ASHPD or Niki Needs More Hobbies
I made a thing! For Halloween!
So include this on a list of Things Niki Has Never Done. I made a Portal gun so I could be an Aperture test subject for Halloween! And it was FUN AS HELL. Holy crap. I expected to have a miserable time of it, but it was a freakin' blast. I want to make MORE stuff now.
I used this Indy Mogul tutorial as reference for the bulk of it. I made a bunch of changes due to 1) availability of materials and 2) the fact that half of this tutorial makes no fucking sense at all.
Started out with an insane 3-hour long trip to Lowes for materials with bigbetterirish. We happened upon a guy working in the cable department who knew what I was making. What are the chances?? He was the absolute nicest most helpful guy it was FATE.
The whole thing is basically made up of some PVC and cardboard tubes. And Volpin Props amazing blueprints.
The larger of the two is an enormous (I mean ENORMOUS) tube used to hold rolls of carpet. The aforementioned awesome guy from Lowes gave this to me FOR FREE. ZERO DOLLARS. I wanted to marry him.
The smaller is a regular cardboard tube mailer .
The larger tube was about 1/2" too large so I cut it down with my handy dandy Dremel tool.
No wait, that thing is a piece of shit. MY HACKSAW, however. Was my best friend
I cut the tubes down to size and added strips of foam from interlocking floor tiles (this shit is AMAZING) around the barrel. In a perfect world they would've come together much nicer but I didn't really have the time to fuss with it. Maybe next time (har har)
I then cut the holes in barrel pieces where the light-up glowy bits go! After taking these pictures I realized they were way too shallow and I re-cut them.
The inside is made up of a plastic tube with the clear handle of a plunger sanded down for a nice frosty look then set inside.
After getting the barrel looking right-ish, I filled in the gaps with plumbing epoxy, cut the notches at the front, and sanded it. This was waaaaay trickier than I thought so it's a shitty sloppy job. I would love to sand it down and re-paint it sometime.
Next I eye-balled the blueprint and made templates for the white bits which I cut out of foam
Here's all the bits n bobs!
I then took it all out back and spray painted it (and my hands and legs and glasses). Gross, you need some touchin' up
Finally I put everything together and added the wire and little claw parts which I made out of an old tupperware lid and more foam. I wanted to screw the pieces together but that was effing impossible, so I just glued little nuts at the joints. Last thing was to stick an LED flashlight with some blue plastic wrap over it for color and voila!
After putting the finishing touches on the gun Amelia asked me if I was gonna make a PotatOS. Ahhh! Of course!!
Amelia suggested I just use a real potato but it ended up being way too heavy, so I carved her and made her little mechanical bits outta foam, some big-ass staples, and an old audio cable.
DONE!
Me and Hipster Ariel were ready to party
So include this on a list of Things Niki Has Never Done. I made a Portal gun so I could be an Aperture test subject for Halloween! And it was FUN AS HELL. Holy crap. I expected to have a miserable time of it, but it was a freakin' blast. I want to make MORE stuff now.
I used this Indy Mogul tutorial as reference for the bulk of it. I made a bunch of changes due to 1) availability of materials and 2) the fact that half of this tutorial makes no fucking sense at all.
Started out with an insane 3-hour long trip to Lowes for materials with bigbetterirish. We happened upon a guy working in the cable department who knew what I was making. What are the chances?? He was the absolute nicest most helpful guy it was FATE.
The whole thing is basically made up of some PVC and cardboard tubes. And Volpin Props amazing blueprints.
The larger of the two is an enormous (I mean ENORMOUS) tube used to hold rolls of carpet. The aforementioned awesome guy from Lowes gave this to me FOR FREE. ZERO DOLLARS. I wanted to marry him.
The smaller is a regular cardboard tube mailer .
The larger tube was about 1/2" too large so I cut it down with my handy dandy Dremel tool.
No wait, that thing is a piece of shit. MY HACKSAW, however. Was my best friend
I cut the tubes down to size and added strips of foam from interlocking floor tiles (this shit is AMAZING) around the barrel. In a perfect world they would've come together much nicer but I didn't really have the time to fuss with it. Maybe next time (har har)
I then cut the holes in barrel pieces where the light-up glowy bits go! After taking these pictures I realized they were way too shallow and I re-cut them.
The inside is made up of a plastic tube with the clear handle of a plunger sanded down for a nice frosty look then set inside.
After getting the barrel looking right-ish, I filled in the gaps with plumbing epoxy, cut the notches at the front, and sanded it. This was waaaaay trickier than I thought so it's a shitty sloppy job. I would love to sand it down and re-paint it sometime.
Next I eye-balled the blueprint and made templates for the white bits which I cut out of foam
Here's all the bits n bobs!
I then took it all out back and spray painted it (and my hands and legs and glasses). Gross, you need some touchin' up
Finally I put everything together and added the wire and little claw parts which I made out of an old tupperware lid and more foam. I wanted to screw the pieces together but that was effing impossible, so I just glued little nuts at the joints. Last thing was to stick an LED flashlight with some blue plastic wrap over it for color and voila!
After putting the finishing touches on the gun Amelia asked me if I was gonna make a PotatOS. Ahhh! Of course!!
Amelia suggested I just use a real potato but it ended up being way too heavy, so I carved her and made her little mechanical bits outta foam, some big-ass staples, and an old audio cable.
DONE!
Me and Hipster Ariel were ready to party