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!

MORE CHINESE WOODCARVINGS

I love these things. They're carved from large bamboo roots. The ridges of the root and the little hairy root stragglers and feelers are incorporated into the designs too. Each one has to be unique to fit around the shape of the bamboo root they're working with. This one has glasses frames and little whiskers, all from a single piece of bamboo.

Since bamboo has hollow segmented sections they don't have much surface to work with for their designs, but you'd never know it by looking at them. These things fascinate me. Having done some woodcarving myself I realize how difficult and intimidating it would be to do something like this. You'd have to have your plan worked out from beginning to end before you ever started. If you went too deep and punctured through to the hollow middle you'd ruin the entire project.

Look at this tiny bicycle made out of wood! Look at it! Those spokes are thinner than toothpicks. The entire bicycle was around 7 or 8 inches tall from what I remember.

I couldn't get close enough to pick up the detail with my camera, but you can kind of get an idea. When I looked at it in person I remember the pedals and how it looked like they would really turn.

I think this started out as a hollow log, and they carved it into a net with lobsters all over it. Everywhere you looked you could see thin, fragile slivers of wood and tiny details. How they did that without breaking it I'll never know.

Here's a closer view. This piece was pretty big. The lobsters were basically full scale. I think the entire thing was taller than me. I couldn't look at the back side since it was in a glass case, but it looked like there were hidden details down inside it too.

NUT CARVING

These are little carvings I saw in China. They're made from nuts.

I bought a couple. I'm slightly nervous about them. I wonder if insects will get at them since they are edible.

Maybe they aren't edible. I'm not sure. They may be more like seeds.

 EXPLANATION FOR MY ABSENCE:

 I haven't posted in a while because I've lost about 20 hours of my free time with a new job. I quit Karges Furniture because I had a good offer at another place. I loved Karges but I thought I should give this new thing a shot. It's tough getting used to after being at Karges for 21 years. That's half my life. So far, at the new job I've designed furniture for Bar Louie, Western Sizzlin', Holiday Inn, the Army and a bunch of other places.

 It's a pretty big culture shock from what I've done in the past. At Karges we had 6 months from the time someone ordered a piece to the time we shipped it. At the new place we have a few weeks. A lot of times we are still slapping the furniture together when the delivery truck arrives, and the driver will have to sit and wait for us. With each job it feels like there's no way we'll make it on time, but somehow it always manages to get done.

 So that's what happened.

PINOCCHIO VS DRACULA

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.

I PAINTED A GUN

Here's a gun stock I painted. The guy who bought it loves deer hunting. If you click and enlarge the picture you'll be able to see some tiny little deer hidden in it.

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.

CIGAR BOX GUITAR - Part 10 of 10

The final day of my Cigar Box Guitar Project:

At the last minute I decided I wanted the strings lower so I sanded some off the bottom of the bridge. Then the tail piece was taller than the bridge, so I had to cut some grooves to set the strings down lower. It was still close so I also put 6 screw-eyes in between to pull the strings down behind the bridge.

This is what it looked like before the screw-eyes were put in. I only uploaded this picture because Lucy was in it.

This is the actual final version.

The sound is sort of banjo-ish. It's very loud too, which surprised me. I figured the size of the box was proportionate to the volume, but I guess other things also affect the volume, like the kind of wood, and how thick it is, and where things are located on the top surface.

It's pretty nifty to have a tiny guitar I can easily tuck out of the way. It's small enough I can just leave it on the couch and it doesn't use up a spot. I've been just leaving it on the couch and so far Mei hasn't asked me to move it.

In addition to looking fancy I think the paper labels act a little bit like veneer as far as aiding in the prevention of expansion and contraction of the wood during temperature changes.

Here's what the Big Wolf sounds like unplugged. I don't have an electrified Wolf video because the amp is in a room too messy to film.

The only downside to having a tiny guitar is the tininess. Depending on the day, sometimes it's awkward to hold onto. It's fun though because it's so quick and handy.

CIGAR BOX GUITAR - Part 9 of 10

Day 9 of my Cigar Box Guitar Project:

I bought a kit online to electrify my guitar for cheap. It would have been even cheaper if I'd have located the items myself, but in the end laziness triumphed! This kit is pretty nifty though, and I'm glad I went that route.
The pickup is just a cheap (so cheap they give you an extra) Piezo speaker, the same kind you'd find in Walkman headphones. By wiring it backwards it acts as a microphone instead of a speaker.

Before soldering I twisted the connections together and checked it in the amp. Everything worked fine on the 1st try. Yeeha!

After feeling confident it was wired correctly I soldered all the joints. I learned something about solder. It's much easier to solder joints when you get the low-heat solder. It's only good for small electronics. In the past I was using some harder stuff and it took a while for it to melt.

After soldering, I taped all the exposed joints with electrical tape, and then twisted the wires so they weren't going all over the place, rat's-nest style.

It was fairly simple to mount. The jack and the volume knob were tightened on with nuts, and the Piezo speaker was attached with duct tape. Thin strings are louder so it was mounted off-center toward the thick string side.
It's nice having the ability to open and close the lid. In addition to the obvious handiness when building it, it's also nice because I can store guitar picks in there, wedged under the screws in the corners so they don't rattle around.

All that's left if stringing it up! Woohoo!