HOME | DD

Description
So this summer I went to California to visit my mom’s parents who live in the mountains about an hour from Yosemite. My Grandpa builds working /street legal versions of old cars for a living so they live in this giant garage/workshop with some plastic flaps separating the house and workshop parts of the garage. This workshop has all sorts of wood and metal and ten billion different kinds of glue and so many tools you don’t know what to do. He knows how to weld and carve and work with aluminum and welding apoxy and pvc pipe and he builds beautiful things all the time so I asked him when we got there if he would help me make the portal gun I’ll need for the anime con I’m going to at the end of October. I’m going to be Chell, so I need a super-legit-looking portal gun. I showed him a video of how to make a cheap one, but he was like

“We can make a better one.”

This piece of amazing is the end result. The barrel is PVC pipe and couplings; inside is a clear plastic tube with a sandblasted double-barreled tube inside it. The outer shells are made of aluminum, as are the claws. It doesn’t light up yet, but my dad or friend is going to run 2 circuits, one for a blue led and one for an orange one, through the two holes in the inner tube so it will. I don’t understand how to electronics, so forgive me if I massacred that explanation. All I know is, it’s gonna light up blue and orange eventually.

Planning took a while, as we had to decide how we were going to make the claws work, and what material we were going to make the shells out of, since foam didn’t seem very legit. I made foam patterns for both the shells before cutting the shapes out of aluminum and grinding down the edges. Despite our meticulous planning a lot of things went wrong- the original piece for the larger back part of the barrel beneath the white shell broke on the lathe so we had to make a new one hastily. Also, the rings were slightly too small to fit on the PVC pipe easily, so we had to sand and grind and sand and grind until we could squeeze them on there.

I spent hours with my grandpa every day working on this project. I was allowed to use some professional tools with his supervision, like the lathe for making bevels, the bandsaw, a machine that looked like a giant anchored drill for drilling holes, and a blowtorch to anneal the aluminum so it’d be easier to work with. Mostly, I sanded and ground it to perfection, making everything flawlessly level and flat. Sanding PVC pipe and aluminum takes a heck of a lot of work and after several hours of constantly sanding, all my clothes were covered in aluminum dust. Layer upon layer of welding apoxy was used to build up the front part next to the tube with the indentions in it, and we used apoxy to secure the wires in place too. I wish I had some in-progress photos to show you guys of it, but I don’t. One of the most exciting moments was when my Grandpa finished making the back shell (He didn’t want me pounding the aluminum and ruining it with my lack of expertise) and I rested it on the barrel and realized that it was all finally starting to come together and look like a real portal gun.

As you can see from the first picture of me (ignore my ugly fatty-fatty-no-parents-ness, focus on babbu) holding the beautiful thing, which I nicknamed Babbu because it is my lovely precious beautiful babbu, it’s larger proportionally than Chell’s is in-game, and because the aluminum shell is made out of one piece not two, there’s simply a black stripe down the middle, not an indentation. Some details were left out, but all in all I’m very pleased with it. The claws can actually move, the barrel looks beautiful and just like the one in-game, and the shells are perfect. The whole thing is so shiny too, since we used coats upon coats of glossy white paint.

I can’t wait to take this to Oni-Con in October. It’s heavy, but I would never put this beauty down in a place where it might get stolen. I’ll post my final cosplay pictures later, and I’ll definitely post pictures of it when it can light up, but I just wanted to show what it looked like since I’m extremely proud of it and am really grateful to him for truly making this prop spectacular.

Description
So this summer I went to California to visit my mom’s parents who live in the mountains about an hour from Yosemite. My Grandpa builds working /street legal versions of old cars for a living so they live in this giant garage/workshop with some plastic flaps separating the house and workshop parts of the garage. This workshop has all sorts of wood and metal and ten billion different kinds of glue and so many tools you don’t know what to do. He knows how to weld and carve and work with aluminum and welding apoxy and pvc pipe and he builds beautiful things all the time so I asked him when we got there if he would help me make the portal gun I’ll need for the anime con I’m going to at the end of October. I’m going to be Chell, so I need a super-legit-looking portal gun. I showed him a video of how to make a cheap one, but he was like

“We can make a better one.”

This piece of amazing is the end result. The barrel is PVC pipe and couplings; inside is a clear plastic tube with a sandblasted double-barreled tube inside it. The outer shells are made of aluminum, as are the claws. It doesn’t light up yet, but my dad or friend is going to run 2 circuits, one for a blue led and one for an orange one, through the two holes in the inner tube so it will. I don’t understand how to electronics, so forgive me if I massacred that explanation. All I know is, it’s gonna light up blue and orange eventually.

Planning took a while, as we had to decide how we were going to make the claws work, and what material we were going to make the shells out of, since foam didn’t seem very legit. I made foam patterns for both the shells before cutting the shapes out of aluminum and grinding down the edges. Despite our meticulous planning a lot of things went wrong- the original piece for the larger back part of the barrel beneath the white shell broke on the lathe so we had to make a new one hastily. Also, the rings were slightly too small to fit on the PVC pipe easily, so we had to sand and grind and sand and grind until we could squeeze them on there.

I spent hours with my grandpa every day working on this project. I was allowed to use some professional tools with his supervision, like the lathe for making bevels, the bandsaw, a machine that looked like a giant anchored drill for drilling holes, and a blowtorch to anneal the aluminum so it’d be easier to work with. Mostly, I sanded and ground it to perfection, making everything flawlessly level and flat. Sanding PVC pipe and aluminum takes a heck of a lot of work and after several hours of constantly sanding, all my clothes were covered in aluminum dust. Layer upon layer of welding apoxy was used to build up the front part next to the tube with the indentions in it, and we used apoxy to secure the wires in place too. I wish I had some in-progress photos to show you guys of it, but I don’t. One of the most exciting moments was when my Grandpa finished making the back shell (He didn’t want me pounding the aluminum and ruining it with my lack of expertise) and I rested it on the barrel and realized that it was all finally starting to come together and look like a real portal gun.

As you can see from the first picture of me (ignore my ugly fatty-fatty-no-parents-ness, focus on babbu) holding the beautiful thing, which I nicknamed Babbu because it is my lovely precious beautiful babbu, it’s larger proportionally than Chell’s is in-game, and because the aluminum shell is made out of one piece not two, there’s simply a black stripe down the middle, not an indentation. Some details were left out, but all in all I’m very pleased with it. The claws can actually move, the barrel looks beautiful and just like the one in-game, and the shells are perfect. The whole thing is so shiny too, since we used coats upon coats of glossy white paint.

I can’t wait to take this to Oni-Con in October. It’s heavy, but I would never put this beauty down in a place where it might get stolen. I’ll post my final cosplay pictures later, and I’ll definitely post pictures of it when it can light up, but I just wanted to show what it looked like since I’m extremely proud of it and am really grateful to him for truly making this prop spectacular.