Building the M-3 Predator Heavy Pistol from Mass Effect 2: Part One

A while back I was contacted by a fellow costume geek who was working on a suit of armor from the popular video game Mass Effect 2.  She had her whole rig figured out, but was coming up short in the pistol department.  It seems that she couldn't find anyone who makes a good-looking replica of the exact pistol she was after, the M-3 Predator.  Here's a couple of reference pictures:



Since these were the best references I could find online, I asked her to email me some screenshots from the game showing the pistol from a variety of other angles.  Several megabytes later, I had enough material to work with.  I printed out some thirty pages of pictures (two to a page) and set to work.

The main body was cut from a piece of 3/4" thick MDF, then I laminated a layer of 1/8" pvc sheet to either side for a bit more thickness.  The curved body portions of either side were more pieces of MDF cut to the proper outline and then shaped with a body rasp.  After about two hours of tinkering, it looked like so:


Since the pistol has a pair of little blue lights on either side, I had to come up with a way to add some LEDs and a battery pack inside.  To that end, I made the panel removable on the left side of the body:


As you can see, I also added some strips of styrene to the rear sight to give it a bit more thickness.  Then I cut out some grooves in the upper and lower barrels, drilled them out from the ends, and fitted them with some plastic rod scraps I had on the bench:


At this point, the build was starting to take shape and I was pretty happy with it:


To make the grip a bit more hand-friendly (and game accurate) I built it up with a bit of Bondo auto body filler.  Since I was getting anxious about what it would look like, I shot it with a quick coat of grey primer:


Then I drilled out the fastener holes and carved in the seam lines and did a bit of sanding.  Then I sprayed it with black primer to fill a bit more of the bare MDF and get rid of some of the graininess.  Then I did a bit more sanding:


To smooth it out a bit more, I gave it another coat of grey primer:


The next thing I did was add the raised portions of the grip by building up a bit more Bondo and then sculpting it to shape.  I also added some ribs to the handguard area, carved in a bit more detail at the bottom of the grip, and the recessed area on either side of the handguard.  The last minor detail I needed to take care of was the forward sight. 

Once all this was done, I masked off all of the parts that needed to be smooth and sprayed the parts that needed to be rough with a liberal coating of non-skid truck bed liner:


I was thrilled with the resultant texture.  Unfortunately, this is when I noticed that I'd made the ribs on the handguard backwards.  After studying the reference images at length I decided that the areas I'd recessed needed to be raised instead.  I fixed them by adding some pieces of half-round styrene stock.  They're the white parts:


The removable panel on the left side fit snugly enough for mere friction to hold it in place.  Not too shabby:


Now if you're looking at the pictures above and scrolling back up to the original references, I'm sure you've noticed that many of the markings are the wrong color.  I know they are.  I figured at this stage I would probably end up making a mold and casting some copies.  The lettering and stripes were vinyl decals cut by my friend Matt Herman who has a side business making custom vinyl decals.  They're basically just there to act as painting guides in the cast copies.  This means Matt was able to just cut them out in whatever color vinyl he had laying around.

At this point, the pistol was complete and I was thrilled with it:



At this point, you're looking at a somewhat heavy and somewhat fragile amalgamation of wood, plastic, paint, and vinyl stickers that would probably shatter into dozens of pieces if it were dropped on the floor.  This will not do.  If you're thinking I should've made it out of something else, you're right.  So I will.


Stay tuned for part two: moldmaking...


...I plan to write it up as a tutorial so you can mold duplicates of your own props.

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Heart of Gold Repair Update

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I took my boat down to Svendsen's Boat Works in Alameda for some mast and rigging repairs after a disagreement with a drawbridge operator about exactly how open the bridge actually was.

So a little while ago I went down to check on the boat and found her like so:

For a moment I couldn't think of what exactly was amiss. Then I realized that the mainmast had in fact been removed. A little walking around the yard and I found it lying on some sawhorses. This is the first time I'd gotten a close look at the broken end where the masthead used to be welded on:

About a foot below that you can see where the bridge girder hit and scarred the aluminum a bit:

Looking down along the length of the mast, it also looks (to my untrained eye) as though there's a bend in the mast right where the lower spreaders are attached:

Other than that, some of the screws that held the spreaders in place look to have been pulled loose:

I'm still waiting to hear from the insurance company and Svendsen's rigging shop as to whether they can save the mast and make it serviceable again or if it needs to be replaced altogether. We'll see.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned in another post, the boat tried to sink last week. It seems that my trip motoring all along the length of the bay was enough to wear down the flax packing in the shaft log (the seal where the propeller shaft passes through the hull of the boat) and it was leaking by significantly. This shouldn't have been a problem but, for reasons unknown, the bilge pump decided to take a vacation at about the same time. So after a couple of weeks of sitting at the dock without incident, the engine room filled with enough water that it completely submerged the engine. Blast!

After they'd pumped the water out, the good folks at the boatyard sent me a bunch of terrifying pictures of the oily funk that now covered everything in the engine room.

That afternoon I ran down to Alameda and tightened down the packing gland to prevent it happening again.

Last night I shanghaied my friend Matt and we went down to troubleshoot the bilge pump. The problem with troubleshooting the bilge pump on my boat is that it's situated at the deepest darkest part of the bilge, below the prop shaft. The only way to reach it is through this hole:

More precisely, the only way to reach it is to lay face down on the deck, slide into the hole head first, thread your body past the two stainless steel steering cables, lean against the raw fiberglass of the hull, and stretch as far as you can in order to just barely catch the top of the bilge pump housing with your fingernails, then hold onto it as if for dear life while you shimmy and shake and swear and suffer and slowly back your way out of the hole. All the while, the steering cables digging into your left armpit.

Matt didn't get a picture of me halfway in the hole, but he did get this shot of me in between a couple of forays down below:

Once I'd pulled the pump out (losing a hose clamp and a basket strainer into the bilge that I'd have to go back for in the process) I pulled it apart to see what was the matter. For all my poking around, it looked to be in good order. Holding it to the battery terminals, the pump functioned perfectly. Clearly the flaw was elsewhere.

Working my way back up the system, I found the problem. There, just under the deckplates in easy reach and ready view, were a pair of crimp connections that were badly corroded. Once I'd replaced the crimp fittings, everything ran perfectly. So in essence I'd spent two hours risking cuts and scrapes and the structural integrity of my spinal column in the deepest darkest dirtiest part of the boat when all I had to do what cut a couple pairs of wires and reattach them. Shit.

The coolest part though is the pair of bruises I got that match the steering cables I was laying on:

Awesome!

Stay tuned for more...

Today Sucked in a Special Way.

Today my trusty Dremel rotary tool died.  So it goes.

To be fair, I'm pretty hard on my tools and I tend to use them up, but I really wasn't ready to rush out and replace this $90 tool.  Instead, I shelled out ten dollars for a set of Torx screwdrivers and a few more dollars for some spare parts to see if I could somehow resurrect this poor departed device.

I had a lot of other things to work on, but found myself so emotionally invested in keeping this one tiny thing alive that I didn't get to any of them.  In the end, it proved to be beyond my abilities to repair the Dremel.  I suppose it was just the Dremel's time.  So it goes.

I was halfway past giving up on my vain efforts to repair it when I got a call from the formeman down at the boatyard where my boat, the Heart of Gold is lying alongside the dock while she awaits repairs.

"Hi there," says I, "how's things?"

"Not good," says he, "your boat tried to sink last night, the engine was completely underwater by the time we noticed it.  We pumped the water out, but there's oil and diesel fuel all over inside the boat."

"Fuck," says I, "I guess I'm on my way to Alameda."

I drove to Alameda to find that the entire engine room was coated in a thick black sludge of diesel fuel and used motor oil.  It turns out that the float switch which turns on the bilge pump decided to go on vacation.  At the same time the flax packing gland that seals up the hole around the propeller shaft figured "haha, now that nobody's here and the bilge pump isn't working, I'm going to just let all of the Oakland Estuary spill into the engine room." 

Fuck you flax packing.  You and the horse you rode in on.  And your little dog too.

Once I'd fixed what I could I then went to the boatyard foreman to discuss the upcoming very expensive cleanup and engine overhaul that would be required.  Bear in mind that earlier that day I was having a hard time coming up with $90 to replace a tool that is essential in almost all of my workshop projects.  This new pile of expenses is really going to be painful.  This is when I looked at the time.  It was very nearly five o' clock. 

Rush hour.  I hate rush hour.

Since I'm averse to the notion of waiting in lines and rush hour traffic strikes me as the worst version of waiting in lines, I decided to stop and see a movie instead.  That way, I'd get to drive home in relative peace and solitude long after the rat race is over for the day. 

I saw Transformers 3.  If it wasn't for that, the day would've been kinda okay.  Instead it was as if I'd paid eleven dollars (ELEVEN DOLLARS?!?!) to have Michael Bay make a bunch of noise, slap me in the face, and then run away laughing.

So today sucked.


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Bliss at Night

Saturday night I was staying with my cousin Desmond and his family out on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.  After dinner we stopped to check out the statue titled "Bliss Dance" which was created for Burning Man last year.  The statue was fabricated in an artist workshop on Treasure Island and, after her appearance at the Burning Man festival, was installed on one of the open fields on the island back in late May.


The installation is impressive.  Here's a wide angle shot to give you an idea of the scale:



The installation includes an impressive lighting array which shifts colors throughout the night.  In white light, you can see her stainless steel mesh skin:


But as the external and internal lights change colors, she changes as well:


I don't know how long they plan on keeping her in place, so if you get a chance to stop by the island you should check her out before it's too late.

Current Works in Progress

I dislike posting about unfinished things.  For me it's not much better than posting about things I'm thinking about doing.  Until a project is finished, it's not much more than a notion.  I figure if I write something like "I'm about halfway done building a functional jetpack," I might as well also go ahead and post "I'm making a cure for cancer," or "any minute now I'll write a novel." 


Still, sometimes I think there's not enough stuff getting finished in the workshop and I'm suffering from a lack of interesting things to post about.  So here I am reluctantly posting pictures of things that are getting done even if they're not getting finished quite yet...


First up, my friend Trevor has enlisted my help to build an Achilles costume for an upcoming Trojan War reenactment.  Here's a very early picture of his helmet coming together:



On the subject of helmets, I'm still making progress on my Isaac Clarke engineering helmet from Dead Space 2:



Here's the back of the helmet compared to a screenshot of the game character:



Since I'm gearing up to start molding helmets, I dusted off one of my Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine Mk7 helmets and started modifying it like crazy to turn it into a Mark 8 helmet.  The dome still needs to be re-shaped and I need to sculpt out the grill, the brow ridge, the mohawk, the ears, and so on.  Still, you get the idea:



Since I'm on a roll with helmets, I pulled my Star Wars Republic Commando helmet off the backburner and started smoothing it out a bit more:



Speaking of backburner projects, I've begun tinkering with my HALO shotgun build again.  Here's the main body with the proper texture in place:

The grip and the butt will be getting a much rougher texture before I'm done with them.


While I've been doing all of this, I've also had Lopez crank out slices of a new build for the MA5C Assault Rifle from HALO3:



I'm also finishing up the forming bucks for the last four pieces of my HALO3 Marine armor:



Not feeling like I've got enough going on, I've taken on a commission to build the Predator M-3 heavy pistol from Mass Effect 2:



Meanwhile, I'm slowly putting together a batch of my kneeling garden gnome riflemen:


Stay tuned.  I'll be posting more about all of these projects as they come together...

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