Shopping Trip!

Mod-related items from today's haul:



Following the advice from Troy on materials, and some painting tips from the guys at MNPCTech (the only place worth ordering modder's mesh from, by the way), I did some shopping today.

I followed most of the painting tutorial on a test piece once, and was quite satisfied with the results. I never quite got to the "mirror finish" stage, but their tips are valid for any great finish. I've read that epoxy primer is better for metal that has already been "etched" (sanded, treated, etc.), but I think I will trust these guys on it. The etching primer is supposed to provide a nice, smooth surface and bond well to bare metal. Then there's a painnstaking process of paint/sand/paint/sand/paint/sand -ing; the sanding will be done with the 600 and 1500 grit sandpaper in the pic. After that's cured well (about two weeks), it gets buffed with the rubbing compound. About a month after it's done, I'll get some glaze and carnuba wax to finish it off.

The PVC pipe is going to be used to create a form for molding the acrylic sheet (an idea I stole from read about in Troy's logs). That will be for the "pods" on the sides of the case. The acrylic piece you see in the back there will be more than enough for the pods, and it was a scrap at Ace Hardware that cost me $0.50 (w00t!); I have plenty of other scraps of plexi for the windows. I'm hoping the pigskin gloves there will be good enough for working with the hot acrylic. This will be my first attempt at anything like this.

Troy is the only one I've found so far who has built shuttle-style cases from scratch, so I'm finding a lot of his techniques very interesting. The other one you can see evidence of in the pic is the aluminum angle stock (there's also an 8' section not pictured) for the frame. Another idea I got from him is to ventilate the entire bottom of the case; I'll be using a piece of modder's mesh I have leftover from my last mod. I decided that should be filtered, so I picked up that package of cheap heating vent filters you see there.

That's it for today's loot; I'll be making a trip to Harbor Freight tomorrow, and coming home with (hopefully) the same cutoff saw Troy was using (it's the perfect size, and cheap; I love HF), as well as a nibbler and probably a bunch of other toys I don't really need. ;-)

New render coming up in a bit. I think it's very nearly done.