Mediocre Modeler

It has taken about 2 years, but it’s finally finished. The primary weapon of the Stormtrooper is now mine.

Once you decide to make a blaster, you will find there are several ways to do it. You could just buy the toy and paint it. That is an inexpensive and reasonable way to go. Many go the route of PVC plumbing pipes. Which again, is fairly inexpensive and can garner some good results. In the past month, I’ve discovered the versatility of floormat foam. All of those methods offer varying degrees of skill and expense. But the king of the mountain has to be building the studio replica.

A box shows up with all Sterling parts cut up.

Having made the decision to challenge myself and build the studio replica. Little did I know that the challenge would test every skill I have and some I didn’t have yet. The first thing you will need is a demilitarized L2A3 British Sterling. That alone cost me $149. A demilled weapon is one that has been cut up with a welding torch. You will get a box full of parts that can be welded back together to make it complete. That is if they cut it up that way. The other thing you can do is buy a receiver tube for the Sterling. It has the markings of what needs to be cut out and/or drilled. This is where things started to get interesting for me. I had to buy hardened drill bits to use in my drill press. The press didn’t turn fast enough and I dulled several bits. Finally, I bought a corded hammer drill. To be fair, I can and have used the hammer drill to do other projects completely unrelated to models. That argument is for the wives, not that it actually works.

Once all the things that needed to be cut and drilled are done its time to piece it all together. I lined up the part of the receiver tube with the parts of the demilled Sterling. Then, I cut everything off at a 90 degree angle to weld it all together. Luckily, I had a wire feed welder to do this with. Unfortunately, I have no experience what-so-ever welding. Thank goodness for Google. But again, that did cost a trip to the hardware store for welding sleeves, rods and other such welding. It took a bit to figure out how not to burn a whole through the metal. Now, the realization came that I needed to learn how to braze. The brazing meant the need for a different torch allowed me to combine MAP gas and Oxygen. Brazing is a little like soldering.  Hopefully, learning to braze will come in handy at some other point in my life. Having all the pieces together, it was time to test fit the bolt and trigger group. The hammer drill once again was put into service. Hours and hours of sanding, grinding and test fitting followed. This was the most time-consuming part of the entire build. Weeks would pass between work sessions because I really hate the fine tuning. Eventually, the parts moved smoothly enough, the mag cleared the opening and locked in place and the could be locked open. There is some visceral satisfaction in releasing the bolt and hearing the metal clack as it closes. The realization also hit me that I just built a gun from scrap metal. Now that I was done with the fit, it time to get on with the finish.

     There are so many different versions of this blaster its maddening. I wanted to keep it as simple a possible and settled on the short mag and scope. Neither came with the demilled Sterling and posed separate challenges.

The Magazine

     The magazine is a standard 9mm 34 round mag. What i did was put it in the gun, decided how long wanted it and marked it for the cut. Of course it had to be disassembled. The hardest part was recreating the flanges for the bottom plate to slide onto. For whatever reason, I wanted it to still be functional. So that meant is that I had to also cut down the spring as well. The entire process took the better part of an afternoon.

The Scope

     The scope is a WW2 M38 Sherman tank scope. Much like the sterling, they were at one time quite plentiful. Once people started looking for them, they became harder to find and the the prices skyrocketed. I look for weeks trying to find this scope or one of its variant. I checked Amazon, ebay, several military surplus stores across the state and even Europe. I could never find one for a reasonable price. In my research, I found a guy that had a resin mold of the scope. But, I was deadset on having the real thing. The reality hit me that this MODEL was going to hang on the wall once completed. Why spend all that money for it to just decorate a wall?  I sanded and fitted the resin copy to a bracket and mounted it to the weapon. Feeling confident in how it looked. We moved on to paint, and man of man does it look good. I still kick myself for wasting all that time looking for and actual scope. It happens a lot while scratchbuilding. I spend all this time researching and hunting down some obscure part when I could be working on the model itself. Here’s hoping that now that we are aware of the problem, we won’t repeat it.

The final piece of the puzzle was the fins to cover the barrel vent holes. Again, much time was wasted trying to source cabinet T-tracks with no luck. My second choice was windshield wiper blade. I played around with a few different style. Yet none of them felt right. By shear luck, one of the brackets that held the wiper blade did look right. A source through work gained me access to a healthy supply of used blades that were easily cleaned up and cut to sized. I got down to the last one, and stop working on it. The 99% completion curse stuck again. Then a weekend came that I was stuck at home for the entire weekend. Since leaving wasn’t and option. Using the time to complete all those 99%ers was the most logical thing to do. The blaster only took about 2 hrs to finish. An hour of that was spent trying to locate parts that I had set aside to clean or adjust in some manner. So her she is, 100% complete and ready for display.