Sunday, September 26, 2010

Entry Three: A Day at the Workshop

A Gunslinger update!

So we screwed the top and bottom together, sanded the forearm piece, then puttied up a few rough areas. After that, we took them apart again to see how the electronics would fit. This would determine where we put the hole.

 By the way...I realized after we made the full octogon that only 5 sides were actually on the arm; the rest was held on by a belt. Oops!

We realized we'd need a lathe for the wrist piece. Nagle, my handy but skeptical roommate, didn't have a lathe in his garage, so we went out to his dad's workshop to use his.


It was really cool out there; tons of tools and giant machines that did who knows what, along with scattered computer parts, scrap wood and metal...I felt like I was in Engie's workshop! He even had a welder's mask with flames on it and a pair of ear defenders just like the Safe n' Sound(red team, fuck yeah!). It was outdoors, and thankfully it was a nice, cool day, perfect for solving practical problems!

 So Nagle Sr. had all ready started rounding the block; this is how it looked when I arrived. After tapering it, we put it on this big machine that I think was called a "mill"...Nagle Jr. told me it was meant for metalwork, and was generally overkill.
We put as big a hole in it as we could, then tried to put it back on the lathe and scrape out the rest of the inside.

It wasn't bad, but we realized it wasn't going to go as deep as we needed it to. Nagle Sr. put together an impromtu L-shaped sort of drill, but unfortunately, the base wasn't stabilized enough for the weird kind of pressure it put on the piece, and it popped a piece out.

 Thankfully it was a pretty clean break, so it glued up pretty good; Nagle and I went to Home Depot to grab a better tool for the job while the glue dried.
We got one of these suckers, at just the right size for my hand to fit, then used that mill thing again, this time stabilizing it with an extra piece of metal that had a v cut out, for extra points of hold. It went through great this time around, and so we put it on the lathe for the last time, and I cut some details and sanded it. When I was satisfied with the work, we popped it off!

After that, we checked how much room we needed for the electronics, then use the same tool to cut the hole for the forearm piece. It turned out we needed a lot of room for the button, leaving it uneven and hence cartoonishly big on my tiny wrists.

 Not sure I'm down, but it's too late to back out now! If anything, I'll grab a smaller button sometime and re-make the forearm piece again after EXP con but (hopefully)before Halloween. Even so, it's looking pretty freakin' awesome so far, and being in the workshop all day was a lot of fun(even if I didn't know much of what I was doing).

Oh, one more thing; I ditched the idea of having the fingers over my real fingers. I thought it would be too much effort and just not look as good. So instead, I bought one of these things to build the fingers around.
My hand will go in the wrist piece, and my fingers'll stick out the front and underneath some of the detailing. More on that in another update!

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