Day 63 - The gun!

I bought a gallon of polyurethane gloss varnish (the kind where you need mineral spirits to clean the brushes off) and mineral spirits, so that when I'm done with all the sanding and filling of the dome, I can slather a few coats of that on.

However, after working on the dome off and on for two weeks (I think there's seven coats of Bondo on the thing, with more to come for filling all the streaks and pits), I temporarily switched direction tonight, which brings us to ... the gun!

When I got to work today, I saw that my friend had dropped off at my cubicle a slightly sanded-down aluminum pipe, and the gun bosses I had given back to him for measurement.  He had mounted the pipe on his lathe and sanded it down with a variety of sandpaper coarsenesses until the bosses fit quite snugly onto it.

Freezing the pipe and boiling the gun bosses expanded and contracted the metals to the thousandths of an inch needed to get them into their approximate positions.  Perfection, but handle with care.  (Thank you, thermodynamics!)

This only left the work needed on the rods.  I borrowed a vice from my friend Jacki at work and clamped it on one of my work tables.  I took a bit of square scrap hardboard and aligned the rods to where they were approximately vertical.  At first, I used pliers to grip the base of the rod, but I found that just simply using my hands made a sharper 45° angle on the rods.

Again, following Adam's diary entry on the gun rods, I made a template to measure where the bends and hacksaw cuts should go, so that the interior distance between the gunbosses along the pipe retained their 23.5cm length.


I also took Adam's advice of sawing the ends of the rods parallel to the pipe, since the holes on my gun bosses go all the way through.  I accidentally didn't account for the width of the rods on the template, so the gun is slightly too fat.  If I want to make sure that there's a proper distance of 6.8cm across the gun, I'll need to trim more off each end of the rods.


The finished gun, I feel, is still a solid metal beauty to behold.  I'm very proud of it!  And, like the Dalek itself, I'm surprised by how big these things actually are!







P.S.  I would be completely remiss if I didn't mention that Kathy (ChristmasDalek) was a doll and bought for me the correctly-sized rings for my eventual plunger assembly.  Thanks, Kathy!  I owe you a beverage of your choice!