Alright, lets continue on. The next thing I needed to do was stop any lateral movement of the main gun barrel when it is static and posed or traveling back into the gun body.
The first daunting but simple task was to fab a block to space the rear of the gun barrel inside the body the correct distance from the top of the inside of the gun body to where the barrel would stick out in a straight line and not droop. I determined the proper space by comparing the barrel to lines cast into the gun body comparing these lines to the line of the barrel using a ruler as a straight edge and eye balling it.
The block was fabbed out of a piece of sprue cut to length and then drilled and pinned to the underside of the top of the gun with part of a staple.
After that, I once again checked for lateral straightness and made a strap for the underside of the barrel using a piece of clear blisterpack plastic. Now, the lateral movement of the back end of the barrel is contained while still allowing the barrel to reciprocate. And by crazy chance, the strap ends up being almost exactly where the rear end of the barrel needs to be to stick out of the gun at the same distance that the kenner prototype does. This can be a reference point for Shawn.
Its hard to see in this shot but the end of the wood barrel can be seen under the clear plastic strap. If you pull the barrel too far forward past the strap, its not hard to thread it back in while looking from the underside of the gun body. This was a simple fix that had to be preformed in a tight ill lit spot inside the gunbody and when I finished and everything worked right, I was thrilled.
Now that the hard part is done, lets have some fun. Its funny how some fodder pieces end up in a project. I dug for a while this morning for bits to build the upper and lower barrels out of and these three pieces was what I decided on after all of the cool stuff I looked through.
One is a cw figure gun, the silver ring is part of a ball point pen,"which I didn't end up using" and I have no idea what that tapered black thing is. My plan was to incorporate these pieces with the resin missile pieces that I had used as mock ups to build my upper and lower barrels,
Now to look at my buddy Tamer, one would think that he would be gentle with the custom figures and vehicles in his possession but that is not the case, folks. Take it from me, he is a brute and I have several pieces that he has returned for repair to prove it. This means that things must be structurally sound if they are to last in Tamer's possession. LOL
Starting on the upper barrel, I drilled and pinned into the gun body using 16 ga coated tie wire which is stout but can be bent a bit if something needs to be straightened.
I had cut off part of that cw missile launcher to use here and threaded it over the tie wire holding it straight and glued it into place around the pin positioning it where it wouldn't change the profile of the back of the gun too much. In front of this piece, I cut the remaining length of the top mock up missile piece to fit into our length parameters, drilled out the back so it could inset some off center towards the main barrel, and then drilled out the furthest end and mounted it. I'm going to say that this top barrel contains some kind of sensor array or perhaps even some sort of optics and will add some greeblies to the cw part of this barrel later.
The lower barrel also got drilled and pinned and there i used that black piece and drilled a hole into it so that it could thread over the lower resin missile mock up piece which was drilled and pinned to the gunbody with it's end drilled out. "I figure this lower barrel can be for exhaust of gasses as the gun recoils while being fired."
Now that the main barrel work is done, I need to patch some holes in the gun body where the screws are and fix that pesky loose factory gun mount hinge and then we can start painting on this bad boy and throw some details on.
