Cheating

Alright I'm fed up with my poor plaster sculpting skills, so I turned to my printer for help. In the words of a scholar, "see the difference?"

The Birth of a Part

There it is, beautiful yes? It's hollow so I'm filling it with Great Stuff. Not sure how well it will work, but if it fails to add structural stability, I can always make another because I have the mold. I'm only planning on making one of these guns, so making molds for one-off parts is overkill. But I wanted to have a save point because you can't always "undo" in real life. Great Stuff is not "undo" friendly. What I should have done for a one-off part is take the foam sculpt, coat it in polyester or some other durable but sandable material (instead of plaster), and work with that.

Molding the Obviously-a-Gun Part

This is how big the mold is for the largest part. That's Scar prowling around up there for scale, and he's like what... 6 feet long? Little does he know my hand is under the mold, ready to go all Cabin In The Woods up in here. Which brings me to a good point; polyurethane rubber stinks (really) and is a lot more delicate than silicon rubbers. It also sticks to whatever it touches, leaving me with no choice but to Vaseline everything wherever there's contact with the rubber. So be wary of this cheaper alternative to the real sil deal.

More Secret Project

 Rubber around some plastered foam pieces. I'm already having issues getting a good cast with these, so I'm trying a different method. After this picture was taken, I covered them in plaster for support.

Plastered piece of foam about ready to be molded. I'll just wait until I figure out the casting process before I do anything that can't be undone.

Some additional, non sculpted pieces that I printed in ABS. These bits will have molds made because they will be a single piece with the foam bits, so I'll just glue them all together, mold, cast, and reassemble the pieces for the mirrored half of the secret thing I'm creating. It's obviously a gun of some sort, I can't hide that. I tried.