MAKE A LASER PISTOL OUT OF A JUICE BOTTLE

How do you work this blogger? I fergit! Although the real reason I haven't posted anything in a while is because of laziness I'm tempted to use "getting a new house" as an excuse. We did get a new house and it left me computerless for a while, but not for five months.

I made a movie prop laser pistol for my yet-to-be-realized movie. I've been planning out a movie now for many years. I've got story ideas but not a complete story, and I have lots of props and friends who are willing to act.

This laser pistol started as a pomegranate juice bottle. Actually 3 juice bottles. Walmart sells 4 different sizes. I epoxied 3 together to make a gradually tapering shape. The logos were removed with acetone and elbow grease.

Step 2: Make the entire gun! Sorry about the lack of pictures up to this point. I didn't think to snap photos until I was pretty far along. The hand grip was carved out of wood. The round part above the hand grip is a plastic wine glass with the stem removed. It was $1 at Target. The long barrel is a candy tube. The clear trigger/body contraption is made from a post-surgery breathing machine.

Here's a view of the back side. I cut part of the wine glass off so I could put batteries in the hole. There's a wooden plug for screwing over the hole. I will glue that cone-shaped clear piece to the back of the wood plug to disguise the flat back of it.

This laser pistol lights up. Here's a string of green LEDs and a battery pack ready to slide into the long tube you saw a few pictures above.

Here's another smaller cheap plastic wine glass. I pulled the base off to use it as a disk for the front "laser-emitting" end of the barrel.

I pulled this off of a Halloween toy. It lights up and blinks and changes colors. It'll go inside that front disk.

This gun will have 2 triggers. One will activate the blinking piece in the photo above, and the other will activate the long strip of green lights. These triggers are on/off buttons from Radio Shack. I epoxied them into holes drilled into the hand grip. The holes meet another hole which travels up into the top compartment.  That's how the lights will attach to the batteries.

Here's another one of those breathing machines. If you've ever had to use one then you hate them, and are most likely happy to see one cut up and turned into something else.

The breathing machines also come with a flexible breathing hose. I will use that too.

The juice bottles slide down over the tube like this. I should have mentioned earlier a hole was made in the bottom of each juice bottle before epoxying them all together. The holes are just big enough for the tube.

These little wooden things on the sides are wheels and axles and spools you can buy at a hobby store. I got them at Hobby Lobby. They have lots of various shapes. I don't know what I'll do with them all but bought a bunch of different ones. I don't know what the purpose would be for these things but they seem like they'd be absolutely necessary.

This paint "makes any surface look like hammered copper." It did a pretty good job. The entire body was sprayed, but not the juice bottles.

After the paint dried I applied Minwax dark walnut stain, and then wiped off the high spots so it would look darker in the crevasses. I cut some fake black leather from scrap at work to make a gripper for the palm-side of the hand piece, and attached that with contact cement.

It glows green when the red button is pushed. Intuitive, eh?

For some reason there's a box of old broken radios in the garage. I cut a couple little squares from the circuit boards and glued them to the sides of the gun. I wanted it to look more deadly. Does it help? I don't know.

The last thing I did was put a big wad of leftover colored wires inside that clear flexible hose and glue it to the side of the gun. You can't tell very well from this picture but the wires show through the tube, and make it look as if something really technical must be going on inside there.

It was glossed over in the pictures above but a "crystal jewel" ceiling fan pull was mounted to disk on the front of the barrel. The blinking, color-changing light is right under the crystal so it flickers when the black trigger button is pushed.

After completion I was saddened to learn no real lasers shot out of this gun. All this work for nothin!

LIU RONG SI Temple in GuangZhou China

This is a temple we visited in GuangZhou. I hope I typed the name correctly. We visited a few and I get them mixed up. This was a pretty big statue in the doorway. It had to be at least 9 feet tall.

Here's a detail of the little monster underneath the giant guy's foot.

There's no telling how old this stuff is. It could be hundreds of years old for all I know.

See this building? Look up there on the roof!

Here's a closeup

And each section had a uniqued sculpted scenery inside.

Here's Mei and a door.

EASTER ISLAND MOAI HEAD CARVINGS

Here's what exists so far of a yet-to-be-finished wooden shelf project. The plan is to use 2 heads as brackets for a shelf, and then have the other 2 heads create a second tier so I'd have a bi-level shelf to display tiki mugs.

The reason I haven't finished the project yet is because I realized I don't have enough wall space to hang such a shelf. Now they sit awaiting a new idea.
These faces were free-handed rather than using a pattern. That gave each one its own personality.

THE WAR - clay animation from 1982

Back in '82 and '83 my cousin David, my brother Kevin and I made several animated clay movies using a Super-8 film camera. Even though we were frustrated with all the film scratches and washed out colors we couldn't figure out how to make it any better with the equipment we had at the time. It's funny because nowadays professional movie studios pay big bucks to artificially reproduce this scratchy film look.

We made this film one Sunday afternoon after church. Even though it's less than a minute long, we probably spent five or six hours making it. From the all the blood and violence it doesn't appear we learned too much in Sunday School that day.

The animation in this video was by my cousin David and me. The music was recorded by my brother Kevin and me.

We kept making movies up until the day the $50 bulb in the lamp burned out. Since we only got $1 allowance each week (and usually I'd lose mine as a punishment for something) we never replaced the bulb, and the filming ended.

ELECTRIC GUITAR PROJECT part 25

This guitar project just passed a massive milestone (way better than passing a massive kidney stone) and it's smooth downhill sailing from here on out.

My friends at work helped me out a ton on the finishing. I was asking them how to do a gradient dark-to-light blend in the stain and they told me it would be best if I kept my hands off it and let them handle it. That sounded good to me.

After seeing how much was involved in the process I was glad I didn't attempt it. First it got a light even stain over the entire surface.

You can see the grain patterns popping out very nicely at this point. I think if I were doing it myself I'd have probably said "That's good!" and stopped right there. It kept getting better though, as they did the entire process. It took about a week and a half for everything because it would need to cure over night between each coat.

After it was stained it got a coat of sealer, and then they did a process called glazing, where they brushed on a thicker, pastier, gooier stain. Since it had a coat of sealer beforehand, the glaze couldn't soak in to the wood and they were able to control where it went. They made it darkest on the outer edges, and then they used clean brushes and rags to fade it to nothing in the center of the body. Also during this step they brought out individual lines in the grain pattern by adding and removing glaze in certain places. Compare it to the 1st picture to see the difference.

When the glaze cured they coated the front and back, I don't know how many times, with lacquer.

I think the back looks even more beee-yoooo-ti-fuller than the front.

After the lacquer process was done, it glistened like it was wet. I could see myself in the reflection almost as clearly as in a mirror. Then it was hand rubbed to tone down the shine and give it a satin surface. It's very difficult to get a good non-glare angle with my flash camera, but it looks way better than I'd ever envisioned it in the beginning.

Although tilting it gets a more accurate representation of the color, now in the photo it doesn't exactly show how shiny it is. Lucy and her rawhide chew are in there for size comparison.

Here's the back side. Look at Lucy; she doesn't even care. That sort of hurts my feelings.
All that's left now is to screw the hardware onto it. There's a little soldering to be done as well. That solder has lead in it. I don't like the idea of messing with lead. I'm gonna make a personal note to be sure not to eat any of that solder while I have it out. Now they make lead-free solder. That's what I'm getting next time. See? It's best to just avoid temptation.

ELECTRIC GUITAR PROJECT part 23

Step 23 of my guitar project:

I've got another decision to make. I need to choose between 2 kinds of jack plates. Visually the flat circular jack plate is nicest. For usability though, the angled plate is way better. The flat plate would shoot the wire straight up in the way of my hand while I tried to play it. The angled plate kicks it down and out. Lots of guitars have the jack plates in the edge of the guitar but since this body has such a deep shape I don't have enough room to do that.

Another problem: The angled plate is too big for the space it would need to fit into. It bumps the pickup plate and still hangs over the break of the body's shape.

A possible solution would be to turn the jack plate backwards and upside down. Then I'd have a convex plate rather than concave. Then the extra length of the plate wouldn't be needed and could be cut off.

This is what it would look like with the flat circular plate.

And here's how the angled plate looks.

And here's a digital simulation of what it would look like after I removed some of the metal and rebored it.

It's a weird nontraditional way of doing it, but the idea is starting to grow on me. Alternatively I could stick the jack plate in the back of the body but then the wire would always be in the way of my ever-growing gut.

ELECTRIC GUITAR PROJECT part 21

While deciding on a veneer layout for the headstock, I went ahead and finished the plate to hold the Pickup onto the guitar body. A piece of aluminum was sliced down to 1/8" thick on a band saw, and the opening was routed out in the middle. Then the corners were rounded and holes were drilled.

After that, it took about 2 hours for me to smooth up the band saw marks and make it flat. I started with coarse 60 grit sandpaper and progressively went to finer grits. The last was 600 grit. Since the plate was thin I ended up sanding off my fingernails while trying to hold it. I should have made some kind of jig to hold it, but that would have meant a trip waaaaaaaay out to the garage. Eventually after I couldn't take it anymore I put on some work gloves and that helped.

When the sandpaper work was done I shined up the plate on a polishing wheel. It's difficult to get a good picture because the flash makes it glare, but it looks like chrome. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. To cut down on hums, electronics chambers can be shielded and grounded with aluminum foil. The nice thing about using aluminum instead of wood or plastic for the plate is now I'm halfway there as far as shielding goes.

Here are the work gloves afterwards. They were new when I started. To a lesser degree my fingers kind of look like that too.

Here's something unrelated. Mei wanted an exercise hula hoop, and we found out they were $50 if you get the size and weight she was looking for. We made this one instead. You get some bendy PVC pipe, and a coupling link. We put 5 pounds of wire cable inside to make it heavy. TADA! It was about $8 total. She's been using it every night.

ELECTRIC GUITAR PROJECT part 19

Part 19 of my guitar project:

In the last post I mentioned how I was unhappy with the way the laminated wood looked on the headstock.

I'm going to cover the headstock with veneer. I'll start with the edges first, and then do the face. That way it'll lap over and look better. Here's the way the headstock looks currently. Since the contour of the headstock cuts diagonally through the walnut/maple lamination there's a large ugly stripe of walnut right in the center of the edge. That bugs me every time I see it.

I brushed some contact cement onto the edge of the headstock.

Also I brushed contact cement onto a strip of mahogany veneer. Then I let both pieces sit and dry to the touch (for about 15 minutes.)

After both pieces dried I wrapped the over-sized veneer around the edge of the headstock using a big heavy hardback book. I only had one shot to get it right. As soon as the pieces touched they were permanently bonded together. There was no opportunity for sliding pieces around to align them like you have with regular glue.

After the glue cured overnight I used a knife to trim the excess flush with the headstock. Done!
Next time I'll put some veneer onto the face.
I have no idea what it'll look like when it's veneered. The nice thing about working with wood is if you don't like it you can always sand things back off and try again. Hopefully that won't need to happen.