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June 22, 2006
 

Thursday June 22, 2006

After my first week of work, I have created my very part.  It goes by several names, but I will call it a flash cone for the sake of ease.

This small three inch long part took me an entire week to make.  You can blame my obsession with detail on this.  The flash cone was made from two pieces.  The first is a one inch PVC pipe connector (since the barrel shroud of the gun will be made from one inch PVC pipe), and the second part is a hand lathed piece of polyester resin.  It may not seem like much to work on for an entire week, but much of the work involved setting up a power drill as a lathe, and making various jigs and templates for doing the job.

A scanned pic, part way through the creation process.

Two things proved to be major problems.  The first was a large soft area in the resin that did not cure fully.  I had to dig out much of this, add new resin, then reshape it to match the rest of the cone.  The second problem was difficulty I had with the PVC melting when I tried to grind the array of notches around the end.  To fix this, I removed much of the PVC on the notched end, except for an inner shell on the inside, then replaced this area with resin, which did not suffer the same melting problem.

For comparison, here is a photo of a real MG34 flash cone,

and here is a scan of my completed flash cone, primed and ready for painting.

So far, so good.  Three inches of gun complete, 45 inches to go.
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

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