Stargate Props : Show us yours!
- Thread starter kwalsh0000
- Start date
Kerr, thanks very much for those pictures, really appreciated 
Pilot
Sr Member
My 3D-printed Telchak box piece was finally supposed to arrive today. Unfortunately, 12+ inches of snow (and still falling) got here faster than the UPS truck. This is the second time in as many weeks that I've had a delivery delayed by weather...can someone refresh my memory as to why I left San Diego? :lol
Pilot
Sr Member
And, we have delivery. There's good news and bad news...
The good news: It's here.
The bad news: Of course, it arrived broken.
Easy enough to glue it back together, but it was packed *really* poorly. It's a thin piece, somewhat fragile, and simply sandwiching it in some cardboard before boxing it would have all but guaranteed safe delivery. What they did was fill a box 3/4 full of peanuts and then set this on top of it, wrapped only in a thin layer of bubble wrap. Very shoddy.
The other bad news: All four sides have very small but distinct curves to them, and as such the model is completely unsuitable to use as a casting master. The edges will never fit together flush this way. Nothing I remember from their documentation mentions any potential warping as part of the manufacturing process. Perhaps I missed it.
I'm going to bring both issues to the attention of Shapeways...probably won't amount to anything, but I'm really kind of disappointed with the whole experience.
I think my next step is going to be to pour some rubber over it anyway and get some casts of the raised areas with the glyphs. If those come out OK, maybe I can graft them on to some nice straight-cut styrene and then maybe get a decent master made.
So, overall, not nearly as good as I was hoping. Maybe I can still make something of it...time will tell.
The good news: It's here.
The bad news: Of course, it arrived broken.
Easy enough to glue it back together, but it was packed *really* poorly. It's a thin piece, somewhat fragile, and simply sandwiching it in some cardboard before boxing it would have all but guaranteed safe delivery. What they did was fill a box 3/4 full of peanuts and then set this on top of it, wrapped only in a thin layer of bubble wrap. Very shoddy.
The other bad news: All four sides have very small but distinct curves to them, and as such the model is completely unsuitable to use as a casting master. The edges will never fit together flush this way. Nothing I remember from their documentation mentions any potential warping as part of the manufacturing process. Perhaps I missed it.
I'm going to bring both issues to the attention of Shapeways...probably won't amount to anything, but I'm really kind of disappointed with the whole experience.
I think my next step is going to be to pour some rubber over it anyway and get some casts of the raised areas with the glyphs. If those come out OK, maybe I can graft them on to some nice straight-cut styrene and then maybe get a decent master made.
So, overall, not nearly as good as I was hoping. Maybe I can still make something of it...time will tell.
Pilot
Sr Member
It definitely crossed my mind, Kerr. I'm still going to get an impression of the glyphs before I do anything else to it, but I think some gentle heat is certainly worth a try. As I've looked more closely at it, there's only one side that's really bad. The other three sides can probably be sanded straight with very little visual impact.
I'm a little less PO'd about it today than I was yesterday now that I've had time to simmer down a bit. :lol
I'm a little less PO'd about it today than I was yesterday now that I've had time to simmer down a bit. :lol
Pilot
Sr Member
Mold #2 is curing right now...mold #1 was a somewhat expected failure, because my silicone was pretty old. It mixed up OK but started to thicken up before I was even done pouring. Not great. Thankfully there's a Smooth-On dealer down in Mass, and it's only a 2 day wait for stuff to get here. The second pour went much better with fresh material, and I brushed all the details beforehand to (hopefully!) avoid bubbles. I'll de-mold in the morning and see what comes out. My hope is that I'll be able to sort of nudge the edges of the mold to straighten out those slight curves and cast up a more or less straight copy. We shall see!
If anything good comes of this, I'll quit cluttering this thread up and start my own.
The second pour went much better with fresh material, and I brushed all the details beforehand to (hopefully!) avoid bubbles. I'll de-mold in the morning and see what comes out. My hope is that I'll be able to sort of nudge the edges of the mold to straighten out those slight curves and cast up a more or less straight copy. We shall see!If anything good comes of this, I'll quit cluttering this thread up and start my own.
Looking forward to seeing how it turns out Rick. Sounds like you have the issue of the warping sorted (or close to being sorted). Zat's super soldier is in for it now
MasterDurangus
Well-Known Member
I'm looking into getting a Stargate mini-replica and a P90 Airsoft... any recommendations for where to get them?
Pilot
Sr Member
OK, I lied...gonna keep cluttering this thread up for the moment. :lol
Here are some very raw casts, very hastily taped together to get an idea of the box size:
8 inches (about 20cm) on a side doesn't seem like much until you see it all together. This is going to be somewhat larger and heavier than I expected. That's about 2lbs (a little under a kilogram) of resin.
Correcting the curved sides didn't go as well as planned, but it may still be workable. I'm going to mess around with it while I'm waiting for the "next phase of development"...
...Turns out, a friend of a friend owns an Epilog laser cutter/engraver which sits idle most of the time. The guy that owns it lets my friend use it pretty much anytime he wants, so now we're working on converting my 3D file into something that the laser machine will eat. Hopefully that'll not only solve my curve problems, but also make it MUCH easier to make all the rest of the pieces I'll need to finish the thing. We shall see!
Here are some very raw casts, very hastily taped together to get an idea of the box size:
8 inches (about 20cm) on a side doesn't seem like much until you see it all together. This is going to be somewhat larger and heavier than I expected. That's about 2lbs (a little under a kilogram) of resin.
Correcting the curved sides didn't go as well as planned, but it may still be workable. I'm going to mess around with it while I'm waiting for the "next phase of development"...
...Turns out, a friend of a friend owns an Epilog laser cutter/engraver which sits idle most of the time. The guy that owns it lets my friend use it pretty much anytime he wants, so now we're working on converting my 3D file into something that the laser machine will eat. Hopefully that'll not only solve my curve problems, but also make it MUCH easier to make all the rest of the pieces I'll need to finish the thing. We shall see!
Alright I've got something done that I'm very excited about. It's not official to the Stargate franchise but I've wanted to do something like this for a while. We all know that SG-1 makes heavy use of C4 whenever it's convenient, but then I stopped and wondered about something. What did the unofficial Russian offworld teams use during season 4 when they had the gate they salvaged from the bottom of the ocean? That's how this came about.
Semtex is a soviet bloc type explosive, it only makes sense that a Russian team would use it for their demolition charges. So I looked up the details and copied what I could, and changed things that needed it. I used the standard SG-1 layout for the C4 blocks and just translated the information into Russian using one of those online translator programs.
Why the red paper? Semtex, unlike other plastic explosives, is known for being colorful. Whereas C4 would be off-white semtex is red, orange, yellow or even black.
Semtex is a soviet bloc type explosive, it only makes sense that a Russian team would use it for their demolition charges. So I looked up the details and copied what I could, and changed things that needed it. I used the standard SG-1 layout for the C4 blocks and just translated the information into Russian using one of those online translator programs.
Why the red paper? Semtex, unlike other plastic explosives, is known for being colorful. Whereas C4 would be off-white semtex is red, orange, yellow or even black.
Charles Kline
Sr Member
Has anyone built a replica of the small round c4 detonator? (the one with the lights)
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