Imagine if you will, Ash in his workshop, his brow furrowed in concentration, scribbling wildly on a pad of paper, sharpening his pencil with a craft knife. He is diligently working on the plans for the Nerf Bolter - reverse-engineering the shape of the front grip, working out it's dimensions, then tracing out the plan onto aluminium sheet and bending it into shape.
Then, he turns his attentions to the outer shell of the bolter - working out how to build the inner curve to fit around the circular dummy switch above the trigger, once more returning to the pad to plan and plan again. Next, he creates the sight rail on the top of the outer casing, sketching blueprints, cutting metal, bending, drilling, riveting, filling, sanding! His mind and hands are a blur of motion, working together with purpose as never before! The sweat beads on his brow! The fire of passion burns in his eyes! And then...!
He sits back in his chair... his energy spent, his creative urges sated, a tired smile of satisfaction on his face....
I ask you to imagine this scene, dear reader, as I made the mistake of leaving my neighbour alone with my laptop. I returned to find it innocently asking me for the admin password, something it's never needed before, asking for information that I just don't have.... <hangs head, sighs, nurses temples with pointed fingers>
BUT a light bit of laptop rebuilding later I'm back up and running, but sadly the intervening step-by-step images have been lost to the warp. So - here is the finished product before it went to paint:-
As you can see - the grip and the outer casing were another case of box-building. They are bolted (not riveted) to the body casing using the same bolt locations as on the original model. That way I can unbolt them and fix any internal problems if need be, and also replace the batteries that are now housed in the front grip.
Once you get the hang of this box-building lark it's pretty straightforward, but the sight rail was a bit of a challenge. The rail itself was pretty easy, being just an oblong, and the rear end cap was okay too. The three spikes weren't too bad, but needed a couple of attempts at test mock-ups in cardboard beforehand. Testing in cardboard is a good way of getting the hang of this as it's a lot easier (and cheaper) than getting it wrong over and over again in aluminium. Once I'd got something I was happy with I used it as a template to make the three identical spikes.
The front end of the rail, with the raised sighting point was really tricky. What threw me out a bit was getting the curves right. The twin curves from the front that go up to the flat square top, and then the swooping curve down the back of the piece to join the main oblong of the rail. I'm sure it could have all been worked out using maths, but I'm much more of a "crack on with it and see what happens" kind of bloke, so there was a certain amount of trimming bits off, swearing, riveting, filling, etc. etc. until it looked right. Another case of "Good job it's Chaos..."!
You might have noticed that the front grip is a bit deeper than on the original template - that's because there's just not enough space in there to put 6 x size D batteries in a row, so they had to go in a box-shape, which pushed the bottom of the box down a bit to accommodate them. Another minor compromise...
Fortunately the length of the original Nerf clip wasn't a problem. I initially thought I was going to have to somehow engineer a new magazine that was curved to fit with the style of the gun, but as it turned out there is so much space between the bottom of the Nerf gun and the bottom of the body casing that it only stuck out a couple of inches. This meant that I could mock up that curved magazine out of ally sheet, leaving it hollow, so it just slots over the existing clip and into the bottom of the body casing.
So yeah - ready for paint! =)
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