Portal Gun FTW

I'm not much of a gamer girl.  In fact, I haven't played many games since Spyro and Crash Bandicoot.  But a Portal 2 came out not too long ago and I fell in love.  And not just the game, but the style and the characters that go along with it.  I knew I had to make a portal gun when I had the time to.

Luckily, not long after that I had the time to do so for one of my classes.  I jumped on it.

And I made my very own portal gun.  :D

I spent about $200 total in all my parts and supplies, not to mention almost all of my free time.  (custom prop making is not cheap!)

It's made of PVC piping and couplings, MDF, acrylic, aquarium tubing, armature wire, a drawer handle, insulation foam, and a TON of bondo underneath that paint job.  It's also wired with 6 LEDs (3 blue, 3 orange) which is controlled by a 3 way toggle switch accessible at the back.

 I loosely followed one of Volpin's tutorials, who really inspired me to do this in the first place and who I admire as a prop fabricator.  You really have to challenge yourself to think creatively and mechanically to do this kind of stuff.  It's crazy-hard and he makes it look easy! 

<------  Even though there are only 2 blue lighting the main chamber on the back end, it's still pretty bright to see it all the way through.

 This was the first time I really tackled a challenging project like this.  Everything else was mostly classwork and not a driving passion behind it.  Since this, I've been inspired to do something amazing with everything I do. 

I attempted to mold and cast the "shells" of the gun to make them out of plastic so they would be more durable.  (They would dent and crack if bumped around too hard.)  But after a last-minute decision to try this, with plastic leaking out of the mold on the rotocaster, then with the plastic curing before I even finished pouring it into the hole, I scraped the makeshift molds and fixed my original shells back up their finished form.  This quarter I plan on either modeling and 3D printing the shells to mold them or using a CNC machine to make a perfect mold of the shells.  I want the new shells to be smooth as glass.

----------->
This was how my gun looked through most of the process until it was painted.  The body was just PVC pipes with apoxi sculpt between the sizes.  The barrel was MDF disks glued together and hand carved on a wood mill, then drilled into with giant forstner bits. 

^-----  I decided to make something different for the barrel of the gun.  I wanted to bring in the aperture logo into the design as well.  A couple of my friends suggested I make an apparatus to squeeze and close or dilate the barrel, but I wasn't quite up to the challenge of the mechanics yet.  Perhaps I'll make a second version of the portal gun too. 

                                                                                     --------->
 So, I glued some insulation foam together and cut it down into a very rough shape in which I continued to carve into with a file card for both shells.  (Not what the tool is intended for, but it does a GREAT job!)  After that, coat it with wood glue to help seal it, and iced these suckers like a cake with bondo.  I'm still so sick of sanding these ridiculous things.  >.<  Soon after, I realized that the gun will be resting on the front shell most of the time, which was very smooth and very round, as was the bottom of the body of the gun.  So instead of worrying about finding the "sweet spot" and sanding that down flat to keep it from rolling around, I just knocked off a stripe right down the middle with a sanding belt before having to ice it with bondo yet again. 

So, I ordered some legit orange LEDs online.  I was kinda disappointed in them.  They aren't nearly as powerful as the blue LEDs.  It also wasn't until I wired them up and really looked at them that I noticed how orange they really were, instead of the yellow-orange as in the game, but oh well.  This was my test run after I first wired them up.  Both acrylic tubes have been sanded to diffuse the light and were drilled into to keep the LEDs inside them.  The longer tube in the middle has 2 orange and 2 blue, while the indicator light has only 1 of each.  

Welp, this is a handful of my photos, but if you want to check out my whole photo montage of the process you can see it here.  So add me, subscribe, or just check in every now and then.  ^^,  Thanks for reading!