A new Project Begins!

OK. so it actually began a quite a while ago but I am finally ready to put something on the web about it. After taking a break to tend to some other very important life pursuits I am building a new prop. This will be a Halo 4 Light Rifle made out of steel, copper and cold cathode lighting. To be sure, this will be much more ambitious than the Valkyrie project was. I have spent months and months of free time in Autocad creating the files to cut all the pieces of steel need for this giant piece of origami. Cutting is now under way and then it will be many many hours of welding and grinding to create the finished piece. The potential of a catastrophic failure is pretty significant but to me art is risk. I always want to try to do something I haven't seen done before and push myself to do things that I don't already know how to do. So I'm a couple of grand and a few hundred hours invested into this project so far. Wish me luck!

-Halo4 is property of 343 Industries-

The very first piece of the project is shown below. I welded some steel together and spun it up on an improvised lathe and ground it to the shape I was looking for. Its just a tiny taste but it helps me feel the material and fall in love with a look that can be achieved. So if you like using your imaginations too, then imagine a Light rifle which has the look and feel of the piece in the picture below.

Here's a few pics of the cad work. The total is something 500 individual pieces of steel that will need to be welded together. I had to create the 3D model of the rifle first,then I had to re-engineer the model into something I could actually build (this was really really hard). Then I broke it down into smaller components suitable for my grinding and polishing equipment. The idea there is that no component should have an "inside" corner pocket (that would be ungrindable). Then I had to make a 3d shell out of each component. Each shell was broken into faces which had to be trimmed to account for the thickness of the material. Then all the faces had to be cataloged and arranged on sheets for cutting. It was a LONG LONG process. But the pieces are all being laser cut as we speak (because my OCD is not sufficiently strong any more to precision cut that many pieces). Here are some pics of the Autocad:

More to come!