Unfinished prop: Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device

Not a big post, this one, but after three days of on and off work I felt like just posting something. So here it is!

Ta-da!

It doesn't look like a massive leap, but the amount of work that's gone into this shell at this point has been pretty intense. Once the shell had totally dried I gave the exterior a coating of joint compound (polyfiller)  to fill in all the deep recesses and started sanding. Once I'd sanded it, I filled in all the extra areas with more filler and I've essentially had to repeat this process about 10 times in order to get what you see before you. The exterior edges are still a big rough as they were extremely inconsistent so I've had to add a lot of filler to even them out. For the sanding I've been starting off with 50 grit sandpaper, sanding down all the really obvious lumps and bumps, moving to 80 to do finer work and then finishing it up with 120 grit. In places it's perfectly smooth, but due to my erratic texture that I left when I coated the shell with clay intially, it's rather lumpy in places.

Still, this gun was never going to be amazing, so I'll let myself off (although it's something to keep in mind). You can also still see that the inside looks like the bottom of f batcave, but I'm not sure I'll have the time to sand the whole thing smooth so there's some planning ahead to do on how to fudge that. I'm hoping I can cover up the majority of the inside of the shell with the gun barrel. I'm also thinking that; considering how well the exterior layer alone held the shape, I may only do an exterior layer on the rear shell in order to cut down on the workload as it'll be supported by the gun barrel and handle anyway.

So! What have we learned?

1. Sanding's hard and although the name of the activity suggests otherwise, it's not all about the sanding. I was surprised to discover that it's as much filling in gaps and building edges up with extra material as it is about wearing material away. If you were to just sand you'd never get anything smooth.
2. Not to coat the inside of the next shell with clay. Also, to try to finish the initial layer of paperclay on the outside so that it's much smoother than this one was. To save on both sanding and the amount of filler used.