Phaser 1 Kit Buildup plus MM P2 Restoration

[asalaw]

Diggin' it!

(I love phaser CAD models!)

Me too!

I poked around in the OnShape video tutorials last night, and I've learned it imports and exports virtually every CAD format there is. Blender also exports pretty much every mesh format there is. And I'm going to open-source this project once I'm happy with it (and I'm getting happier by the minute). So you'll be able to download them in a format that'll fit whatever package you use, just about, and 3D print them, have them done at Shapeways, or mess around with them yourselves! OnShape also does CAD blueprints, of course, so I'll be doing my own unless somebody beats me to it.

Again though, my focus right now is getting this hero phaser finished, so I can finally move on to other prop projects. My dream is to model just about every TOS prop and ship that strikes my fancy (including the Enterprise, D-7 and Galileo), and make them open source. I remember struggling to make my own props, lacking tools and skills, and the gouging by kitmakers (when you could find a decent kit). I remember the frustration of years of proplessness. I'd love to help end that.

Look at the 5' Millennium Falcon project. There are now freely downloadable CAD files of the whole model to scale, expertly made, and new greeblies are being made and uploaded all the time. Before too long, anyone will be able to build their own falcon, virtual or practical, at any scale, for a fraction of what it would have cost just five years ago.

The maker movement is radically democratizing this hobby, and I really want to be a part of that.

 

[asalaw]

Whew! So close to sticking a fork in this!

The side ribs came together like buttah, but the cradle dingus needs just a little more tweaking. I'm knocking off for today, just to get my perspective back. My brain is turning to jello. No, you can't have any of my brain jello.


Wow -- that hematoma jam looks delish!

So here it is, today's shameless exhibition of naked phaser pictures!

 

[asalaw]

Nothing today -- taking off to NovaLabs to meet with a guy about helping him build the 12" frame for the vac former, and then I gotta go empty out my storage unit. Because money. Back on it tomorrow.

 

[Tiberius Kirk]

Amazing! Keep up the good work.

 

[asalaw]

Amazing! Keep up the good work.

Thanks!


Sorry to be a downer, but...


Someone jumped from the 17th floor of my building tonight.

Guys, if any of you believe, if you pray, please do so for the poor suffering soul who walked off the Earth tonight.

:cry

 

[asalaw]

Sorry for the awful bummer last night. Very shocking stuff.

I'll be doing a bit more tonight, but first I have to inspect my car and get the last couple of items out of my storage unit. That'll be another 90 bucks/month back in my pocket, which is suspiciously close to the price of full membership at NovaLabs... hehehehe! :devil

And ... OMG... I'm doing the P1 yet again! WHY? WHY, GOD, WHY?


That was my favorite bowl of petunias!

Well, apart from all I learned about topology from the P2, my Makerbot print came back a little funky (pics later), and Shapeways found a wall that was too thin for comfort.
This one will go überfast, though. Shouldn't take more than a day. Have I mentioned how easy it is to work really fast in Blender once you learn it?

BTW, the prices that came up for my shells on Shapeways kinda surprised me. After auto-correcting the thin wall, the top shell alone came in at $8 or so for the crappy plastics, around $16.50 for the smoother acrylics, and $32 for the Extreme Frosted Detail plastic. YIKES! Nothing I can do about it, I'm afraid -- the shells are already as thin as they can be for printing, so cutting holes isn't gonna fly (and the top shell already has two rectangular cutouts). Turns out $2.99/cm^3 racks up pretty fast. EEK!


My despair is almost Palpatinable.

I'll do a test at some point to see if the crappy plastics (like the soft & flexible plastic) can be fixed up with Bondo or something, unless one of you intrepid souls beats me to it.

 

[asalaw]

Too pooped to work tonight after emptying the last of my storage, but thank God for that! I got super weak and vulnerable, which usually ends in a pizza tragedy. But tonight, I impulsively bought Deadpool on iTunes, which I wasn't going to bother with since the trailers were annoying. Boy, am I glad I caved in. I laughed for two solid hours and felt fantastic afterward. Who needs a fourth wall?

Really good news: I heard from the vac-form guy I helped yesterday with the 12" frame at NovaLabs. Not only do I have the first slot in the vac former class in two weeks, but he wants me to be an instructor! And only one vac-former class a month will offset almost my entire associate membership fee! The ink in my maker budget has suddenly gone from Techshop red to NovaLabs black!

Also watched the '66 Batman movie -- because some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb!

More modeling madness tomorrow. After watching two great movies, I'm ready to watch the inside of my eyelids.

 

[Replicator1701]

Nice work. I have a Master Replica' that's missing the P1. Looks like I will be ordering one from shapways when you are done.

 

[asalaw]

Nice work. I have a Master Replica' that's missing the P1. Looks like I will be ordering one from shapways when you are done.

The top shell in platinum is a steal at $8,800!

 

[asalaw]

Still some very small geometry issues to fix. I spent about 90 minutes on the little nub at the back of the cradle, and it's improved, but the topology still needs work since I'm still getting some distortions and pinching, as you can see.

I think I should be able to stick a fork in that tomorrow, mirror it, and cut the side dial and other holes. The only remaining thing to model on the pistol is the little ribs and round collar for the 10-turn knob. Still haven't decided whether to make it a separate object or grow it out from the body like I did with the ribs and cradle.

I went back through my source photos of the GJ and the two known midgrades and I think overall it's maybe 90% accurate. That last 10% isn't going to improve much, since the originals are so beat up and covered in thick paint, and the Wand took some minor liberties in cleaning those areas up. But the beauty of open-sourcing the original file is that anybody who knows Blender (did I mention that Blender is FREE?) can go in and make improvements to my work.

Back tomorrow night.

 

[asalaw]

Very nearly there. Cradle's almost perfect (some rounding off still to do), some very minor cleanup remaining overall. Very happy!

 

[Sean]

keep up the fantastic work my friend. I'm laughing and learning as you go. and if I won the lottery I probably would do something crazy like getting a platinum phaser:lol...:thumbsup

 

[asalaw]

Okay -- I thought I was done, but then I noticed I'd forgotten to build something in!

The cradle's as done as it's gonna get this go-round. It's nice and round in back, I've gotten rid of the nasty creases, and it's much smoother. I did a teeny bit of reshaping to the trigger box (nothing you'd notice easily, just rounding the profile a bit more), and was just about to proclaim it finished...



Unitl I noticed...


D'OH!

Hey, that little acrylic window's just gonna fall right outta there. Cuz I forgot to build the friggin' frame for it.

Fortunately, my regularly-scheduled 2:30 collapse just hit, and I'm gonna go make some coffee and spend the afternoon imitating the love child of a slug and a sloth, and that means The Raid 2* on iTunes. Yay!

Tonight or tomorrow, I'll do the frame.

I gotta do some thinky stuff and decide whether to build it right in, or make it a separate piece you just glue in back there. Could go either way. If I do, I'll shape the piece so there's only one way it'll fit.

Hey, gotta leave some room for improvement for version 2.0.

Also have to figure out when exactly to make these halves split 60/40 like the GJ, as opposed to 50/50 like they are now. The midgrade is 50/50. It's just a matter of what order to do things in to avoid making myself (slightly more) nuts.



*Much to my deep disappointment, while I loved The Raid the other day, I realize now that obviously Dredd is a direct ripoff of it.

 

[Sean]

Cool! do you still have A gazillion laser cut windows laying around somewhere ?

 

[asalaw]

Cool! do you still have A gazillion laser cut windows laying around somewhere ?

Yup. In a bag. Along with a gazillion laser-cut handle wafers. Different bags, though.

I'll make them available -- what am I gonna do with over 200 phaser windows? WTF was I thinking?

I'm totally not feeling like doing any more modeling today. My energy level has been pretty crappy this last week.

In other news:
Just saw The Witch. Amazing movie, but it's a very slow burner. I loved it, but I can see why genre fans were disappointed. More about a family disintigrating than a traditional horror film. SPOILER ALERT -- Kate Dickie, who played Lady Lysa Arryn in GoT, spends a fair amount of time nursing in this movie too. Just not a psycho 10-year-old.

 

[asalaw]

Need a change of pace today -- going stir-crazy from all the modeling. So I'm going to the shop (I still have two weeks paid for) to laser-cut a template so I can correctly sand down the female Hubbell plug every time (if you recall, I made a mess of that back when I made it for the JL MM pistol). I'll post the artwork. All you have to do is print it on card stock, cut it out with an xacto knife, and use it to mark your socket for sanding/grinding.

View attachment 621534View attachment 621538View attachment 621546

Wear a dust mask, bakelite is nasty. Not quite Roseann Barr and Rosie O'Donnell mudwrestling nasty, but not exactly Uma Thurman vs. ScarJo in jello, either.

 

[robn1]

When I sanded the Hubbell I expected to ruin a couple but it went pretty easy. I marked two straight lines on the end and sanded to those lines on my disc sander, took about a minute.

 

[asalaw]

Yeah, but the trick is the orientation. I didn't have mine rotated quite enough, and as a result the handle doesn't line up properly and I have to flip it around. Besides, I paid for the month, might as well use it.

 

[robn1]

I sanded the female first, getting it as close to the GJ orientation as possible. Then once it was glued into the P2, I cut down the male and attached it to the female. Then glued the handle to it making sure it was in line with the P2.

Of course get your money's worth from you membership, especially if there's anything that you can't do at the new place.

 

[asalaw]

Need a change of pace today -- going stir-crazy from all the modeling. So I'm going to the shop (I still have two weeks paid for) to laser-cut a template so I can correctly sand down the female Hubbell plug every time (if you recall, I made a mess of that back when I made it for the JL MM pistol). I'll post the artwork. All you have to do is print it on card stock, cut it out with an xacto knife, and use it to mark your socket for sanding/grinding.



Wear a dust mask, bakelite is nasty. Not quite Roseann Barr and Rosie O'Donnell mudwrestling nasty, but not exactly Uma Thurman vs. ScarJo in jello, either.