Sunday, August 22, 2010

This Weekend's Project: 1:6 Scale Acoustic Guitar

Every figure collection at some point needs a guitar for their accessory pool. It's one of the unspoken rules of collecting idolatrous representations of paganistic figureheads, er, I mean, toys. Your shelf's awesome quota gets fulfilled by 3% with each guitar with a ceiling of 15% maximum added value.

I actually just wanted a guitar for my Engineer. It's way better than the Gunslinger since I don't have to amputate an already half assed glove sculpt and make reinforcements to make it work. More of also just wanted the Engineer to be able to do the taunt kill with a guitar.

First, like a good Engineer, we'll need some schematics. Unfortunately, I couldn't be bothered drafting up any, so I did the next best thing: have someone else do it for me. Here's a great set of schematics that I used to build my guitar, courtesy of Christophe Grellier's guitar site. I scaled down his drawing to 69.5% to achieve 1:6 scale.

To start off, we'll need to build the body. I chose to make an 18mm thick guitar, so subtracting the thicknesses of two 4-card stacks for the back and front faces, we get 15mm of body height to make up for. Some Ronom Unicorns and Surging Sentinels were sacrificed to achieve the task. I split the cards into 15mm wide strips, then arranged them inside the stencil 5 layers thick. Use tape to hold the walls next to the stencil as you layer the insides with more cards. I ended up using 5 layers instead of 4 because I had excess material from cutting up 4 cards. More is better anyways.

 Using the stencil, I made the front and back faces. I opted to use the back of the card as much as possible stylistically rather than paint the guitar. I wanted the "Deckmaster" logo to appear on the front, and the "Magic: the Gathering" back to be unobstructed on the back.

The neck was fairly simple. 8x Magic cards with a slight bend at the top portion. I honestly know nothing about guitars, so I'm going to call parts as I see it. I cut slats in the head part for the strings to feed through. The base is composed of 20x Magic cards, cut to a taper by simple diagonal planing with an X-acto knife. Same technique used on the Hellfire.

 To make the bridges, I used some unspecified gauge stripped electrical wire and glued them to the neck. I trimmed any excess with diagonal cutters.

For strings, I used some white sewing thread. If I had silver wig hair, that would be better in terms of appearance. I think white thread works just fine. Coating the thread in some glue would help stiffen it. The threads were secured to the body and upper neck by glue. 

I looped the strings around the tuners at least once, then secured them in place with glue. Key is to pull them tight during the process so they remain relatively taught. They won't be functional, but slack will be ugly and noticeable.

And there is the finished Deckmaster guitar. The entire process took about 2-3 hours with lots of down time for drying and not trying. Could probably make another one within an hour. 

Here's the back with all the Magic: the Gathering glory.

Unfortunately, I don't have a 1:6 scale pickup truck or a campfire. Got the guitar and that's all that matters.

At long last, Coldsnap is finally playable. It may be a while before more firearms get developed, but some variety is good. Off to bludgeon people with a guitar!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hahahah, awesome!!! Nice to see the gunner taking an acoustic break!!!

Your blog is simply amazing, I've been following it for quite some time now! You sir, are an artist, in the truest sense!!!

JNORAD said...

@One Sixth Dreams:

Glad to see another fellow 1:6 scale blogger! Thanks for the comments and taking the time to look through this jumbled mess of a blog.