It is a cool looking kit and came together well. I have some reservation on frame made of abs like plastic. I’m going to have to be careful when I paint to keep from making the frame too brittle. As cool as the kit is stock, it will definitely need some customization. First and foremost, that God awful sniper rifle will need to be updated. <\/p>\n
Prior to the kit’s arrival, I had already started the process for updating the rifle. I found a damn cool looking sniper rifle online from Fall Out Las Vegas.<\/p>\n Everything starts with Blender<\/a>; the free 3D rendering software I used to create new parts for the kit. A new stock and a new barrel is drawn, then saved off as stereolithography files (STL), and then sent to my Afinia H479 3D printer using ABS for creation. Since I didn’t have the kit on hand yet when I was drawing out the new barrel and stock, I just guessed and printed a rough estimate.<\/p>\n The kit arrived and I couldn’t wait to test out the printed parts. The fit was pretty decent. I’m actually quite surprised. But it is still a rough mock up. I just wanted to get a quick look and feel for the rifle. I think this is a marked improvement over the original design. I was never a fan of that oddly bent rifle stock for the original weapon. After looking at the mockup for a while, I felt that the barrel was a little too small. So I edited the blender file and printed a new barrel. The print was only slightly larger, but I think visually, the bigger barrel looks better.<\/p>\n On to cutting, sanding, and snapping. In the past, I’ve just cut and snapped the kit together and worried about sanding when I took the kit apart for mods or cleanup. In recent kits, I’ve discovered that I missed some clean up areas. So this time around, I sanded as I cut and snapped. <\/p>\n But back to the project. Cut, sand, snap, and repeat. I find that getting the entire kit together gives me a better opportunity to visualize some of the mod ideas bouncing around in my head. It also gives me the chance to take some before the mods type of pictures.<\/p>\n Granted, I’ve already jumped the gun so to speak and started cutting up the stock rifle. But that damn thing is so ugly that it seriously needed that attention so that I could focus on the important parts, the actual kit. Once I got the arm and hands assembled, I could mate the rifle and the arm together to see how much more I will need to modify. To my surprise, I only had very little to modify. The hands have a plastic slot that slides into the stock rifle’s grip. Since the new grip doesn’t have this slot, that needed to be removed. The printed grip was slightly bigger, so I sanded down the insides for the hand to get a good fit. And that’s all the modification to the hands I needed. Not too shabby. The new stock doesn’t look too big or too small, and everything fits perfectly. A few different poses and it all still work as designed. I’ve posted the progress so far on a few FB pages as well as reddit and got some inquiries for selling these mod parts for folks that also don’t care for the standard GM Sniper 2’s rifle. I will need to finish the mods and clean up these parts before I can make a mold and make casts. If folks are interested, that pretty damn cool too.<\/p>\n Last night saw the last bit of work for cutting, sanding and snapping. The legs and the backpack pieces came together.<\/p>\n Now that I have my completely snapped kit and take the “before” pictures. The real mess can surface.<\/p>\n The first small mod is to beef up the backpack thrusters. I have some metal thrusters so I started playing around with a few different configuration options. The below pictures are still in the middle of that decision tree through bubble. But the rough idea is there.<\/p>\n Next up, I took some parts from a GM Spartan conversion kit and started to add those to the left shoulder, the waist armor, and the left arm. There will be some further refinement, but this is a pretty good starting point for slapping on things to the rather plain looking sniper.<\/p>\n Next up are some metal details for the leg parts. There is some detail in the stock plastic, but I want something that stands out a little more, so I have these 3mm 2 part detail bits. I will be doing the outer calves with these metal accents.<\/p>\n I used a smaller 1.5mm 2 part metal accent piece for the elbow cover part. I drilled into the elbow parts a bitso that I can inset these metal pieces slightly.<\/p>\n Since I have a limited supply for the metal accent pieces, I don’t need to actually use them since I can make a mold and have resin copies made. The resin copies will be lighter and easier to paint. I’m also making copies of the backpack thruster pieces now that I settled on a specific thruster configuration. Here’s the first step in the molding process; making the first of a 2 part mold. A box build with legos, some play dough as a base layer, the parts, then pour in the mixed silicone and throw the entire assembly into the pressure pot to cure.<\/p>\n As usual, the nice and clean workbench becomes a complete disaster area during the modification phase. This is where all the real work starts happening. Motivation is still pretty high, and there are still so many ideas that need to make their way onto the bare Bandai plastic.<\/p>\n Feburary 13, 2017: I went almost a week without doing much work other than molding and casting the metal thrusters. They look cool, but are a pain in the ass to paint and they add a bit too much weight in comparison to a resin copy. Plus, they can get expensive if I keep buying and using them. So going back to my Chinese roots as a cheap fuck, I pirate the crap out of them. Then again, I’m not selling them, I’m just making copies to maximize their value. That said, I started working on the backpack sometime last week. I’ve seen some folks create these heatsink\/vent things that look pretty damn cool; and some folks on reddit have asked how they’re done. So after a little bit of research, I figured out one way I could do them. For the quick and dirty, here’s a before and after for the backpack:<\/p>\n Briefly from where I last left off, I was making molds of the metal thrusters. I’ve gotten used to making two part molds, so here is the second molding after making the first part. Vaseline is used as an agent to keep the silicone from sticking to itself. Once the second mold is made, the metal masters are removed and put away. Some mold release is sprayed into the molds and the molds go into an oven set to about 100 degrees F to warm them up and activate the mold release. The stuff needs heat activate. Once all that is done, it’s on to casting the thruster pieces.<\/p>\n I wanted some massive thrusters to the back of the Sniper. It makes no sense since a sniper’s job should be to stay hidden, not generate a giant heat signature from oversized thrusters. But then again, it’s a giant robot – who cares if it makes any sense. I’m doing the same for the leg thrusters. I have those thruster pieces being molded and cast during all this.<\/p>\n But now on to the real fun, making some heatsinks. I used strips of .5mm thick styrene. I just cut them to roughly equal size and started gluing the ends together to create a basic dual vent piece. Nothing fancy, just styrene glue and strips of plastic. Clamping down caused the strips to warp, so I just pressed them together firmly and left it alone. <\/p>\n With my vent block created. I needed to find somewhere to put the vent. Since I’m adding some massive thruster bells to the backpack it would make sense that there needs to be some sort of heat dissipation help. The caliper is used to measure out a rough area on the backpack. Dynamo labeling tape is cut and placed into position so I have a guide for cutting out a hole. Having the area scribed out, I used the scribed lines to help cut out the plastic, then metal files to get everything sanded down as well as squared up. The vent block is added into the hole as a test fit.<\/p>\n With the hole cut, I can focus on the vent block. I could have pre cut the final shape of the vent block strips, then glued them together to get the final part – but for this, I decided to work with the whole vent block. The idea here is to take a square block and start sanding to get a final sculpt. It is just a matter of preference in how to do this. I took some tamiya masking tape and used that as a guide for some initial cuts into the vent block. Slowly sanding with metal files, I started to create a slope on the top area and an in cut just below that, followed by a rounded end. This could be cool if I turned the 3D printer into a laser cutter and just cut out the shapes and glued them together. The silhouette curio would have been another good option for doing this kind of precision work.<\/p>\n Once that was done, the heat sink was put back into the hole for a test fit and look. I cut some corrugated styrene to add some detail to the sides of the backpack center piece. I also used some wave round detail parts to the circular indented plastic detail on the original part. Inside the wave round molds I added some corrugated styrene that I cut using a hole punch set. Another trapezoidal strip of plastic is cut and added to finish the center backpack block. <\/p>\n I sanded down the red square vent pieces that fit inside the backpack side sections so that I can add in some metal mesh material. I picked up this stuff from my local railroad hobby shop. These places are perfect for getting all sorts of scratch building and modding materials. I get my styrene strips, tubes, plates, etc as well as mesh and diorama materials from these shops. Next up, I cut more strips of styrene and just glued them to the side of the backpack sections. Once the glue dries, some light sanding is needed to smooth everything out and get the part ready for priming.<\/p>\n With another test fit, there’s still something lacking. So more masking tape is brought out as well as the dynamo tape. Using different width thickness of the masking tape helps keep things uniform when laying out the heavier dynamo tape that will be the actual guide the scribers run along. This makes it more precise than eyeballing it or trying to lay down a ruler and pencil in guidelines. Using a 1mm scriber, I cut in a fat line that I will fill partially with some 1mm styrene blocks. A zero scriber is used to make some new panel lines from the bottom of the circular vent detail to the thicker line.<\/p>\n It is important to always continue to test fit. Checking sizes, checking the look and feel. But it will always look like a mess of different colored plastic and no real uniformity until it is primed. The glue marks are sanded down, some of the rough edges are sanded. It’s not fine tune sanding, but enough that the primer should stick and visually help focus the fine tune sanding areas.<\/p>\n The backpack is taken apart and primed with Mr surface 1000. Mr resin surfacer for the resin parts. I recently discovered that they no longer make Mr Resin Surface and it’s just called Mr Primer Surfacer. So I have a few bottles of that stuff that I’ll test out. I have found that Mr resin surfacer doesn’t stick too well to plastic, so hopefully the Mr Primer Surfacer will fix that issue as well as stick nicely to resin. But we’ll have to wait until I exhaust the resin surfacer, which will be soon. Once primed, and left to dry; the parts are assembled and it’s starting to look like a single piece instead of a frankenstein mishmash of resin, plastic bits and metal mesh.<\/p>\n The backpack is pretty much done – I still may do some things but it’s close. Time to move on to the other body parts. First up is the shoulder. I was originally using the GM Spartan conversion kit’s shoulder mounted beam saber detail – but found that it was too large for what I wanted. Here’s what it looked like from the first post about this project:<\/p>\n So I swapped it out with what I was using as the waist skirt detail piece. I think the smaller canisters work better here for what my plans. Some corrugated plastic detail for the bottom of the part as well as more mesh over the existing vent. I cut out strips of styrene to add more details to the shoulder. I’m still working on this as I’ve kind of come to a block on what I want to do with the big dopey looking shoulders. <\/p>\n On to the chest pieces. I decided against doing the mesh over the upper chest vents and I figured I could replace them with some more heat sink style vents. Same as before, cut strip and glue them together. Here is a quick test fit. The glue hasn’t set on the assembled styrene vent block so I couldn’t get into sanding and sculpting the final shape for the vents. But this is a pretty good idea.<\/p>\n Since I took away one of the side skirt details, I felt the need to replace it with something. Snipers typically carry an SMG or smaller close combat weapon. I don’t care for the 90mm GM Machine gun – so into the parts drawer and out we get an ore gun. I now also need to create a holster of some sort to hold the ore gun. In the box of spare parts I find a piece that looks like it would be a good base part to start building this holster. U clear out the middle and sand down the edges so that the ore gun’s handle fits. Now it’s time to figure out out to mount everything. Magnets. Rare earth, neodymium magnets to be specific. One side goes into the ore gun’s handle, and the other is build into the holster. The holster is detailed with a few round molds from the wave option parts set; a cut styrene tube for the bottom half, two small styrene rods along the inner edges of the top half followed by a strip of corrugated styrene to tie it all together. The back of the part is drilled and a relatively thin magnet is glued into place. This magnet will hold the ore gun but is not very strong. The original waist detail is drilled out and a thicker magnet is added here, and the combined strength of the two magnets is a very strong hold for the ore gun.<\/p>\n Here’s everything assembled for a test fit and the ore gun is being held up nicely.<\/p>\n Going back to the other side of the skirt, I did not want to use the same detail piece that I had for the shoulder, so I ended up cutting up my original shoulder detail piece to shorten everything and created some detailing for the other skirt side. The side skirts are mostly done. <\/p>\n There is so much more work that I want to put into this kit. So I’m scouring the internets and looking for inspiration. But the project is coming along. The nice thing is that since there is still so much to do; if I get modeler’s block on a particular section, I can put it aside and focus on a different section. This kinda makes it hard to do decent updates as it’s scattered here and there. But that just means I will just have to wait while I get at least 90% of a part done before posting an update. A good thing that there is a build gathering coming up this weekend so I can get some live feedback that may help jump start, or just add more work to the list of to dos.<\/p>\n Feb 20, 2017: This is going to be a fairly sizable update. This includes the work from last week as well as over the weekend. I’m starting to focus and get more and more work done as the inspiration continues. The front skirts are REALLY plain looking. Yes, it’s a grunt suit, so it should be relatively simplistic cannon fodder that all GMs aspire to be; but it’s just plastic, so what’s better than cutting the plastic and then gluing more plastic to the cut plastic? There are still some scattered bits of work here and there as is typical with this kind of build. While glue or putty is drying, the focus on other sections keeps the work going. All the while, I’m taking pictures of all the progress.<\/p>\n Starting off with the skirts. Yes, they’re plain, and that open space is just screaming to get some detailing.<\/p>\n The first step is to plan out the design. I use dymo tape since it is fairly thick and works well as a guide for scribing tools or saws. The first line is laid and I align the tape against the bottom of the skirt. This way, I know how to line this up on the other skirt piece. Once I have the first layer of dymo tape, I laid down a thin piece of masking tape as a second guide. I cut the next layer of dymo tape at 60 degrees and laid it down using the masking tape as guide. Now I have the first level of design done; I made the mirror image for the other side.<\/p>\n The scribing tools are used to make groove lines. Once I have the guidelines in; the thin hobby saws come out and I start to cut the pieces from the sides of the part inward towards the middle. The middle will be difficult to cut with the saw, so the saw is not used to cut this area. I scribe the middle line a few times to thin down the plastic then take a hobby knife to press in and break the line. Since the plastic is fairly thin, I can snap the part and get a fairly clean break. Sanding the edges cleans up the rough edges from the cutting as well as creates a separation line between the two cut pieces. One horizontal side is sanded to remove more plastic than the other edges to create a wider gap.<\/p>\n Most of the cutting work is done with the hobby saws and the detail work is done with a metal file to sand down the edges. Here’s what the skirt looks like assembled. Breaking apart the skirt adds a nice bit detail to the plain surface.<\/p>\n Next up, I want to remove even more plastic, so again, some guide masking tape is placed, followed by the dymo tape.<\/p>\n The scriber is used to channel out a guideline. Saws are then used to cut away the excess plastic, files to clean up the rough edges, then once assembled, the design is starting form.<\/p>\n Some cut strips of styrene glued to the surface adds another layer of detail. The raised detail gives some added depth to the skirts. The last bit was to drill out a hole for a resin minus detail piece.<\/p>\n Next up, I decided that the original antenna just didn’t look good. The clippers went to work *snip* *snip*, and off it came. I have some pieces of styrene, an I-beam, styrene rectangles, strips, rods, and tubes of different sizes. It’s a matter of cutting and gluing to create the new antenna. I had to let the glue set up before continuing to add little details.<\/p>\n Small details round out the rest of the antenna. A resin minus detail, a metal collar piece, another resin collar piece and some magnet wire wrapped around the smallest antenna piece finish everything up.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/gamerabaenre.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/mg_gm_sniper_07_2048x2048.jpg\")
<\/a> <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/gamerabaenre.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/FNV_sniper_rifle_Carbon_Fiber_Parts_Suppressor-1024x273.png\")
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