Silent Death Incomming

I have a batch of silent death ships that have been staring at me on my desk with just primer on them for over a year.  Finally getting the fire to start painting again I quite like how most of these little guys turned out.  Its always fun imagining the race that controls each type of ship and how they may paint the ship.

Better pictures to come once these are completed,  at present they are about 95% complete.  Im not sure if Ill use standard SD bases or make something else,  My base materials stockpile appeared to have been low last time I painted. 

NERF camo extravaganza

Well I didnt care for the grey nerf gun, so I repainted it.
I actually like this one a bit better even though it appears to be worse in the NIR.  I also painted up a nerf grenade launcher (shoots the big red darts) which accounts for my two favorite action nerf guns.  I much prefer pumping each round than relying on batteries.   I went with a messy concrete'ish top for the grenade launcher and a quasi tech camo with mostly classical earthy colors for the smaller pump action.   However (shoulda done a color sample test in the NIR first) it turns out the base earth color I used for these is pretty darned dark in the NIR.  Oh well I still like them.    And they add nicely to my eclectic nerf arsenal.

NERF Hailstorm: Rival Kryptek

Seeing videos of people converting their nerf rivals I had to give one a shot.  Since C and D batteries are so passe I first replaced its 6 C cells with 3 8000mah lithiums which allows this thing to spit out 12 rounds in well under a second.   I modified the trigger to be a two stage trigger pull half way to spin up the flywheels and a high power ducted fan for the feed tube, wait a quarter second then pull all the way to open the gate and unleash nerf hell.  When this bad boy spins up you know its time to duck and cover. The balls also dont feel very good when you get hit so WEAR SAFETY GOGGLES.

I havent spent enough time to work out the feed issues with the backpack. At present Im thinking some sort of cork screw to prevent clogs.  A project for later...

I decided to paint it with a kryptek style staying with light blue grays or silvers. Other than the backpack clogging issues, and that there is no reasonable way to play with others with this, I am quite proud of this bad boy.  Next I need to develop a filtered vacuum cleaner to pick up the hundreds of balls this baby can fire in a minute. 

Parents get sabers too!

It was unfair for the kids to get sabers so the wife and I get sabers now.
I have a light staff under way but at this rate itll be another 6 months.  Too many other projects.
She gets one that looks vaguely sith like with scratch marks for grip while I get two black and silver handled  more classical style.  Both handles are aluminum with a mild level of polish and the grip black is a duracoat for maximum durability.  

She got the bight teal on the top while I got an aqua and ice blue.  Hers is brighter because its a fixed LED while mine are RB and RGB. 

For the internals I used lightsaberos for arduino as found many places on the net.  Modifed the code a bit, and after a lot of playing figured out a stack which allows an arduinonano, a sound amp, an mp3 player, voltage regulator etc all on one board.   later I further added a 5V boost because on powerup with high power blades we often got a brownout on the boards causing a reboot or glitch state.  a buffered 5V boost allows the arduino to stay powered at 5V even while the batter takes a large initial hit. 

Further powering a few hundred milliamps up to an amp for the LED array takes a fair amount of fet power.  I milled aluminum heatsinks that socket some FETS and allow a set screw in the handle to press the heatsink into contact on the ID of the lightsaber aluminum tube turning the entire handle into ground and a heatsink.  Otherwise these fets overheat and blow within 30 seconds.  It turns out using red is even worse because it has such a low potential drop  compared to blue and green that the fet has to dump a ton of power.  Thus why people making red blades often run half of their LED's in series with the other half.  Blues have such a nice high voltage that the fets down have to dump much heat.  The quad fet below is powering an RGB saber. with two fo them running the Red led's.  The 6 fet sink runs the blade in segments with a common ground (or anode, I forget which) making the blade power up in sequence. 

Fairy Sabers V1.0

As is obvious I haven't painted in a while due to a variety of reasons. but as  I almost never stop creating in some manner  (hence Thirdfate Creations)... Lightsabers!

We've had some target FX light sabers for a couple years now and I was sad I missed getting all the colors they had back when they were only about 25 dollars during after Christmas sales.
So... I stopped whining and made my own.  The kids got the first versions while I figure out the bugs.   The guts of two collapsible sabers with sound from target were used as a sound board, then I went about making the blade based on kid color preference, using lighter materials that were more robust than the store sabers, and digging up some SOT fet's left over from my micro-drone builds and got to work.  For the hilt I was originally going to paint PVC to look cool but stumbled upon a way to fire PVC (with excellent ventilation,  a breather mask, and a propane torch) to make it look like wood and give it a finish that is tougher than all but the most expensive paints for adhering to PVC.   Then just a bit of spin doctoring to convince the kids they were fairy sabers, not a hard sell, and viola! we have version 1 woodland jedi or fairy sabers.

Now to do some for myself, My wife,  a niece,  and a couple other kids who desperately need sabers. 

Just finished another set for a friends kids. Since I wont be on hand to do repairs I made the internals painfully simple and lowered the LED current draw from 1.7 to 0.7 amps so they should last a loooong time.  I also rand a secondary wire up each LED string to ensure that even if a solder joint fails the backup wire should keep the string lit for a long time.  And I included a bit more padding about the LED's to ensure they will take the stronger beating a couple boys will give them.  Camera flash was on.

And let the munchkins go at it!

Now,... I have some starships sitting on my painting bench crying out for attention...and a mech...

More Quad Painting and a Deep one.

Spending a lot less time on these guys, I picked a theme that worked well with the props I put on them at the time. Mostly tuned these guys fly quite nicely.Its too bad most quads dont have bodies to paint.  I could do some nice racers.

and a Deep one quickly painted with the airbrush.  I liked the skin texture I put on him but may have made it a bit subtle. .

Bit of a side track with FPV racer XBR black bolt

Trying to get some momentum after life steps in I chose to do an easy canopy for an FPV racer, the XBR blackbolt.
The carbon fiber is the frame, I didnt paint it.  I just painted the canopy on the top.