Unfinished prop: Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device

Oh hey, so remember that nice smooth, really cool looking shell I put loads of effort in to making?

Yeah, well you can forget it.

Turns out that as it dried, because I hadn't properly kept the two sides apart, the whole thing had curled in on itself, making it much narrower than the foam base and way too small for the barrel of the gun to fit through (which I was beginning to suspect it would have been anyway, so there's a lesson learned right there, don't spend loads of time and effort making something amazing without first checking it will fit on the most fundamental part of the prop at the end. Hurr).

So! A lot of weeks working, restarting my education and moving in to a new flat later, I'm now going to present a whistle stop tour of how to make a portal gun relatively quickly and as cheaply as possible!

Materials: LD45 Foam
                 Hotglue
                 Cardboard (Oh yes)
                 Plastic drinks bottles
                 Expanding insulation foam

There's a few steps that aren't photographed, so bear with a quick text explanation.

After learning that the gun's barrel is one of the most fundamental parts of it, especially in the creation of a fake gun, I decided to start there in order to not repeat my previous mistake. to make the barrel I simply cut the tops and bottoms off three two litre bottles of cola ( which makes a wicked drain cleaner, just so you know ) and slid the three together to form a strong cylinder. I then wrapped a sheet of LD45 foam around it making sure the seam was at the bottom to be as out of the way as possible and attached it with hot glue.

The next stage involved measureing everything up and working out where it would fit along the barrel. Some reference pictures later and I'd measured out where everything ought to sit.

 

What you see above is, from left to right, the enlarged section of the barrel that sits before the front shell and underneath where the main chamber is visible. I'd already cut this out and covered it with foam by the time I'd taken the picture. Those two flat sections serve as the front and back of the larger section which has the gun's handle on the rear and has the larger shell sitting on top. I basically cut these pieces out of cardboard and attached foam to their exterior.

Just a sheet of cardboard cut to fit and glued to the edges of those two panels.

And then a nice foam wrap, with the seam on the bottom (although in retrospect,I should have put it on the top as that's where the shell sits. As you can see, I used a craft-knife to cut away a portion of the foam to expose the clear plastic to act as the visible portion of the chamber. The only issue here is that if you look inside you can see the dried hotglue used to attach the foam through the plastic. I'm going to have to mask the clear portion, then spray the inside of the barrel for a better finish.

Once I had the sizes of everything the shells would need to fit around, I started with simple ' U ' shaped lengths of cardboard that I then drew the basic shape of the shells on and then cut out. In order to make the shells 3D I cut cross sections of how the shell should be and stuck them on at intervals, the plan is to fill them in with expanding foam which I can later cut away, carve and fill. Above is the front most shell.

Pictured is the completed base for foam for the front and rear shells.

And there we have the two covered in expanding foam. Hopefully, once it's fully dried and set I can just carve it into the basic shape, sand it down (using my recently found skills in that particular area) and then fill it in before painting.

I'd actually tried the expanding foam thing before, but that went horribly wrong. I didn't include the 'fins' to give myself basic guidelines (and more importantly: keep the foam attached to the cardboard) and the foam wound up falling away from the base inside itself and having a hard, exterior layer of foam coupled with a gooey interior mess that was no good to anyone. This time I moistened the cardboard a little to help the foam stick and didn't use too much.

I've also managed to get it on my jeans both times and this stuff just does not come out, so I'm looking forward to soaking two pairs of jeans in acetone to try and shift it.

So, what did we learn?

1. Jesus Christ, John, for once in your life would you just stop and actually think about what you're doing before you go and spend weeks on single piece that can't be used, CHRIST.
2. Expanding foam is a cruel mistress, make sure it'll adhere to the surface, don't use too much, don't use too little, make sure there're no oversized pockets of air in which things could go terribly wrong... And that's just the application.
3. Whenever you're doing something that's basically a lot of shapes, start with the most basic one and work your way outwards.

This post was brought to you after a solid 10 hour stint on this and an Emil costume (which you'll get to see later) so apologies if I sound like a bit of a psycho.

Of course, if the foam stuff doesn't work, I *will* go psycho, so look forward to that.