the eagle head.

Theres not really any trick to cutting this out, It was a good while with a hacksaw, files and sandpaper. With some elbow grease I had a pretty decent eagle head. I also picked up a brass hinge and got to soldering half of the hinge on. At least thats how I hoped it would go.... after about half an hour of trying to find my butane torch, and having no luck getting my solder to bond, I used some of that aformentioned swearing and removed all the charred flux and broke out the JB weld, not how I wanted to go but screw it, I don't have the patience for this dance again. 24 hours later I could trim off the excess hinge and file it flush. Wouldn't you know it though, old JB weld didnt wanna stick and it popped right off. After a trip to the hardware store, some new brand new solder and flux and another half hour of work, I FINALLY had half a hinge soldered on. This is gonna be my major alteration to the screen accurate design, where my hinge is in a slightly different place, and my eagle doesnt have the 3 little tail feathers(?) as the original, but I went for strength of the solder joint over style. Whatever, this is my prop, not yours.

I also drilled and soldered a small piece of 2.5mm brass rod in to the back for the latch pin, this is likely just gonna be a friction closure. pics of that coming soon.

This brass will all be sanded and polished once i get closer to finishing the whole things.

 

[OzReturner]

Real metal, I appreciate that! Looks great!

 

[Cbstudios]

Real metal, I appreciate that! Looks great!

Thanks man, should make for a really nice display prop

 

[Cbstudios]

I wanna offer a word of warning for anyone attempting this. This project is dumb and I hate it. lol. I’m not a metal worker aside from attempting some fairly hobby level projects, and I don’t recommend trying something this intensive haha

So after a pretty successful start with the eagle, I turned my attention to the 3 mm copper bracelet. I knew that this was going to be a pain mainly because of the thickness of the copper, And also that it has to be a very long straight strip. My material is 100mm wide, and needed to be 45mm wide, and I decided instead of using a hacksaw or my bandsaw that does not cut true, I’d break out the 7” angle grinder. I also hate this thing, but after 10 minutes of making the manliest glitter around, I had my parts cut.

Look I’m even wearing PPE, Mom would be proud.

No pics of the next section, but I annealed the copper by blasting the hell out of it with a butane torch, and quenching it in water, and that gave me enough flexibility to start forming the cuff around a large round lump of wood, as well as some chisels and my anvil. After that we had a cuff piece roughly shaped. I also cut the square for the top box, and using a step drill hogged out the centre hole to 14mm.

Next up, I Absoltely LOADED the piece with solder to try and fill as many gaps and blasted it again to ever bond the pieces together. There’s a lot of charring and solder spills, but hey I learned to do this sort of soldering making Freddy Krueger gloves, I dunno what to tell you.

Once that was cooled I soldered the other half of the brass hinge in place and let it cool again.

From there, I did a bunch of smoothing of the edges with a dremmel and sanding drum, trimmed the excess hinge with a cut off wheel, ground down the solder spills and generally cleaned up the whole situation. I also drilled a little retention hole for the eagle’s latch pin, and finally tapped the hinge pin back into place. After that, a bit of work on a wire wheel and we’re back to a handleable level of clean, for the time being.

So…. Where to from here?
There’s a lot of surface imperfections I’d like to sand down, so that’s gonna be the next major step. Getting everything smooth and neat and even. I have some gaps between the soldered top box and the bracelet, so I’ll be filling those, I think at this stage I’m gonna give some 5min epoxy a shot and mix in a whole lot of copper powder, as much as I don’t wanna use glues, if I try and touch up the area with solder I’m likely to lose all that hard work I put in soldering the thing already, so I can make that concession.

For the red button, I’m gonna 3D print the button from Sean Fields files in translucent red resin. It’ll take 20 mins and should look pretty neat in place, and I’m happy with the dimensions.

More to come soon