Looper Gold Bars

[Shonuff]

It's fortunate but also curious that the etching went straight down. What would have happened if the bar was placed at an angle? Would the etching be sideways?

not sure, I have the bar submerged and the etchant hits everything without a resist on it. It needs agitation or occasional brushing to get the particulates out of the way and expose fresh metal to the acid, so if tilted sideways you might just get a little bit of an angle if the particulates collect around the rim. Needless to say because of the method of constant agitation/clearing of the area the corroded bits don't stay in place long

 

[propmainiac]

Nice man! You make it or is it screen used?

3d printed many hours altering the print and finish work. Steel pipe inside for weight. Metal trigger and guard.

 

[propmainiac]

Where did you get the metal backing for that display? it’s cool.

eBay... custom car grills

 

[Shonuff]

Been a bit, my workshop is finally available again after a fair bit of flooding. I took all the 1KG pieces down to final dimension, but 1 big drawback to doing these in mass is that the 120 grit sanding belt turned all the brass I took off into a super fine powder that has now covered every inch of my shop, even with the use of a baffle. Going to have to take another bit of time away from the project now to give my entire space a thorough cleaning lest I breathe in brass dust for the foreseeable future. Need to design a better way to power sand these things :\

 

[Shonuff]

Contoured the edges and sanded down the first of the 1kg bars. Here it is up against my original for size comparison:

After looking more at the film, I'm definitely way off on the first round and won't take them to the full 8 bar set. I feel I'm closer with the 1kg version but still feel that I need to go bigger. The ratios seem right, maybe just 5% - 10% bigger. If anyone has the dimensions of the screen used gold prop please share if you can. Here's a shot also of it versus a screen used silver bar from the film:

They're pretty close and in the film the gold bars seem wider than the silver bars, maybe 1/4".
Also I'll be taking the finish before etching closer to final to see if I can get better fidelity, so wet sanding down to 1500 before painting the resist.

On the plus side the 1kg version's sanding phase is WAY faster and getting the full set done is going to be less daunting than the much larger versions.

 

[Jintosh]

So I've gotten that question/request a bit now but I've never made a run of props for sale. Just to get an idea, what price would yall actually be willing to pay for 1 and/or the full set of 8 of these?

You're supposed to create the INTEREST THREAD, and THEN ask how much people would pay in the Interest thread. You shouldn't ask about money in a normal thread. (like this one)


You need to become a Premium Member to do an Interest or Project Run.

 

[Shonuff]

You're supposed to create the INTEREST THREAD, and THEN ask how much people would pay in the Interest thread. You shouldn't ask about money in a normal thread. (like this one)
<Please fix this>

You need to become a Premium Member to do an Interest or Project Run.

Thanks for the heads up Jintosh!

 

[Jintosh]

Thanks for the heads up Jintosh!

No prob. Premiums not that expensive, really. You still have to have the minimum amount of time with TheRPF, and minimum amount of posted messages, etc.

 

[Mechanized]

Very cool build, Shonuff. Amazing work.

And just my two cent, Premium Membership is totally worth it

 

[Shonuff]

Tonight's update to the bars, I contoured the rest of the batch and tried a new sanding strategy that worked out great.

Learned a lot of lessons tonight working on these things.

• I was getting deep sanding lines on the edges from my initial shaping that were proving a pain to remove in the hand sanding phase. I made sure to remove them entirely using my spindle sander before moving on to routing the edges, which resulted in much cleaner fillets.
• I swapped out my oak makeshift router table with a laminated MDF board after a couple bars. I was finding that brass chips were getting in the grain of the oak board and scoring the bars when I was sliding it on the surface during shaping the edges, causing me to have to revisit the sanding phase to cleanup. I took the time to cut a new makeshift router table and mount my 1/4" shank router to it. This also resulted in far cleaner edges on all subsequent bars as well as a faster turnaround.
• Take breaks in between bars. Routing metal is slow work, you have to feed really slow and steady in order to get both a clean uniform cut as well as avoid catching. Moving slow however will also heat things up fast and you want to avoid letting the cutter bit heat up or it will increase likelihood of damaging the bit. Also leaning over and moving slowly is rough on the body so taking breaks in between bars to move around and let things cool down is ideal.
• I need to design a better way to mount my vacuum hose. The brass chips go everywhere and I need to think up a good solution to either containing them or directing them for better cleanup. Spending more time cleaning up the shop these days than dirtying it in the first place.

Tonight's full set with my fresh new makeshift router table.

Here you can see both a gouge free edge for the router bit's bearing to slide smoothly along as well as my shop vac which seems more of a suggestion than an actual solution.

Closeup of the bars surface after initial cleanup on my spindle sander. Even though its temp, it did leave a pretty cool surface pattern.

Next step will be hand sanding stage to blend and clean the surfaces smooth and then on to masking and etching.

 

[Townz]

Looking great! Impressive work

 

[Shonuff]

Took it to final sanding and buffed out. Now on to getting it finished with gold plating

 

[Sundowner]

I'm super impressed by these!

 

[Shonuff]

I'm super impressed by these!

Thanks man, glad they're feelin close to the actual film version

 

[Shonuff]

Finally got around to sanding all the 1 KG bars down to final (2000 grit). First coat of resist is applied. I generally do 2 coats for better protection in handling and when brushing/agitating during the etch phase. I use Black Chalkboard spray paint, found that it works really well for this. Hope to laser engrave them all tomorrow and get them etched by Wednesday.

 

[Shonuff]

Full set is engraved and ready for an acid bath

 

[Shonuff]

Loop Closed! My first set of 1KG size bars are done. Still got the last 2 in the acid bath, but these first 8 made it through pretty well.

I need to redo how I set up my acid bath for the next full round. I made stands to hold up the bars in the acid so that they would have a void underneath for the acid to etch away the metal and have the corroded bits fall away. the stands were hot glued onto the Pyrex glass container that served as the acid bath container. Problem is that I heat the acid to increase potency by suspending the Pyrex containers in water and heating that with an aquarium heater. This heat loosened the hot glue adhesion to the glass, which is poor to begin with and the stands didn't last long. Made for a sloppy scenario when it came to agitating the bath. My plan is to use a glue designed to bond to glass and to redesign the stands to be more user friendly and visible when covered in the dark viscous ferric chloride.

This project has rocked! Made a good amount of errors and constantly learning some good lessons off it, while still coming out with a decent finished product. Next up I'll be buffing these all to final and sending the full set of 10 as well as my 2 larger first versions off for gold plating. Already got new brass stock coming in to do my final true to screen sized versions, so looking forward to finishing out my full Looper Payout sets

After these are done I got something special planned regarding the silver bars too, so looking forward to the follow up as well.

 

[Shonuff]

New stock of brass arrived for the larger, screen-used size of the gold bars. Got 10 out of this slab, and had to get creative with my MC band saw as the sheet was too wide to allow for full clearance. Next up is marking out the profile of the larger version and taking it to the sander. Re-locating the sanding portion of this project to avoid getting my workshop covered in brass powder again, and also going to work on creating a good dust collection system in the new area to keep health risks down.

 

[extreme_too2]

Any progress on this project?

 

[Shonuff]

not yet. The gold plating place was shut down due to covid and work picked up (in crunch at the moment) so haven't gotten to work on this in a while. I also want to change the way I do the bar code for this next round. I think my next step when I get back on it is to make a steel stamp that I can use to either hammer or press into the brass to get the indent