fiber glass

The past couple of days have been slow work.

Yesterday, we had a terrorist attack in central Stockholm, and my fiancée and daughter were in town earlier that day at the hospital, and passed the area where the incident happened, but fortunately, that was some 30 minutes before the incident.

Had my fiancée decided to go shopping, something she considered, things might have been different.

But, I digress.

A while ago, I bought an acrylic tube for my proton gun online with the assumption that I could prepare and fix it myself. My theory was that I could easily sand off the tip myself, then mask off the areas on the tube that should be frosted, and work them over with sand paper.

I also picked up a few plastic funnels from a car shop, and rolled up a paper, marking what stuck out of the funnel.

Cut the area out from a piece of sand paper (by the way, a great way to sharpen your scissors!)…

… add some spray photo mount on the back…

Push a rod through to act as a guide for my power drill, and guide the acrylic tube…

… and I thought everything would be fine.

It wasn’t.

Turns out I can’t even superglue the sand paper to the funnel. It is absolutely THE worst type of plastic to glue anything to. When I did manage to get it to stick somewhat, I ran into another error. The wooden stick I used to fasten the funnel in my power drill was not long enough to go all the way through, so it scraped the inside of the acrylic tube.

The idea here was that I’d hold on the to the acrylic, while spinning the funnel with my power drill, and gently pushing the acrylic towards it, sanding off the tip at 45 degrees. It kinda worked…. but it was a good thing my acrylic was a tad longer than I needed. Time to saw it off and try again!

One thing I felt a lot better on, was my continued work at prepping the shell.

Last week I straightened out the ribs where the V-hook will be mounted, using wooden sticks and two component epoxy putty, an idea I blatantly nicked from GohstTarp’s build.

I didn’t snap a good “before” picture, but… let’s just say that I had a good 3 mm to fill in the middle, plus some air bubble towards the bottom of one fin, and a lot of sanding.

This is the result after using wood sticks as guide to get a straight line, and I have just pushed the wood putty on to the crooked ribs.

Once dried, it was sanding galore. I brought out my small mouse sander and went crazy. This was the result:

These ribs are really straight now! *yay*

You can see in the curvature how much it was crooked, and one of them had an air bubble that I later filled.

Then up to today: I thought I’d run the shell over with some paint while I had the time. The proton pack should be black, as you know, and the fiber glass shell I have, was grey.

I had cut up a few holes needed, and also sanded off a few places on the shell, and really wanted to see how it looked when painted.

Having learned my lesson in the past when it comes to spray paint, the key is to build the paint up in thin layers that are set to dry in between.

After going over it 3-4 times, I was left with this:

I noted that the paint did the scratches made when positioning the N-filter became even more prominent, and some of the artefacts from the moulding was also more visible than I’d like. I know the proton pack surface (the base part) should have a bit of texture to it, but I have bought a special paint for that, to get it the hammered look.

Anyway, I decided more work was needed on this, so I went ahead and covered the proton pack again with some spray can body filler. Ironically, it is grey.. So i painted my grey pack black, so I could paint it grey again…

The only thing that stayed black for now was the N-filter.

Here’s the pack with my grey body filler in it:

I spent about half an hour sanding on it in the late evening, but as the light was so bad, I couldn’t get a good picture of it. I’ll continue sanding tomorrow when some of the extra filler I added after another air bubble showed its face, and I’ll go over the pack with a better grade sand paper. Maybe even wet sand it in the bath tub.