Stormtrooper Blaster E-11 first build.

[YamahaGTS]

Hi. I've been a member for several months but this is my first post with a project. I've been "lurking" here for a while. I'm so impressed by all of the members and the quality of work presented!

Over the long winter I decided that I wanted to build a Stormtrooper blaster for myself. I modeled mine off of THe New Hope blaster. It's not perfect but for display purposes it's close enough for me.

My blaster is made mainly of PVC, styrene plastic, some welding and stainless steel, a screwdriver bit and some optical glass from an old set of binoculars. I started my project back in November '09 and just finished last week. I only worked on it a little at a time. You know what they say?; slow and steady wins the race! There are a few areas that are not techincally perfect. The "dog ears" on the trigger guard are too low. I didn't notice until the blaster was assembled. I tried to keep the cost down by using pieces/parts that I had on my work bench.

I had lots of fun making this and learned much that I hope to use on future projects...

 

[Clutch]

Excellent job! You have some mad skillz!

 

[smoothrat]

Sweet. Nice work on that. Any WIP pictures to share?

 

[cayman shen]

VERY nice job! You work with the Blaster Builder's Club tutorials? You really aced this one!

 

[PHArchivist]

Pretty...

Well done, and welcome.

 

[dcarty]

I love me some Sterling goodness and you have nailed it!

 

[Darth Lars]

Very good work! :thumbsup
Kudos for doing it all from scratch!

 

[stormtrooperguy]

that's really impressive. nicely done!

 

[LHZ]

Nice job and very good pics BTW. :thumbsup

 

[darth_myeek]

SOLD! oh this isn't the JY. :lol

You've done a terrific job Y, and a blaster compliment from Clutch is a nice thing to have, IMO.

 

[Panaflex]

Great work. Congrats on taking your time instead of forcing it.
B.

 

[YamahaGTS]

Thanks for all of the kind comments.

I do have work in progress pictures. I'll post a few; I don't want to bore everyone with all of the fine detail!

This picture shows most of the core elements for the blaster. As you can see the body, the inner barrel and the (to be) bolt are PVC pipe. I bought the recoil spring at my Sears hardware store. The magazine, mag housing, grips & parts of the folding stock are made from 1.5mm styrene plastic. The arms of the folding stock are made from welding steel. (Luckily, my brother is a mechanic and was able to cut the steel with his pneumatic cut off wheels. I started with my Dremmel but it would have taken forever). The core of the grip is poplar wood.

These are close up shots of the mag well and magazine. I eventually cut the length of the magazine down. I wasn't happy with the longer length. The mag release is the head of a door stopper. I just cut off most of the length and glued a piece of plastic to the top and cut in the groove.

This is the blaster with some of the pieces dry fit. The front sight housing is made from thin stainless steel I had laying around. I drilled out most of the material then used my Dremmel for clean up. The stainless steel was also used for the ejector and front hole covers. The front sight itself is a screw bit. The rear sight is plastic and PVC. I used 1/8" square sheet styrene for the grips. The original grips were a diamond pattern so I know it's not perfect but it was close enough for me.

I was originally going to use just the plain PVC end cap as is but it bothered me without some detail on it. The end cap had a round end so I cut it off and cut and glued on a piece of plastic to make the end flat. I used some pieces of wood dowel, sheet styrene and a lot of putty to fabricate the ears that hold the collapsible stock in place (my stock is fixed). I used some aluminum square stock and some wedling rod to make the belt hook for the end cap. Cut the length I needed and bent the rod to shape. Again, it's not perfect but it's close enough for me.

This is the scope I fabricated out of PVC, metal washers and a cut up funnel. I had originally cut some thick lexan for the front and rear optics. I also printed out the templates for the blaster sights. But when I got it all together I did'nt really care for it. It looked "fake". I had an old set of binoculars laying around so I disassembled them for the glass optics. Wow, what a difference. The glass optics made the sight look real. That's what I ended up using. The knurled focusing knob is a speaker termial ring from a speaker wall plate.

With the lexan and printed optical sight. Didn't really care for it.

With the glass optics. Much better!

I used another piece of welding steel for the optical sight platform. Very strong and sturdy. No bounce here!

Here's the front end cap. More PVC and a metal washer. I cut the heads off of some hex head screws and glued them on.

I used the handle from a chain breaking tool to use as the charging handle. I like the diamond pattern. Again, not prototypical, but I like it.

I built a stand out of MDF and some PVC pipe. Just painted it flat black. As you can see is this picture I had tried to weather and "iron" the look of my blaster. I dry brushed it with Tamiya gun metal. It actually looked Ok. My problem was that it looked too much like a real sub machine gun and not a Star Wars blaster. I ended up spraying and fine coat of flat black on top which gave me the look I desired. I finished spraying with a semi-gloss clear. And the rest is history...

 

[mike d]

Thanks for sharing the progress-pics! I wanna build myself an E-11 now:love

 

[SurferGeek]

I'll post a few; I don't want to bore everyone with all of the fine detail!

We LIVE for the details!

Amazing build and thank you for sharing the in progress pictures.

:thumbsup

 

[Chronos]

Beautiful build!

Thanks for sharing the progress pics. I love seeing it come together.

 

[Nexus6]

Dude, that is friggin' OUTSTANDING. Holy smokes. :eek

I've always wanted to try my hand a scratch-built E-11, & I'd be totally stoked if my results were as good as this. :thumbsup :thumbsup

 

[bqk333]

Wow!!

This is really amazing!!! You should make these as kits!! I'd be interested if you decided to!! Anyway, I just wanted to say you do awesome work!!

-Bqk333

 

[gunnerk19]

Sweetly done, and in mostly metal to boot!

Me's jealous...

Guess my ROTJ version will hafta mirror yours in awesomeness....

 

[Transcoder]

fantastic scratch build! 10/10 good work... and paint job

 

[Robert McLain]

Welcome aboard You just happened to build my favorite version of the E-11, No hengstler counter and shorter M19 type scope instead of the longer and more common M38/M40 scope. Your attention to detail is amazing and the paint job is perfect. Bravo!

Robert