First, here are all of the resin pieces that I have created from my silicone rubber molds:

The first and obviously difficult thing to do was to cast the emitter tip in clear resin. Its small size and my desire to make it as bubble-free as possible caused me a few headaches, but I managed to wangle it quite nicely. After my first few tries I was shattered however. The castings were not only full of bubbles, it looked like a can of soda had exploded inside the mold before the resin cured. It was that bad.

Of course I had the answer to this problem always in the back of my head: In my greenness I had foolishly attempted to pour the resin without degassing it first, because I shied away from the effort of building a vacuum chamber. No matter how cautiously I tried to mix the resin, the result was always a disaster.

So, I finally realized that there was no way around it: I had to build a vacuum chamber to be able to suck all of the trapped air bubbles out of the resin before pouring it into the mold. So I got myself a few components and started building: A small low-cost vacuum pump, a big stainless steel pot, some thick plexi as the lid, a flexible hose, a few connectors / valves and a rubber mat as a sealing gasket.

Putting it all together is pretty self-explainatory: I drilled two holes into the plexi, one for the hose that is connected to the pump and one for the valve which enabled me to re-pressurize the pot after the procedure. Then I connected the hose and added the rubber mat to the underside of the plexi to make the lid airtight.

Et voilà – my very own vacuum chamber! Not as difficult to build as I thought and it works like a charm! Resin degassed in there is almost bubble-free and cures beautifully.

Looking at the degassing procedure makes clear how impossible it is to get a bubble-free casting without it. There are a lot more tiny bubbles inside a resin mixture than you would ever imagine. Exposing them to a vacuum makes them visible, lets them grow bigger, rise to the surface and finally breaks them.

Bubbles or not, it is still very difficult to get the resin inside a mold this small though, because it is quite viscous. I use disposable pipettes to be able to allot the resin in small doses.

After the mold is about half-way full, I stop and use a toothpick to catch any bubbles that might have been caught inside the mold and try to push them away from the inner mold wall. This way no holes are created in the casting, even though those bubbles are still trapped inside and obviously visible. That’s not always possible to prevent. When I think I got them all, I continue and fill up the mold.

And here you can see the result. Almost bubble-free castings which will look fabulous when lit up by the electronics from behind.

The next element that required a special casting technique was the display panel:

Well, it didn’t exactly require a special technique, but I decided to do it a little differently from how it might normally be done to make it look more seamless.

The normal way of casting this would be to incorporate a hole into the master model so that the electronics could be inserted into the casting, which naturally also would feature this “window”. The other possibility would have been to work this hole into each casting, similarly as I did with the battery door of my ODN Scanner replica. With this experience under my belt however, I decided that I didn’t want to do it like this again because it’s just too elaborate.

Instead I put the LED digits inside the mold before pouring in the resin. This way the electronics get embedded into the resin and actually become one with the panel itself.

Doing this, a precise placement of the electronic components inside the mold is obviously vital. If they are not placed exactly right, they will later appear askew, which is of course not desirable. Also, the spaces from each short side must be enough to account for the screws and switches that are going to be placed there later.

To be able to leave the soldering joints on the back of the LEDs blank, I used one of the smaller molds (the one from the Emitter Base Strip) as a placeholder to put the components in their place and keep the resin from completely encapsulating them. That’s also why I made the master model for the panel slightly thicker than the LED digits, to have some room to work with. Just in case you were wondering.

While pouring the resin inside the mold, I gently push down the placeholder to keep the resin from creeping under the LEDs and between them and the rubber placeholder piece.

Unfortunately it is impossible to prevent this resin creep completely. Some of it always manages to get where it shouldn’t:

Thankfully thin layers of resin can be removed quite easily. After cleaning out all of the excess resin flash and sanding the surface flat, it looks like this:

The front is also usually affected be resin creep, …

… but just as easy to clean up:

The result is an extremely sleek element that looks like it was made from one piece, because it essentially is. No ridges, no crevices. Smooth as an android’s bottom, as it were.

As you can obviously see, I also experimented with dyeing the resin to make all the parts black. This worked so well that I won’t even have to prime and paint these parts since they basically look perfect right out of the mold. It’s also more accurate since the original prop was also made from black resin.

Following this thought, I also gave the end piece a special treatment to make it look like something made from metal rather than resin. To achieve this, I filled the resin with aluminum powder before pouring it into the mold. The more powder you use, the more the part will be made up from actual aluminum. And as such it will naturally look more like a metal piece, be a bit heavier than usual and also feel a little cold to the touch. Very cool indeed (pun intended) and a lot better than spray-painting a resin piece silver.

Coming out of the mold, this is not immediately obvious, though. The part has a dark grey color with a slight yellow tint coming from the kind of resin I use which usually has a beige kind of color.

Once you sand over the whole piece however, the aluminum particles inside the resin show themselves and the surface gets nice and shiny, looking very metal-like. And the best part is that it is scratch-resistant since this metallic appearance is not only on the surface like a delicate layer of paint but comes from the material itself which is two thirds actual aluminum!

Here are both side by side to see the difference before and after sanding.

All the other parts were pretty straight forward: I dyed my resin black, filled the molds and got beautiful looking pieces out of them. Everything just looks more badass in black.

And here are all of them together, again:

Not casting-related, but following up on my last blog post, I also wanted to show you what I’ll be using as the disc for the end cap. As I said in the last post, I wanted to use the real deal, which looked like acrylic to me from the photos of the original prop. So I got some discs lasered from 1mm thin black plexi by a fellow prop builder who has access to a laser cutter. Thanks again, Christoph!

The disc will also serve as a door to conceal the charging port for the built-in rechargeable battery. If everything goes according to plan, the door will be screwed on to the actual charging port, looking totally seamless from outside, without any sign of a door. Just the way I like it and did it before with my Voyager Desktop Computer replica. More on that in the next post.

Now that I have everything I need, I can finally start assembling! Yay!

To watch my progress, follow me on Twitter @trekprops and be sure to check back here soon to see the finished replica. If you have any questions, please also feel free to leave a comment below or E-Mail me at info@trekprops.de.

If you want to make more than one unit of any given prop replica, it is inevitable to make molds of all the parts you need. This way you’ll be able to make multiple resin casts of each piece. For the Neutrino Probe, this presented a few unique challenges I had to tackle along the way due to the special nature of the body, its prototype parts and the fact that I wanted to put electronics in there. In this blog post I’ll show you exactly what I thought would work, what did’t work and – most importantly – what I ended up doing.

If you remember, the main body of the Neutrino Probe (minus the emitter) consists of five pieces – some of them big and some of them rather small.

Let’s begin with the main piece, which was the trickiest to mold. Why was it so tricky?

Well, for one it had to be hollow for me to be able to install the electronics later. To do that I needed enough room inside to fit the circuit in. However, due to the large grooves on the outside it was difficult to estimate how much I could hollow out without risking to break through one of the grooves. Therefore everything had to be measured exactly.

The other aspect was that the master model for the main part obviously was round since I turned it from wood. The actual prop part however needed to have one flat side where the display panel would go. How should I approach this? Cut off the unwanted piece before molding? No. Being out of wood, the material could easily have ripped thus ruining the entire thing. Also, being round it would’ve been difficult to get a grip on it and make a clean cut. Lastly, it would have been too final a solution for my taste. Had I cut off too much of it, I would’ve had no way to correct that mistake. So, I decided to solve the problem by molding only as much of the prototype as I needed and not one millimeter more. I’ll explain below.

To be able to do precise work, the first thing I did was to mark a line on the prototype where I wanted the flat side to be:

My first idea was to suspend the piece in silicone rubber by hanging it from wires (that’s what the small holes in the picture above are for) and pouring rubber in the mold below, until the pencil line was reached. What I didn’t take into consideration however, was that wood actually floats, not only on water but also on silicone rubber. Duh! So when I poured the silicone inside the mold and it reached the master model, it slowly began to move upwards, sinking my plan (pun intended ;)) millimeter by millimeter.

So, I needed a new plan. And one was quickly found. It was slightly more elaborate, but worked perfectly. Here’s what I did:

Since molding only part of the master model didn’t work, I decided to do a full-blown two-part mold with a lid that I could later take off. And that lid should be exactly where the pencil line was. The first step to accomplish this was to use a scrap piece of cured silicone from the first try and use it as the “floor” for the new mold box. Yes, you can saw cured rubber quite well. On top of that I built the box walls using LEGO as I always do. Around that I put some plasticine to seal the box and fix it in place.

Having everything absolutely level is important if you don’t want to produce crooked castings. That’s why I always check using a water level before molding.

Next I placed the prototype part inside the mold box and secured it using two strips of tape. Any type will do. I arranged it in such a way that the pencil line on the body was parallel to the “floor” of the mold box.

I then poured a little bit of silicone in the box, just enough so that the master model was covered up to the pencil line.

And this is how the silicone looked like when it was cured. This was gonna be my lid.

In order to continue, I then had to clean up the lid a little in an effort to make it as flat as possible. So I removed the excess rubber using scissors…

… as well as cutting pliers.

As preparation for the next step I then applied (quite a lot of) vaseline on the exposed area of the silicone as a releasing agent.

In this next image you can clearly see the applied vaseline and the brush strokes on it.

Then I reinserted the master model inside the mold…

… and secured it again using tape to prevent it from floating up as it did before.

Then I poured in silicone once more.

Note that I only covered the piece by about half. Why? Well, I couldn’t leave the tape in there to keep the prototype in place, so I needed something else. That’s what this intermediate layer of silicone was for.

When it cured it acted as a grip to keep the part where it was supposed to be and I could extend the box walls (the white LEGO pieces in the next picture) and fill up the mold. Without any vaseline in between, the silicone became one piece in the end, which is exactly what I wanted.

After demolding I was able to seperate the two pieces of the mold without any problems.

Getting the master model out of the mold was a little tricky, since so much of its round form was inside the mold, but thanks to the flexible nature of silicone rubber that became no serious problem.

After a little cleanup I was very happy with the result:

Now on to the next challenge: Making the casting hollow. Since my “resin displacement”-technique worked so well with the ODN Scanner, I didn’t think twice to use this method again here. The idea is to manufacture a rubber displacer piece on a stick that can be lowered down into the mold before filling it with resin. Afterwards it can be removed, making the final piece hollow.

To create this rubber displacer, I prepared a wooden beam with three screws, only partially screwed into the handle. This is where the rubber would stick to the grip. Inside the mold I used some of the clay that I use to prevent mold boxes from leaking to form a temporary mold for the displacer. The tricky thing here was to estimate how thick the walls and how big the displacer should be. I ended up making the mold rather large, thinking that I could always remove some of the cured silicone from the displacer piece to make it smaller. No correction would have been possible in the other direction.

(By the way, that’s what I ended up doing – shaping and correcting the cured rubber by cutting and sanding away material until it was just right.)

This is how the displacer grip looks like lowered down into the mold.

In this shot you can clearly see the screws that will dip into the silicone and attach the displacer to the wooden stick.

All filled up with some RTV rubber:

And this is how the complete mold looks like after demolding and cleaning up:

A perfect fit!

Now, if you have paid attention, then you know that the very first sentence of this post after the break actually isn’t correct. The main body of the Neutrino Probe (minus the emitter) isn’t made up of five, but of six pieces. The sixth very important piece is the display panel, which closes the main body and houses the 7-segment-LEDs for the readout. I built it from three layers of sheet styrene, glued together and filed to shape.

Slightly thicker than the LED component I’m using. Why that is? You’ll see… in the next blog post.

Three layers of sheet styrene glued together.

The usual game: File, putty, sand, prime, sand, prime, and so on…

And here’s the finished panel. So why didn’t I build this piece earlier? Well, simple: I didn’t know the exact dimensions I needed before molding the main body element of the probe where this part needed to fit on. So, logically, I couldn’t build it until the mold for the main body part was done.

Molding-wise this piece was very easy. I attached it to a board, built the usual mold box around it, and filled it with rubber.

And the finished mold:

Now if you’re thinking “Wait a minute, aren’t those LED digits supposed to be installed into that element? Don’t you need a hole in there for them?”, then you’re thinking right. I’m going to show you how I’m doing that in the next blog post!

The next piece to mold with an interesting story is the emitter. As you might remember from this blog post, I built one using styrene, putty and primer way back after I did the main parts of the probe. It consisted of two very small pieces and looked like this:

And here it is together with the rest of the business end:

It looked very nice and I was quite happy with my work considering that these pieces are so tiny.

However, I came to realize that they were not precise enough and more importantly not smooth enough. Because here’s the deal: Of course the emitter had to be cast in clear resin so that it could be illuminated from the back. For the casting to be absolutely transparent and clear, two conditions had to be met: The casting had to be bubble-free (more on that in the next blog post) and the surface of the prototype had to be absolutely, 100% smooth. If it hadn’t, the silicone would’ve translated all the irregularity, texture and roughness – as subtle as it might have been – into the mold which would’ve produced castings with a milky, frosted surface and not a glass-like bright finish.

So I reached out to fellow prop-builder Myron Stapleton who has both the experience and the equipment to turn parts from aluminum to measure. I prepared some very detailed specs for him and what I got back matched those dimensions exactly:

I couldn’t believe the accuracy with wich Myron replicated my diagrams. This is truly the work of a master. Thank you so much, Myron!

The molding process for this piece was no different than the rest: Put it on a board in a mold box and fill it up with silicone. The one thing I had to be careful with was the speed with which I poured the rubber inside the mold. Pouring in a thin stream I carefully filled the box, paying close attention not to trap any air bubbles while covering all those ridges and crevices.

And here’s the final mold. While molding all the other pieces, I actually made a number of emitter molds so that I could later make several castings at once.

Molding the rest of the pieces was very straight forward. By now you know the drill, so I’m not going to repeat it once more. Just enjoy the pictures:

You’ll notice here that I sometimes used clay as a base for the pieces. The plasticine acted as a light adhesive and also prevented the silicone from creeping under the prototypes thus creating a thin rubber film which can make the demolding process problematic.

Looking at this last piece, which is the “end cap” of the Neutrino Probe, I realized that painting – or more precisely masking – this component would be quite elaborate since the disc at the top has a different color than the rest. Have a look at the original to see what I mean:

So I decided in the last minute not to include the back disc in the actual “end cap” casting, but to add it later and use the real deal (more on that in an upcoming blog post).

Instead of removing the disc from my original master model (the one which I turned from wood here), I used a resin casting of said master model to preserve the original.

If something had gone wrong, I simply had made another pull from the mold and started over. But, thankfully, there were no problems. First, I shaved off the majority of the top disc using my belt sander like this:

Then I used sandpaper stapled to a board to gently remove the rest. Wet sanding makes for a smoother surface.

After some priming and more sanding, the surface was perfectly smooth.

I noticed however, that the whole element was not tall enough and did not match the original prototype. I simply sanded off too much of the bottom of the casting to make the surface smooth.

So I used styrene to extend the element like this:

A few layers of putty and primer later, with a little sanding in between, the new “end cap” was finished and ready to be molded.

And here are all of the Neutrino Probe molds with their respective prototypes. Seven pieces in total, which is quite a lot, now that I’m looking at all of them together.

In the next blog post I will cover the casting process for these parts and the unique problems I had to solve to make that happen.

As always, if you want to follow my work more closely, you can follow me on Twitter (@trekprops) to get more frequent updates on what is happening in my workshop.

If you have any questions or observations, you can of course also E-Mail me or leave a comment below. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

First, two pictures of the completes circuit board:

And here’s the video:

If you have any questions or remarks, please leave a comment or E-Mail me at info@trekprops.de.

Sometimes, you want to finish something as quickly as possible. You desperately want to make progress, feel the urge to get back to it continuously and yet you can’t find any time to do just that. You just can’t, and every step takes forever as a result. That pretty much sums up the situation I’m in right now with this project.

Anyhow, as you can see I finally did manage to take the next step by finishing another important part of the tool – the business end! It’s a very detailed piece that consists of four separate parts right now (I’m not sure yet how I’m going to mold it though). And four very tiny parts I might add. The smallest one is only 5 mm in width!

This is by the way the part of the probe that was originally made from a disassembled nose hair trimmer. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts I wasn’t able to identify the exact model or even manufacturer of that trimmer, so I couldn’t use the original and had to scratch-build something instead. It was one hell of a lot of tedious work, but – to be honest – the result is probably nicer and cleaner than any found item, which makes the whole thing worthwhile in my book.

But, judge for yourself. To refresh your memory, here’s the front part of the original prop as well as the schematics I did as preparation for this project:

And here are the pictures of my finished multi-part piece:

So, let’s get down to business. How did I create these parts? Here we go:

It all started with some more or less precisely cut pieces of styrene, my material of choice when it comes to scratch-building stuff.

They would make up the body of the largest piece. Which is round. Which meant that I had to sculpt it somehow since I didn’t have anything that I could’ve used as a base piece.

So I marked an appropriate line for the outer curvature on all pieces and cut them with an X-acto knife.

As you can see, I also cut some material away at the top to make it easier to create a recession there later.

Then I arranged them in a circular way to build a kind of skeleton structure and glued them together using plastic glue.

The next step was to fill the spaces between the “ribs” with putty to “put some meat on the bones” as it were.

Then the sanding began. Oh, boy. The sanding – that’s the kind of work that I’d like to have an assistant do for me or something. On the other hand it gives you great control over the final shape of your piece. The downside is that it takes a long time. A very long time. And especially so if you’re only one bit as anal about a perfect surface as I am…

While sanding the outer surface of this part I also paid some attention to the top side of it where I needed to have a pretty substantial indentation with a thin lip around it. To achieve this I used a mini-dremel with an appropriate attachment to remove material from both the surface inside as well as the “walls”.

Here is an intermediary result. Looks pretty nice already, doesn’t it?

On to the next part, which is essentially the same deal as the first one, except smaller and with a more straight profile. And when I say smaller I mean like 9,5 mm tall! That’s pretty tough to even hold in your hands (depending on what kind of hands you have of course). But holding it while trying to leave some room for sandpaper to work on it? Yep, you guessed it – that’s not easy to say the least. To illustrate: I even had to use tweezers to glue the “styrene skeleton” parts in place, which were only a couple of millimeters in width.

Here’s another preliminary result, this time a bit smoother. As you can see, I used spot putty on the smaller piece to fill in tiny holes and gaps.

And this is where Murphy came into play. It turned out that I had miscalculated something or simply had visually misjudged the proportions of this small piece. Anyway, it was evident that it was too thin and I had to somehow make it thicker – or wider if you look at it from the side.

Sounds easy, but how should I do that? Well, after thinking about it for a bit I decided to simply add material by gluing small strips of styrene to the side of it and fill it with putty as before. Yay, more sanding! Not exactly what I wanted to do but it sure did the trick:

After that small setback, I moved on to the next part, which is a kind of add-on to the first, “big” base piece. I made it basically from four small strips of styrene, which I glued together and sanded in shape.

A little putty to hide the seams:

A little sanding – done.

So, here are all of the three pieces that had been done at that point:

Next, I had to make the small, narrow part fit into the bigger base. So, I cut a piece out of the side of it and added some putty back in to make the new surface nice and smooth. Again, I used my mini-dremel to do that, this time with a small circular saw attached to it. I also used various small files to work on that slot.

While working on any of these pieces, by the way, I sprayed light coats of automotive primer on them all the time to reveal small blemishes, scratches or any kind of unevenness that needed to be fixed.

It wasn’t until I had created this slot that I noticed how deep I had carved the indentation into that big piece from above. Clearly too much! When put together, the final element of the prop would not have looked very good like that. So I had no choice but to improvise again and insert a round piece of styrene to raise the level of that surface a bit. This of course meant that I also had to putty it to blend it to the “walls” inside:

A lot of sanding later – and I mean a LOT of sanding later – the mistake was corrected and the surface both inside and outside was smooth as an androids butt. Also, the small add-on piece fit in its place perfectly.

To finish this piece off I had only one thing left to do and that was to create tiny grooves on the outside as a bit of detailing to give it some structure and make it interesting, not to mention match it with the original of course! To do that I cut tiny pieces of tape and put them on where I wanted the grooves to be.

Then I applied several coats of primer to add some material to the outside.

Then I removed the tape and voilà – micro-detailing!

Last but not least I had to tackle the emitter tip, which proved to be extra challenging. What I needed was a very small piece with very specific measurements and three tiny rings around it. At first I had no idea how to achieve this, but then decided to try to sculpt the tip from air curing clay which worked out quite well.

The three rings around the tip gave me a headache though. How the hell should I sculpt those by hand? It seemed impossible. Then I had the idea to wrap a bit of wire around it to at least get an approximation of what I wanted. It would be a short spiral instead of three separate rings, but that was the best I could think of. And it turned out that it worked really well and looks very nice even if it’s not perfect. After all, it’s only a very small part of the final prop…

So, here’s the final result again:

Note that I added a small indentation on top of the middle sized piece as well, similar to the one on the big base piece to create a small lip and a place for the emitter tip to fit in.

Seeing those four parts together now that they’re finished, I’m very satisfied with this part of the probe and I think it goes very well with the main parts I did a while back:

I’m sure it’ll be a great prop when it’s all done. And I sure hope that I’ll be able to make some more progress in the near future, too!

What do you think? The good, the bad and the ugly – I’d love to hear back from you in any case, either via a comment below or via eMail!

Also, if you want to watch my prop-related activities more closely you should follow me on Twitter. Every time I’m in my workshop, you’ll know it instantly and see what I’m doing in real-time before anyone else can read about it here on the blog. Sounds like something you might enjoy? Follow me @trekprops and get the inside scoop!

Even if I had to deal with a few setbacks, the work went forward quite smoothly and pretty much the way I had imagined it. However, some serious precision work was necessary to make the parts as accurate and clean as they turned out to be, which was no easy task at all! As you can see in the pictures below, I shaped the wooden raw material with knives, saws, files and of course different kinds of sandpaper until I was satisfied with the results, while permanently applying coats of primer in between to reveal rough spots and other blemishes yet to be smoothed out. The most useful tool in this process? My caliper, which I used to continuously measure the thickness of the ribs, the spacing between them, etc. Without it, the parts undoubtedly wouldn’t have turned out this nice.

Of course, the pieces are not 100% symmetrical or exactly like my schematics, but I’m very pleased with the results nonetheless. The three parts I made in this manner are the ribbed middle section as well as the two back pieces. I decided to do the latter ones separately so I could make seamless resin castings of them later by using a one-piece silicone mold for each – in contrast to a two-part mold for a bigger piece, which would have a seam line by default.

So, without further ado, here are the pictures. First, the finished parts:

The original prop and my schematics for comparison:

And here are some progress pictures:

Very useful for making flat surfaces truly flat: a belt sander.

Humble beginnings…

Expanding the grooves.

Cutting deeper to match my schematics.

Some filing action to accurately shape the ribs.

Splash coat applied to reveal all kinds of blemishes.

The final cut to trim the piece from the excess wood.

The next part of the probe I want to tackle is the tip of the tool, which I will have to scratch build since I wasn’t able to identify the nose hair trimmer part that was originally used for this purpose.

Keep watching the blog for more updates. If you want to catch additional info between my blog entries, follow me on Twitter: @trekprops!

For what it’s worth, here’s a look at the test piece I was playing with to get accustomed to working with a lathe:

As with most of these props, it was used as a medical instrument as well as an engineering tool. However, with this one, the scientific use was seen more often.

Here are some screenshots from “Star Trek: Captain’s Chair“:

And here are two shots from the “It’s A Wrap”-Auction where two of these were sold:

Lastly, here’s the sequence of the lights from the show:

Even if it’s not very clear in the animation above, I know that the last LED of the sequence is green whereas the rest of the lights are of a warm yellow/orange color.

Using these references and with some help from people in the know, I was able to figure out proportions and measurements for this prop. Also, I learned that the tip was taken from a nose hair trimmer and the ribbed middle part was loosely based on a Star Wars lightsaber handle. The back piece was custom made from aluminum.

Here are some schematics I put together:

This drawing will be the basis for my replica. The dimensions should be pretty accurate to the original.

The next step will be to manufacture the ribbed middle section as well as the two back pieces. I will try to accomplish this by turning these parts from wood.

Stay tuned for more progress pics in the coming weeks!

Any questions or suggestions as to how I should proceed with this? Or do you know which nose hair trimmer model was used for the tip of the Neutrino Probe? Leave a comment and let me know!

Here’s a closer look to the resin parts that come with the kit:

First up: Wash these parts in warm, soapy water to get rid of any mold release agent that might still be sticking to them. You need to get it off completely because it can prevent primer and paint from adhering to the surface properly.

Parts cast in resin are most times rough when they come out of the mold and have to be sanded smooth before processed further. In this case, the pouring of the resin created a ridge in the “walls” of the body shell. This is the area that will later be glued together. Here’s a close-up:

In order to make it possible to glue the parts together, you have to sand those areas smooth. I use a large piece of sandpaper mounted on a board to accomplish this.

The parts that come with the kit have already been pre-sanded, but you’ll still have to do some fine-tuning to fit the parts together perfectly.

Be careful not to sand too much material away – keep in mind that the electronics have to fit inside! Keep measuring the thickness of the two shells aligned to each other with a Caliper to make sure the prop will be equally thick on each corner.

Here’s the result:

Before continuing with the body, let’s pay some attention to the inner workings of the scanner first! Here are the electronics that are included in the kit:

Since the LEDs alone are not wide enough when placed next to each other, use some 1.0 mm styrene to act as spacers between them. This way, the width will be more accurate to the original prop.

This step can be quite tricky! Use some fast setting super glue and rough up the LEDs as well as the styrene with sandpaper or a file. When done, the glue will bond easier to the material.

Update: Since I wrote this tutorial, I’ve improved the set of electronics and am now using a LED bar instead of five seperate LEDs. Thereby the aforementioned (very elaborate) step in construction can be dropped:

Also, I am now using other super-bright red LEDs as the one shown here.

Next you’ll have to cut out all the windows out of the resin parts. Let’s start with the one for the front LEDs. As you can see in Part II, I specifically designed the silicone mold to create a particularly thin layer of resin in this area. That way this step is easily done with a sharp X-Acto knife.

Although the area of thin resin is fairly large, be sure not to create a window that is too big, because you wouldn’t want to have any gaps later. Keep comparing your assembled LED bar with the window to ensure a tight fit. Of course, if you want a bigger window, feel free to do whatever you think looks best. Gaps can be filled with putty later if needed.

Use a small jewelers file to smooth the edges. If necessary, use some spot putty to resculpt any imperfections here. Primer the part to reveal any blemishes and keep working until they are removed. When the electronics are installed, any work on this window will be very difficult, so complete it before the installation!

Next you need to cut out the battery door. The best place for it is in the handle on the backside of the prop. The opening can be conveniently hidden under one of the styrene parts that will be added later.

To determine the dimensions of the opening, simply measure the battery holder which is included with the kit. Then, cut out the matching styrene part using the included templates and place it on the handle.

Hint: Use spray glue to attach the templates to the styrene before cutting. This way the shape will be accurate and the paper can be easily removed in warm water.

Trace the outline of the detail piece and add the measurements of the battery holder like this:

The resin in the handle is approximately 5 mm thick, so you’ll need something more effective than an X-Acto knife this time. You can get good results if you drill four holes in the corners of the layout and then use a fretsaw to cut out the door.

This is the result.

Use a small and flat file to clean the shape of the door.

Now, the openings for both the trigger and the top LED have to be drilled. When doing that, it’s important to align the resin halves perfectly and to be careful not to bring them out of alignment during the drilling process.

For the trigger, simply drill a hole of 4 mm in diameter in the middle of the recessed area on the handle. Test fit the trigger and extend the orifice if necessary before continuing!

To determine the location of the opening for the top LED, use the template of the head piece, which will be added later. You can also use this and other pictures in this tutorial as a reference.

You’ll have to make sure that the electronic components have enough room inside the body to perform their function. To do this, you’ll need to dremel some of the material away.

This is where the battery holder will be put. You’ll have to align it to the door in the other body half, which will be placed on top of this one to enable easy access to the batteries. Again, use the dremel to create some more room if necessary.

This is how the electronics are arranged inside the prop:

To attach all of the components permanently into the resin shell, use a strong putty, for example a 2-component polyester putty which I use in my builds.

As you can see, all of the LED components are placed very near to each another. In case of the green running lights, this is on purpose and not a problem. But as far as the super-bright red LED is concerned, there is a problem with the close proximity to the green LEDs: Light bleeding. To make sure that the red LED doesn’t light up the green ones next to it when activated, you’ll have to putty up the entire area around the green LEDs and use black masking tape around the red LED.

When inserting the LEDs into the window, be sure not to make them flush with the front of the resin body. There needs to be some space for a piece of the included translucent plastic to go in there later.

When the electronics have been successfully installed and tested, the resin body can be permanently sealed. First, use 5 minute epoxy glue to attach the resin body halves to each other. Then, putty up the seam lines and sand them smooth when the putty has dried.

This is the most elaborate part of the buildup. Use primer to reveal any blemishes in the finish and remove them with spot putty and sandpaper until they’re all gone. Be sure to mask all LEDs and the trigger to protect them from sanding, puttying and priming!

Next, the head piece needs to be attached. Before you do that, sand a good portion of the top array off so that it will have the original thickness afterwards when the styrene is in place. Use the templates to cut out the shape and then use 5-minute epoxy to glue it on.

Again, putty the edges and use sandpaper to round them. Try to make it look as if the part was integrated into the overall shape of the prop from the beginning. As before, repeat the puttying, sanding and priming until the result is acceptable.

When everything is done, it’s time to paint!

You don’t want to glue the greeblies onto the paint later, so mask off all areas which will be enhanced with details. Then, paint the entire body with PK 7173 or a matching equivalent.

Don’t forget to drill the holes for the battery door screws!

When the paint has fully dried, mask off everything but the handle and the top scanner array and paint them with PK 7179 or a matching equivalent.

After this is done, remove the masking tape and continue with the last step.

Here all of the detail parts at a glance. For the emitter, shorten the acrylic rod to a length of approximately 12 mm and cut it in half. Sand the flat side of it to achieve a frosted look and a light diffusion effect.

Here are the color codes for the greeblies: Handle details, front ribbed piece and one of the small top details: copper metallic. The other small top detail: red. Rim strips and pointed front detail: PK 7179 or matching equivalent. Square additional detail on pointed front piece: beige. If you want, you can also paint the screws in the same color as the handle details to blend them in.

Again, use 5-minute epoxy or CA glue to attach the greeblies.

Screw the battery door in place after inserting two AAA batteries.

Fit the translucent plastic into the front LED window and insert it.

Cut out the display graphics that you wish to use and test fit them. When your display graphic fits the recess perfectly, use some thin double-sided adhesive tape to glue it inside. You can also use spray glue for this.

That’s it, your ODN Scanner is finished!

Now, go ahead and scan away!

Because the finished prop was supposed to contain an electric circuit with a super bright red LED and five green sequencing lights, the mold had to be done in a way so that the later resin casting is hollow. This could only be achieved by doing two resin halves which were then put together. This circumstance didn’t make the task of molding the prototype any easier…

Here’s again the finished master model just like it was about to be duplicated. To reveal small imperfections, I already applied some coats of primer and then repaired whatever didn’t seem right.

Since both halves of the cast resin parts should be as symmetrical as possible, I marked the middle of the body using a pencil. This helped me to accurately shape the clay bed later.

Next I had to make sure the work surface was leveled. This is checked best using a spirit level. If the work surface is not leveled now, the seam line of the two resin halves will not be straight later and they won’t fit together.

The next step is the most difficult and time consuming part of making a two part mold: The master model has to be half embedded in clay to create the first half of the mold. The above mentioned marking on the body of the prototype now helped me.

Be sure not to use just some material for this but non-reactive clay to avoid inhibiting the chemical reaction of the two silicone rubber components. To ensure that, I use a clay that doesn’t contain any sulfates and is oil-based. It works very well together with the additive cross-linked precision casting silicone I use.

The master model has be mounted evenly on the work surface. I achieved that by sticking chunks of clay under it to stabilize it:

Next up is the task of shaping the clay bed. I started by putting material close around the prototype body and then worked my way away from it.

Now the mold box had to be created. It determines the final size of the mold. Most people use styrene or wood to construct this box and seal the corners with clay but I found that LEGO bricks work very well because they can be re-used every time to create boxes of different sizes and the buildup of the box is fast and easy..

Now comes the tricky part: The important thing is that exactly half of the model has to be embedded in the clay. This just alleviates the buildup of the kit later. Also very important is the fact that the clay needs to be aligned exactly to the body. There mustn’t appear any gaps between the model and the clay. This could be repaired later, but it’s easier to do it right here. So, precise modeling work is in order here!

Of course, the entire inside of the mold box has to be filled with clay. As you can see here, I first did this only roughly and then did the fine tuning later to get the surface smooth and to close all the gaps between prototype and clay.

Still quite some work to do here!

The next picture shows a pretty good progress on the clay bed. To do the shaping I use a putty knife which makes it easy to reach tricky areas, for example corners.

Remeber to wear gloves! Otherwise the clay will get stuck under your fingernails which is quite uncomfortable. Furthermore, the clay will get dirty rather quickly if it is exposed directly to your fingers even if you washed your hands before!

Here’s the result after a lot of work: The surface is now very smooth and there are no more gaps anywhere.

Next I used a pen shaped tool to create several small indentations in the clay around the model. They will later become pins as the silicone flows into them and cures. The other mold half will then again show these troughs and both halves will be perfectly aligned to each other.

This is important for creating solid castings by pouring the resin into the mold while both halves are closed. Even though this was not the type of casting I wanted to do, I nevertheless chose to implement this step because it’s not possible to add it later.

After I had enlarged the mold box up to the desired height, I was ready to pour the mixed silicone rubber into it:

The deepest areas have to be filled with rubber first to avoid air bubbles. For the same reason you should pour a thin stream so that bubbles cannot occur in the first place and those created by the mixing of the silicone components can break.

When the prototype is completely covered with silicone, you need to add at least one more centimeter in height to make sure the “base” of the mold is thick enough.

After the silicone has cured, the entire mold can be turned around, …

… the LEGO bricks can be dismantled and the clay can be removed. Be careful not to move the master model in any way. Note the above mentioned pins in the silicone.

Remaining clay residue has to be removed.

Most silicones are self-seperating, which means that the master model won’t get stuck to the rubber so it can easily be demolded. This however isn’t the case when silicone is poured onto silicone. In this case, the two rubber parts would bond together and become one piece.

So, to avoid enclosing the prototype into a solid block of rubber, I had to apply a release agent to the first mold half. I used vaseline for this, which I brushed on carefully. Don’t be stingy with the release agent! The more you apply, the easier the demolding process will be. Remember to mask the master model off to avoid blemishing it with brush marks which would be transferred to the new mold half.

After I had removed the masking tape, I repeated the above pictured step of pouring the silicone into the mold, waited until it had cured, demolded the prototype and disassembled the LEGO frame. Here’s the result:

The silicone mold is now finished and ready to be used for resin casting. However, if I had used this mold as it is to cast parts, they would have been solid just like the master model. This however, wasn’t my goal. I wanted to create two resin shells in which I could install electronics. So, I had to do a little more work on this mold to make that happen.

In order to get hollow resin shells I had to find a way to displace the resin that I would pour into the mold halves. The first step to achieve this was to use clay again to shape “walls” which had exactly the thickness that I wanted for the resin pieces later. Everything that I made out of clay here, would become resin later.

Note the recess for the LEDs!

Next, I placed wooden slats with screws in them over the mold. The screw heads had the purpose to attach themselves to the silicone rubber I was about to pour into the clay lined mold. This way I would have a comfortable handle to place the inner silicone displacement piece inside the mold later.

Here’s the result of this rather complex mold making process: two two-part mold halves (front side and back side, only one half is pictured) which produce two resin shells that fit exactly together (well, more or less since there’s always some excess resin that needs to be sanded off).

The development of the two most important parts for the ODN Scanner kit is thus complete and the buildup of the hero prop can now begin!

With every building project, there’s one essential question: What material am I gonna use? Well, in prop building there’s most of the time only one answer to this question and that is “styrene“. Styrene is nothing more than sheets of plastic which is available in several thicknesses. It is also used in other model building efforts, for example architectural models.

So, the first step of building the prototype was to cut out all of the needed pieces from styrene (I used styrene with a thickness of 1 mm). After I had determined the shape of these parts by drawing a blueprint, I printed them out and glued them onto the sheet of styrene using spray glue. Next up was cutting the pieces which I did using a sharp precision knife. After scorching the sheet two or three times, they can easily be broken off along a straight edge.

After that it’s no problem to remove the paper from the styrene. If it doesn’t come off easily, simply put it in luke warm water for a few minutes. Then, the edges of the styrene parts had to be sanded lightly to create clean edges. The opening which would later become the display window proved to be especially difficult. A lot of sanding work was necessary to achieve really straight lines and rounded corners. Very useful in this step was sanding under running water which requires a special kind of sandpaper but results in very little dust and a very smooth edge.

Here are all 24 seperate pieces which I marked with the respective codes to know which one belonged where.

To see if these pieces could fit together to result in the object of my wishes, I did a test fit and glued them together using removable masking tape:

Styrene is best glued together with a special plastic glue which joins the parts permanently:

I filled the inside of this open box with putty to gain additional material for the later sanding process of the corners and edges. I wanted to prevent creating a hole in the body which I would not be able to close again.

After I had closed the body, I sanded the hole object roughly to remove all of the sharp edges and corners.

Next up was the handle. Here I also did a test fit first to determine how I would have to glue the pieces together. Because the handle would have been too thin consisting of 1 mm styrene, I glued two identically shaped parts together to make it thicker.

To perfectly fit the handle onto the main body, I actually attached the respective parts to it while glueing them together.

As you can see, the edges of the handle were very raw. Because of this I again had to use putty and a lot of time to give the handle a sleek shape and a smooth surface. The complex form obviously didn’t make this easy for me. However, the time was well spent as you can see here:

Fits like a glove! However, the main body being curved and the inside of the handle being straight, small holes were visible in between which again had to be filled and sanded smooth.

After that, the complete body had to be sanded very carefully to make every surface smooth and to achieve the desired degree of roundness on all edges and corners. Because silicone rubber transfers each and every imperfection to the mold very rigorously, the master model has be as perfect as the final kit or prop is supposed to be. Mistakes made here are being carried all the way through to the final product and then have to be corrected on each casted part anew. So, a lot of work can be saved here by thinking everything through and doing things right.

I here fabricated one set of greeblies, which are normally being put on as the last step in the buildup of a prop, to see what the final look of the prop would be:

In the same way I did the handle, I also made the scanner array on the top of the prop above the recessed display area. This way I could simply plunge it on and then attach it.

Even if it doesn’t look that way, the construction of such a prop from scratch using the methods shown here is a lot of work! Sanding is by far the most time consuming task because you always spot another small blemish which has to be repaired or areas you are not satisfied with. Also, the whole process requires a lot of patience because it just takes very long if you want to do it right. Anyhow, the effort is well worth it especially when you see yourself making progress and getting the project somewhere.

So far, so good. The master model is finished. Next is Part II in which I describe how I made the silicone mold.