Oscillation Overthruster Scratch Build Xmas Present! My first replica build.

Hi everyone! Now that it's done and I've given this gift to my father-in-law, I can finally show this Oscillation Overthruster! This is my first completed prop replica build, though not the first one I started - I had to put a couple of game prop guns on hold to get this done for Xmas.

Before anything else, I'd like to first extend my most sincere thanks to morganthirteen for sharing his amazing OO build, which I referenced very very heavily, and also to docatomic whose design orthos really helped me get started with basic shape and size info. Having these guys blaze the trail was a tremendous gift, and I am deeply indebted to their generosity. Now, the pix!

"Beauty" side shots:



Top view:



Back view:



I built this mostly out of sheet styrene of various thicknesses from .010" thru 1/8", with a few metal washers, M2 screws, wood dowels and acrylic rod for the pins, assorted wire bits and some stick-on rubber "feet". It took about 120 hours to complete, because I was learning as I went... the next one will be a LOT quicker!

My father-in-law is a huge BB fan, and my wife and I both gave him BB gifts - here's the happy recipient!



Hope you like it! I had a lot of fun building it and I'm really happy with how it turned out. Stay tuned to this thread, as I photographed the entire process and I'll be posting everything unless you all yell at me to cut it out.

Excellent build. I love the watermelon plaque, too.

Looking forward to your build photos.

Cheers!

Ted.

That came out great! I still need to finish my own.

Thanks much! OK, here's how I got started...

Referencing docatomic's plans, I cut out the main side walls of the core body from 1/8" (3.2mm) sheet styrene. I also cut a number of profiles from .040" styrene to frame the part he calls "the Orb". I put those together using Micro-Mark's "Same Stuff Plastic Welder", which I learned about from a YouTube tutorial.



I tried a number of different tools to get that 9/16" circle thru the "pizza slice"-looking piece, wrecking about 6 slices before just drilling out smaller holes inside it by hand-turning a 3/16" drill bit (shortly after that I bought a pin vise!) and then cutting out the larger hole carefully with X-Actos and various small files. Next, I realized the two sides weren't quite the same size, so I taped them together, stuck 'em in the vise and trued them up better with files.



Here's a view down into the Orb frame. This section has a double curved surface - Doc's plans show it as part of a 2" sphere. The frame reflects both curvatures.



I figured I'd try a temporary assembly of the two body sides set at the body width. It wound up being a permanent assembly, worked out well.



Next up: Laboriously making a curved surface from flat sheets of plastic... sigh.

Next steps!

I went ahead and glued the perimeter walls onto the body box, then took my 1/8" styrene and started cutting bits out of it and gluing them into the orb frame until it's all chock full up:



And then I spent a good oh, maybe 12 or 15 total hours carefully sanding and filing them down to about the right curvature. Not coincidentally, not long after that I started researching belt sanders and places that might sell me 2" spheres. I cut a little gauge out of balsa wood to check the crosswise roundness.



I didn't take pix of the process of putting more parts on the main body, but it was pretty straightforward, just cutting pieces of plastic and gluing them. The raised slabs on the top planes are solid 1/8" sheet. The other assemblies are mostly .040". I test-fitted the two major pieces with another slab piece; it looked pretty good so I made various marks on both pieces for further work and stuck them together.



Now glued together, I continued sticking on more of the peripheral parts:



Here - of course, here - is where I realized I'd measured the orb parts incorrectly. Hooray! The "pizza slice" is supposed to be smaller and farther left when viewed from the bottom. You can see in the last of the previous shots that the angled slab's "back" edge aligns "inside" the slice's drilled hole. If you look at @morganthirteen 's build, it's clear that the back edge of the slab continues around the bottom of the orb uninterrupted by the slice and circle. How to resolve this, after all that work and the thing's glued together about as solidly as possible??? Answer next post! (don't hold your breath or anything, it's not that big a deal)

When last we saw our hero prop... heh Well, I messed up on the "right" edge as described above, so I had to do something to fix it. Since the amount of space I had for the next one was smaller, I wound up cutting off the wedge I'd already glued on and sanding it down to match.



Now to assemble the back side. Same stuff, just building volumes out of .040" styrene sheet. Had to use my helping hands to get the angle right on one face.



For the grille-fins, I thought I'd make a fancy jig to glue them all together at the same time, but it just didn't work the way I'd hoped. I wound up cutting and gluing on each fin individually by hand, very fiddly work. I have another idea for how to do it next time, we'll see how that goes.



At the same time, I cut out the wells on front and back with the tried-and-true drill-and-cut method.



Made lots of progress! More soon...

This is fantastic.

Hey, sorry for the delay, here's more!

Here's the front bay finished cutting out and with its floor in place, then I closed up the end gap and started with the front fins. Last pic here shows them all on.



Also finished up the back fins and then "floored" the back cutout. You can see I've been filling gaps and problems using Squadron white putty.



I was wondering where I'd get the right diameter stock for the "vent tube" that comes off the orb; I was thinking of a 9/16" dowel, but I didn't have any and didn't want to go out to the store, so I took my caliper to random cylinders around the house until I found that Prismacolor art markers have a 15mm barrel, almost the same size. I sacrificed one of the old dried-out ones I keep around for dry-mark effects.



The marker barrel is HD Polyethelene, which famously doesn't stick to much. Solution: sand it so it's got lots of nice tooth, then use Loc-Tite Plastic Epoxy. Worked great, probably the most solid joint on the object. To make the collar near the end, that's just another washer epoxied to the tube, with styrene glued on for the pierced grating and another small length of marker barrel epoxied to that. I had to fill some gaps around where the styrene meets the washer with Squadron putty. You can see I glued the other round bit onto the orb, it's made of (from base to top) an O-ring, a cabinet finish washer, another two smaller flat washers, and a little piece of 3/16" dowel at the very top.



And there we are, major construction is all complete. All the big bits are glued on and sealed up, washers and dowels and tubes and fins. Next time: wires, details

(Sorry the pix didn't stick first time! Hope it works now...)

Hi again! On to some details!

First I drilled holes for the exterior screw placements using a pin vise and 1/16" bit. There are 10 total including the 2 recessed ones on the top "right" end as seen from the "beauty" side. Then, using bits of old guitar strings, some strands of fine copper wire cut from old speaker cables, and some round styrene, I stuck a bunch of wiring into the back cutout bay. CA glue under, in and around holds it in place.



For the front, I cut some random-ish bits out of .015" styrene and stuck in 3 layers of bits, wire and guitar strings.



Following morganthirteen 's example, I just filled the "pizza slice" circle with some glue and sprinkled dirt from our backyard on it. Worked great! Next, I worked on the 3 pins, which I cut from 3/8" birch dowel. I very carefully hand-drilled the ends with first the pin vise bit, then a 3/16" standard bit, to fit acrylic rod of the same size. In the last pic you can see one stuck on the end of the rod. In the final, I didn't even glue the acrylic bits in, they press-fit very nicely. Also on the right end, you can see I carefully carved a step in the dowel so the base would fit into the washer hole, 5/16".



Not shown: when I went to drill out the recesses for the end screws, I found that I'd used only .030" styrene for that panel, which made it impossible to properly countersink the screws. I swallowed hard and proceeded to tear that whole panel off the end, but thankfully it came off clean. I replaced it with a .060" panel which is happily exactly the same depth as the screw heads. I drilled out 5/32" holes by first using the 1/16" pin vise, then hand-turning a standard bit. I glued a .040 sheet to the inner side then drilled 1/16" holes for the screw shafts, then glued the panel back in.

Physical build complete! Next post: LET'S PAINT THE DAMN THING.

Fantastic work! I love a well documented scratch build.

Thanks Nick!

OK, here's where we finish it off. Until this point, I'd done something like 115 hours of work on this thing - remember, it's my first full build attempt, and at least 80% of that time was spent thinking about *how* to do things and then trying stuff that maybe didn't work. I'm sure the next one will take a fraction of the time! All the following work was done in about 4 hours spread over 2 days on the weekend before Xmas, so I could gift it.

First I masked off the cutout bays, then I used duct tape to stick it to a long dowel via the "exhaust tube". I sprayed it down with RustOLeum auto primer in dark grey.



After that was dry I took off the dowel and sprayed the tailpipe bit to match. Then, time for the first sand-down using 220 grit paper and sponge block.



At this point, of course, it started raining, so I couldn't paint outside anymore. Problem: I didn't have a paint booth! So, using a cardboard box, hot glue, duct tape, a piece of HVAC filter, a small Vornado hi-speed fan and a couple of plastic trash bags, I made one in about 20 minutes.



The plastic bags were duct-taped around the window (out of shot) to exhaust the fumes to the outdoors. It worked very well! Next, a second coat of primer, which was clean enough to not need more sanding. Once dry, I hit it with a light coat of matte clear. Next I sprayed the whole thing with metallic silver.



The silver is actually a very thin single coat, which allows the primer to show through. I thought that was a nice effect, it looks quite a bit darker than a steel finish - more like tungsten carbide. I then used Rub-N-Buff gold to hand-decorate the washers and the bit on the orb, and also painted the base ring of the orb bit by hand with gloss black.Once again I very lightly coated with matte clear to set the gold finish. When that was dry, I masked off the gold bits with blue tape; I have a set of circular gasket punches, which I used to tap appropriately-sized circles out of the tape and stuck them on. Worked perfectly.



I hit the whole thing with a heavier double-coat of clear matte. While it was drying, I sprayed the pin barrels with gold paint by sticking them individually on the end of a dowel. When dry, I then Rub-N-Buffed them and stuck in the acrylic bits. I doubled over a piece of duct tape on the support board I was using, stuck all the pins on, and then hit them with 2 nice wet coats of clear lacquer for extra shiny smooth goodness.



Back to the main body, I spit-sanded with 400 grit and hand-buffed with rough and smooth cloths to smooth out the surface feel. It's not as shiny as it looks in these images. Below, I pulled off the masks over the cutouts. Next there's a good shot where you can see the recessed screws on the end plate, as well as the black rubber buttons; those were made from the little Radio Shack rubber feet you'd use for an appliance or electronics project. The ones they had in stock were too large diameter, so I used the afore-shown gasket punches to pop smaller ones out of their middles. EVA craft foam would also have worked well. I sanded the paint of the ends of the dowels they went on and used Weldwood contact cement to secure them.



I then painted the cutout parts by hand with a brush, and that was that.

Lots of work, Lots of learning lots of fun, and a nice sense of satisfaction upon delivery. Win!

Next one, I'll do things differently: the core block I'll just cut from a solid piece of wood, most likely. The orb I'll cut from 2" wooden balls I got at Michaels! That should cut base assembly time down to less than 1 hour. In putting this together, I get the feeling that the original prop maker did pretty much the same thing, and then used the cutaways from their block and ball to make the other parts. Now that I have better saws and a belt sander, I think that with proper planning I can have the main structure (apart from the fins) done in another couple of hours. I'll want to see if cutting the fin bits out of the parts cut off the ball will work well, and I also have a different styrene method in mind to try that will be fast.

I hope you've enjoyed the breakdown! Thanks for your kind words and attention.

Rather late response. I can't believe you haven't had more comments - as it's excellent work!

- nkg