Well well well... Yodajammies is showing off his fancy-pants CNC build on his M7, so I figure I'll throw my hat into the ring with my old-school "Layer MDF and hack at it with a belt sander" method!
Eric and I are also both attending DragonCon this year, but he's got a bit of a head start on me with the costume. We'll both be costuming as Shepard, but he's got quite a lot of neat tools at his disposal - shop bot, CNC stuff, and 3D modeling. Should be cool seeing each other's work in person!
Anyhow, onto the build!
I started by making blueprints in Illustrator. These are based off mostly in-game screenshots, though I did find some nice rips of the game models in 3DSMax I played around with later.
I build on the cheap, so much like my AER9 project, this will be a mostly MDF gun. The lion's share of the project was drawn out on 3/4" MDF.
Pieces were kept symmetrical by clamping them together after trimming and sanding the edges flat
My main construction idea with this project is to have a central flat piece that the top receiver and bottom grips will "slot" onto. This is the top piece being glued around a thin spine
This gives a better idea of what I'm talking about - you can see here how the bottom grip pieces fit over the profile shape of the gun.
This is a pretty good trick for getting straight edges on a weird piece like this. The angle aluminum is screwed to the frame and routed flush.
The top piece and bottom grips have since been sanded down on a belt sander to their approximate shapes. This is currently how the gun looks.
Eric is already molding his piece, so I've got some catching up to do. Make sure to watch both our threads for a little friendly prop competition!
Eric and I are also both attending DragonCon this year, but he's got a bit of a head start on me with the costume. We'll both be costuming as Shepard, but he's got quite a lot of neat tools at his disposal - shop bot, CNC stuff, and 3D modeling. Should be cool seeing each other's work in person!
Anyhow, onto the build!
I started by making blueprints in Illustrator. These are based off mostly in-game screenshots, though I did find some nice rips of the game models in 3DSMax I played around with later.
I build on the cheap, so much like my AER9 project, this will be a mostly MDF gun. The lion's share of the project was drawn out on 3/4" MDF.
Pieces were kept symmetrical by clamping them together after trimming and sanding the edges flat
My main construction idea with this project is to have a central flat piece that the top receiver and bottom grips will "slot" onto. This is the top piece being glued around a thin spine
This gives a better idea of what I'm talking about - you can see here how the bottom grip pieces fit over the profile shape of the gun.
This is a pretty good trick for getting straight edges on a weird piece like this. The angle aluminum is screwed to the frame and routed flush.
The top piece and bottom grips have since been sanded down on a belt sander to their approximate shapes. This is currently how the gun looks.
Eric is already molding his piece, so I've got some catching up to do. Make sure to watch both our threads for a little friendly prop competition!
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