Mid June: Phase 5

I am starting to assemble the rifle and it is slowly taking shape. The sanding and the final polishing of the metal will take place at the end. 

Early June: Phases 1 - 3

Welding first then grinding and sanding the welds smooth. Here are a couple cool welding photos. 

Late May: Trigger, barrel and sides

Let the work begin! After the "backbone" I started to build the trigger mount, most of which will be covered by other pieces. I then worked on smoothing out the welds and seams on the backbone, and crafting/sanding various side pieces.

Mid May 2014: Welding begins with the "Backbone"

After sorting out all the pieces into the appropriate phases. I began my welding and grinding work on the "backbone".

Early May: CAD designed pieces arrive from laser cutter

The work begins with about 500 pieces of steel which arrived from the laser cutter. The work will be broken down into 14 separate phases, beginning with the "Backbone". Each phase will build off of the previous work.

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!