The Expanse: Props & Found Parts

[paulf]

That turned out great! Having made my own, I'm curious about some little details.

I think you sling decisions make perfect sense to me. I epoxied a real metal QD sling into place in the original location/side mainly for looks, with no matching one at the front. I don't know if we ever see a sling ever get used in the show. I guess I'll have to watch for it the next time I watch again.

The texture on the grey portion border at the upper rear... Did your file have that, or did you add it, or did you do like I did and fake it with paint?

Lastly, I really should add the decals to mine...

Again, really nice work!

Thanks for the kind words.

For reference, here's a photo with the QD sling attachments in place, without the 1" sling. Also, a PDF with the graphics I used. The sling itself is just one I had lying around. Like you, I epoxied the sling mount 'cups' that were metal (just sourced from Amazon) into the body. There's a small shallow cylinder cut in at the front of the body of the gun so, as you can see, that's where I decided to drill in and place/epoxy my second mount to have a second point for the sling.

There's quite a few shots of the sling in use as a single point during the scenes when the Roci crew is, with the help of the MCRN marines, escaping from the Donnager. What was odd to me is the single point attachment being on the right hand stock of the gun, and the marines using the gun right handed. From my experience the attachment should be on the left hand stock of the gun if it's being used right handed, hence my modification. Given I wanted to carry the rifle around at DragonCon, and single point slings are really for being 'combat ready' and can have the rifle bounce around a bit, I struggled for how to make a second attachment point that would be accurate to the show. Well, when rewatching the show recently, I was rewarded - there's a couple of scenes mid-season 4 where Holden has it slug across his back. Not sure how the second point attaches as that's hidden, but at least I have a plausible reason for two sling points. The one thing that didn't sit well with me was in those scenes, Holden has the gun barrel up - with my setup at DragonCon it'll always be barrel down.

Good catch on the border/surround for the gray part of the stock. The print had that as flat/untextured and I was just going to leave it, until I noticed that was textured on some show rifles. To make it textured I used truck bed liner, two coats, then painted over with the gray. The very butt of the stock is also textured with truck bed liner, but I wanted more there so I used four coats before painting with a final black.

 

[RandomMaker]

All of that makes sense to me, including the positioning of the sling swivels... And it's easy enough for me to write of any gun-handling issues with Holden, as he was like a Navy officer who was kicked out so it's amazing that he'd have any gun-handling skills at all. Plus, it's tv so don't get me started on how bad and made-up nearly all of that is. I recall one firearms instructor jokingly refer to a popular pose as the "Full Sabrina" (as in Charlie's Angels) because so many people learned from tv/movies, and those have very different requirements to real life.

Good solution with themed liner too. I just faked it with mine, applying a darker grey paint on top of a lighter grey using a sponge to deliver a mottled effect, simulating the texture. My show-used cast MCRN rifle prop *does* have texturing, and differs in some other respects from the common 3D-print model. It's also missing the charging handle, so it's not perfect like the Hero rifles either.

Thanks for including the PDF, and for the detailed reply. I do love discussing and thinking about this stuff. It's one of the ways I learn.