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Cylon-Knight wrote:I recently saw a Cylon rifle on eBay that seemed to break into two main sections. A good idea for a Cylon on the move, I thought.

Mean this one here:

Shazam! That is the one... Red Eye's eye is always watching.

Yes, and then if the stock would detach too it would be more mobile between trooping. Just an idea, perhaps for a future build... Probably not much of an option for a vac formed rifle.

The rifle shown here was made by Kropserkel, by the way.

Yeah... I wont be doing that. I mean, in a kit form it can be made to come apart if the builder so desires. I saw two times a krop rifle come apart during a troop. One time in San Diego another time during G3. SO there are definite drawbacks. ALso, a vacu-formed rifle gets a lot of its strength from being a single unit.

I *may* do a three part vac mold though, because I found the plastic doesn't suck in around the back of the receiver where the stock meets it.

Yesterday was a fun and productive day!

So the above it the prototype tooling. From here I can cast stone or fiberglass tools which can further be refined. I plan to fix the lines up (there are a few crooked ones) and of course get rid of the grain effect. But I'm pretty happy with what I have so far.

very nice, good work

Will you pull the final rifle out of black plastic? Is colored plastic more money or harder to work with? I don't see it used much in hobby builds... ? (Just wondering out loud)

Good - question... it's all about availability... simply, few people use black styrene so iyou can't buy it. I will be doing some test pulls in black ABS so stay tuned for that.

Great update!

Looks very promising indeed.

Ooooooooooh ABS!

Rock it style

I have the tools cast in fiberglass and will extract them tomorrow. I can tweak them and hopefully have some new test pulls and possibly a built riffle (minus bayonet) by the weekend. Project is going well.

As a side note, I did cast up the lower tube in two parts. I looked at some samples and know I need to cast it in two halves in order to get a "shelf" for the clear tube to sit on. I'll show in pictures tomorrow.

I don't want a black nor white but a chromed version will a lot a strobe lights.

GoldCylon wrote:I don't want a black nor white but a chromed version will a lot a strobe lights.

Well - that can be arranged

BIG UPDATE!

Prototype 1 is complete. Today was a very busy day. I took the fiber glassed tools out of the 'mold' and refined them. I streamlined the profile and tweaked a few small things. I vacuformed some new halves and was pretty happy with the results. I also tried some black ABS plastic which worked out pretty well. I only had 12x24 ABS sheets so I could only test it in the barrel shroud. I will try the whole rifle in ABS when I get some more.

SO... there were a lot of problems in construction. For the first one it went together ok... but not clean. The barrel shroud is a separate piece which causes issues in construction and I think I need to revisit the approach again. My machine only does 24"x24" so I am limited which is why I can't get the entire gun in one shot (like the originals are I believe). I may decide to make the butt stock a separate tool because I can make a strong junction at that point... better than the barrel.

Those who see detail will notice the barrel is shorter than it should but this will be corrected.

The muzzle tip is one I got a while back and I will need to have someone turn me new ones on a lathe. The bayonet is also a stand in as it is just a piece of cut plastic painted silver. Kind of looks cool actually...

So, I do intend to offer some of these to the board but I want to correct the construction issues I had which will in turn correct some accuracy issues as well. But for the most part... I have a rifle!! And yes, I was going for 'background stunt version'.

Perfect or not, it looks great so far! My compliment.

Somehow, I like the simplicity of how these things were constructed. Simple but effective IMHO.

Wish I had the money for one...