Ok folks
I don't have photoshop, or whatever people use to measure distances between items up-close (I've seen Dustin do this for the Fett rifle) but I do have the updated apple photos on my laptop, which lets me draw straight lines, shapes and transfer shapes to other items.
SO
I had this realization today that seems a little dumb typing it out. Circles... the horizontal diameter is the same as the vertical diameter because... it's a circle. I thought this might be a good avenue to explore how big things are in relation to eachother. Basically, photos aren't comparable to each other because of angles and lighting and distance... but proportionally and generally within each photo you can probably draw some conclusions. I have to say none of this is exact, and I can't claim this to be uber accurate. I just wanted to see where things line up, if they do at all.
If this has been done before, I apologize.
I first took some photos from the ESB thread and just blocked out the mount for myself, to see silhouettes of the mysterious parts around the bracket. I posted them to the thread too.
That showed me
1) The mystery knob is bigger than I thought, but I don't really know how big
2) There is more weight to the idea that the mystery knob might be sitting on TOP of the current disc (ex-Thorens) There is no paint damage
around the disc on the bracket, no flat area outside the screw heads to cover them on the disc - screws sit on the
edge of the disc - and finally that the glue area in-between is
too small to match the photos we have of the disc. These 3 ideas are important and left me in a quandary designing my blaster.
If you're still with me, thanks. So I started drawing lines. I measured distances between items on the gun. I did not transfer exact measurements from one photo to another, but the relationship of parts. Like doing proportional fractions. For example: the lower edge of the front disc screw is centered on the lower piston screw. That's the purple line below. I angled all the lines to be parallel to the M19 side of the bracket, which is a good horizontal marker. At least, it's a good marker for another photo from a similar angle!
I took the straight-on magazine photo and measured the lower edge of the disc to be a little more than 1 screw head beneath the edge of the screw. Then, it's 4 1/2 of those screw heads to the top edge of the disc, so.. the diameter. I used this to get the edges of the disc drawn out, especially when we can't see it.
Here, the Purple line is the lower edge of the front screw. Green lines are the edge of the disc: I started with the screw head, measured down, and then 4 1/2 up from the bottom. Boom, edges of the disc.
The red lines I took from the "top-hat" photo, or #2. That's the observable edge of the mystery knob. Turns out it's a specific distance from the green lines on both sides. I then transferred that to picture #1 with Al Roker, proportionally.
So, I tried other parts of the gun and failed, but this seemed to do it. Random things were lining up, like relationships to the pistons and the edge of the bracket, etc. so I felt confident enough to start with the screw heads on the Magazine photo, and walk through measuring that one. The red lines are really
half-way from the purple to the green. So it did it to the bottom of the disc, and copied that distance to the top of the disc like before. And then drew a perfect circle using the M19 socket, and shift-transferred it to the red lines.
The mystery knob definitely has cut-outs for the screw heads, and covers half of the heads. There's black paint residue on most of the disc, so it had to have been painted before the knob was glued in place.
Phew...