Another DLT-19 Build (Finished!)

[Old Trooper]

well I must say this is looking mighty fine. I bow to your skill & creativity.

[Cantina Craig]

Amazing work bro. Seriously impressive :-)

[Allerg3n]

Sorry for delays in posting - life has gone a bit crazy. Big developments though - got the barrel drilled, batteries in, and everything working electronically. Also just received word from ATA that my armor should be here Thursday. I'm going to have a lot to do!

Pictures to follow in the next day or so...

And thanks again for all your comments and support. I'm having a "blast" with this.

[Allerg3n]

OK - so I thought it would just be simpler to make a video showing the effects. Here it is on Vimeo:

Here's a second one where I turned a light off so you can see a bit better:

Apologies for picture/audio quality - I was using a 2012 Nexus 7 to film this and the front-facing camera isn't all that great.

[Allerg3n]

Updates!

Bought a new camera - it is a joy to use. Pics from now on will be taken using it, so hopefully quality should be much better.

On to the build!

Carved out the middle barrel sight with some scrap oak and fixed it to my PVC ring. Used JB Weld putty to form the rest of the ring. Lots of sanding - still some left to do on the surface of the sight.

Started sanding/crafting the tip of the barrel. My legs won't be removable, but I'm going to try to make them at least functional. I cut/sanded part of the PVC ring to match the gun as much as possible, but unfortunately the original gun is just a bit too narrow in some places. I don't want to have to cut into the barrel underneath, so I'm leaving this for now. I also hand-filed the notches into the front section. This is the top:

Here's the left side of that piece:

A look down the barrel...

I added a shield to cover the electronics and to imitate the feed cover tray. The mesh isn't canon but helps contain the wires and let sound through, and when it's all finished in black it shouldn't stick out too much.

Here are some of the condensed electronic guts of the gun. In this first shot, (looking top down) the Arduino is buried on the bottom left, and the mp3 board from China is oriented vertically on the right.

Here's the inside of the ammo feed cover box. Speaker amp, batteries, speakers.

Tried brushing up some of the sanding around my inlay. Some examples:

Looks ugly, but feels really smooth. Hoping it will look better when painted:

And one shot for funzies:

###

I found some angled shelf brackets at Lowe's that will make perfect legs. Need to assemble the attachment to fix them to the barrel.

After that, minor detail work. I need a sight for the very front of the barrel, a rear sight, a carved-out depression for the spent shell casings (as discussed earlier), and grooves in my grips and on the back of the butt.

Then t-track and wire.

Then on to painting! Saw some cheap paint today and picked up white primer, silver undercoat, black top coat, and satin finish. The end is in sight!

/also, if anyone would like me to take pics of a part of the gun with the new camera, just let me know. I can capture a lot more detail a lot more reliably now.

[Allerg3n]

Quick update - finished the gun this weekend. Big post with lots of pics inbound soon. Had to make a few sacrifices (and discovered that I misaligned my barrel holes) but I think it easily passes the 5 Foot Rule and it looks pretty badass to boot.

Standby...

[Allerg3n]

Big [PIC HEAVY] post inbound... I'll leave descriptions a bit short and try to let the pics speak for themselves.

Picking up from where my last post left off, at this point I started to build in the attachment for the legs. I carved out the front PVC piece and ran a screw through it, and sealed it with epoxy putty.

Used a piece of scrap oak as the coupler for the legs. I was a dullard and did not take pics of carving. In order to make the legs functional, I drilled a 3/8" hole lengthwise through the coupler and carved a perpendicular channel into the hole. Then I used some 3/8" dowels and crafted a T-shaped axle. Some pics of the T-part:

You can see the nut resting in the top of the T section below. That's what screws into the PVC above.

I cut the angle brackets to the proper length and joined them together with some pins, nuts, and magic. A little sheet metal trim later and I ended up with this:

Back (faces the underside of the barrel when closed)

Front

Magical contraption in the open position:

And closed:

Recessed channels on either side to allow legs to expand:

Used another piece of dowel and a thumb screw to secure them to the barrel:

Then, on to carving the sights. I started taking short cuts here because I'm rapidly running out of time to complete all these projects by Labor Day, and I honestly could take another 6 months just to finish the detail work on this gun. Sights were all carved out of spare balsa wood or pine.

Front sight closed:

Front sight open:

Fun perspective shot;

Rear sight closed. This is not as complete as it could be (the wing attachment to indicate distance isn't there) but I can always carve that and add it later.

Rear sight open:

More detail work...

Carved a notch into the rest for the rear sight:

Added the ejection hole (props again to Vince):

Underside of leg attachment piece:

I narrowed the strap attachment on the main barrel:

And on to things that were irritating me. The rear metal piece had gone all wonky when I first attached it and was not sitting level with the top of the gun. So I popped it off and shimmed it up, then re-set it with JB Weld. Nice and level now.

Repair from the side:

The unscathed side (for reference):

Corner shot of the repair:

I added a "screw" disc to the top piece. This is attached to the wooden side because I need to open it to get to the electronics.

Next I carved grips. This was done freehand using a Dremel (it shows), but from 5 feet away you can't much tell the difference.

Did the same to the butt of the gun, and installed a disc as well. I thought this came out much better than the grips.

For T-Track, I decided I didn't want to shell out major $$$ for exact replicas, since this whole build is neat but not exactly exact. So I took the more general advice to "find a rake" and dropped $10 at a hardware store. Trimmed up the pieces and attached with superglue and wire. You can also see in the following shots that I added some basswod to make the leg attachment piece stand out a bit more. This was glued on.

I noticed when trying to attach the T-Tracks that I had inadvertently misaligned the barrel holes when I first drilled it several months ago. While this sucks, it's not *too* severe, and the added bonus is that my light effects will show through a bit more than they would have. The downside is that I have no place to attach a wire around the leg attachment screw because there aren't any holes in the barrel nearby:

Rounded the edges on the legs:

Assembled immediately prior to painting:

For paint, I chose black Rustoleum Primer and Rustoleum Oil-Rubbed Bronze. I picked Rustoleum because it'll cover just about anything and I'm using a variety of materials in the build. Oil-rubbed bronze has a nice dark metallic look to it, so it comes out looking gunmetal black. Like this:

The butt only got primed - I didn't use the bronze on it. I used some Raw Umber acrylic on it but it needs a bit more work to make it look like bakelite.

I was a dunce and didn't tape up some of my joints, so I'll have to sand those out (that's why the front piece is crooked and the barrel doesn't screw in all the way). But all together, here's the "final" product (minus weathering and more "bake" in the bakelite):

All that's left is the (minor) painting details, and a coat of semi-gloss polyurethane to protect it. It's been a long road, but boy will it be fun to troop with a working DLT-19!

Thanks again everyone - looking forward to putting my armor together (hopefully it will go more quickly than this).

[clonecollector]

Amazing detail!

I like that Rustoleum Oil Rubbed Bronze color. I used it once on an ESB Boba Fett blaster I had. It gives the blaster I nice antiqued touch I think.

[beast05]

Amazing is right! Will you be making more to sell ??? =)

[Allerg3n]

Thanks guys! Unfortunately will not be making any more - I'd have to really streamline things. This was a 9 month build, after all. In all seriousness though, it'd probably be relatively easy to kit out a DLT-19 if you had a good way of pre-cutting pine boards and a 3D printer to handle some of the miscellaneous parts/greeblies. The rest is PVC and a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.

Unless you want lights and sound - then it gets a bit more complicated.

Last build update - here's pics after weathering and clearcoating. Weathering was pretty much a thinned out black acrylic wash (probably 25% acrylic, 75% water), followed up with silver drybrush, especially on raised areas. I used a gloss clearcoat because it was the only thing we had lying around. Will probably re-coat with a semigloss eventually, but it looks badass enough for me right now. She's finally done!

Thanks again - moving operations to the armor assembly thread.