wayouteast
Sr Member
As I'm just coming to the end of the build phase of putting together rgriesbeck's beautiful printed model of Officer K's blaster from Blade Runner 2049, and before I start painting tomorrow, I thought I'd start a 'build' thread here to keep everything together (some of these pics and descriptions have already appeared on the Project Run thread for the kit here .
The kit arrived very well packed in a big ziplock bag. The kit comes with 3 red LEDs (2 needed plus a spare), 2 small magnets to hold the removable 'slide' in place (not really needed as the fit of the part is perfect), wiriring for the electrics, a battery holder for a CR2032 3v coin cell, and a small slide switch (which lives in the above-mentioned removable slide. There also a good-sized sheet of carbon fibre vinyl wrap so plenty of opportunities for getting it right if you decide to use the wrap supplied (the actual prop carbon fibre affect seems to be a 'basketweave' pattern rather then the 'herringbone' that all available vinyl wrap seems to come in).
The blaster itself comes in 8 parts and is beautifully crisp and cleanly printed, with the serial numbers laser engraved. There's some easily stripped-away support structure that 'hides' the detail at first glance, but once that's been picked off the underlying detail is exceptional. As with any 3D printed model there's some filling and sanding to be done to achieve a really smooth finish and I debated with myself whether to smooth the (already pretty smooth) print with epoxy resin on some of the simpler shapes to speed things up a bit, but in the end I went with the more old-fashioned technique of filling and sanding each part. A few hours of effort should preserve the sharpness and detail of the original print (sometimes lost with the resin technique) and produce a fantastic end result.
One thing that surprised me slightly was the size of the blaster - it's big! Here it is with my Elfin Knights water gun conversion for comparison. You can see from this how beautifully the 2049 blaster fits together even without any cleaning up or adjustment.
The first task was to smooth out the fine striations and print lines...
The kit arrived very well packed in a big ziplock bag. The kit comes with 3 red LEDs (2 needed plus a spare), 2 small magnets to hold the removable 'slide' in place (not really needed as the fit of the part is perfect), wiriring for the electrics, a battery holder for a CR2032 3v coin cell, and a small slide switch (which lives in the above-mentioned removable slide. There also a good-sized sheet of carbon fibre vinyl wrap so plenty of opportunities for getting it right if you decide to use the wrap supplied (the actual prop carbon fibre affect seems to be a 'basketweave' pattern rather then the 'herringbone' that all available vinyl wrap seems to come in).
The blaster itself comes in 8 parts and is beautifully crisp and cleanly printed, with the serial numbers laser engraved. There's some easily stripped-away support structure that 'hides' the detail at first glance, but once that's been picked off the underlying detail is exceptional. As with any 3D printed model there's some filling and sanding to be done to achieve a really smooth finish and I debated with myself whether to smooth the (already pretty smooth) print with epoxy resin on some of the simpler shapes to speed things up a bit, but in the end I went with the more old-fashioned technique of filling and sanding each part. A few hours of effort should preserve the sharpness and detail of the original print (sometimes lost with the resin technique) and produce a fantastic end result.
One thing that surprised me slightly was the size of the blaster - it's big! Here it is with my Elfin Knights water gun conversion for comparison. You can see from this how beautifully the 2049 blaster fits together even without any cleaning up or adjustment.
The first task was to smooth out the fine striations and print lines...
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