Paint and Shotgun Shells

Well, I feel silly. Forgot the TOZ-34 and TP-82 use 12.5x70 mm shotgun rounds. I ended up building a 12 gauge TOZ-34. For future reference, here's a handy chart of shotgun ammunition sizes for making future casings.

I need to find myself some 2.08mm diameter rods to convert to 1:6 scale 12.5x70 mm rounds. Closest thing is the straw to a compressed air can, which is slightly oversized by 10 thousandths. Gundam runners are now only applicable for 12 gauge.

On that note, I finished painting the TOZ-34. Built twelve 12 gauge shotgun shells to go with my re-chambered shotgun. Was debating rebuilding the Pancor from a while back. If I do, I now have shells for it. At least that uses 12 gauge.

Nothing particularly new here, except that the paint doesn't entirely suck this time. Can't figure out how to do an orange wood color. Stained wood it shall be! Forgot to account for the shell rim thickness, so I had to modify the dimensions a little to get the locking motion to properly engage. The rims were causing some interference between the barrel end and the stock.

I properly painted the shells this time and added some depth to the gold paint application to account for the metal casing that Dragon conveniently leaves just to the rim. Now I'm dead set on not buying 1:6 shotgun shells since now I have to deal with bore sizes.


Other Developments

There's a couple items in development right now. I should organize the completed, pending and queued projects in a post so there's actually some organization to this mess of a blog. One of the items I'm attempting is another flower out of Magic: the Gathering cards. The rose turned out well. I figured it's time to try another type of flower. Bad idea.

Here is my test build of a lotus. Didn't turn out too well. Needs some work. Learned that this one has more issues with color coordination than the rose, since the rose has one side of the cards dominate, giving the color a more pronounced effect. With the lotus, the card back and fronts compete to the point where it looks like a dying mass of brown. Didn't help that I used a lot of land cards to get me some neutral red color, which failed.

If you're wondering "Why a lotus?", you haven't been playing Magic. I figured that I should attempt to build one of the iconic artifacts from the game, and something that also doesn't look out of place by itself. Flowers, I can easily pitch away to people. Chairs and golems don't work that well. I also received a generous donation of lots chaff that included 19x Vampire's Bites that I thought would look OK if all mashed together into one lotus.

Anyways...

 In testing out the lotus build, I did end up with some interesting effects. Here's the outer layer of petals that ended up rather neat, using Portal 1 mountains.

It's certain that I'm never going to use land cards for anything aside from structural components ever again. You can't get a good color palette from the lands as you do from  non-land pre-Mirrodin/8th edition card frames. Brown's also a very unflattering color for a flower.