Completing Morning Rescue

Well, that was a terrible 7 months. Here's the latest update:

Mission Accomplished. 

So, I've clearly failed in item #2 of my original plans. No shutters for me. I decided to give up on making the impossible possible, and cut my losses.

The two sand reservoirs required a clear domed structure which I did not have any means of fabricating. A trip to a Michaels yielded this peculiar item (also purchasable off Amazon, apparently, if you want one). Looks like a portable epilepsy inducer. I bought it and destroyed the item, saving some children from a cruel fate, and netted some components in the process. Turns out the covering splits in half and is the perfect size for the reservoirs. Now, to build a structure to hold the domes in place on the shield.

Build two of these and we're set.

I sealed the open sides with a piece of plastic card sleeve, to form what looks like a terrible Diablo health icon at 70% HP. I may have put more sand than I'd like.

In order to make the little channels of sand that "flow" from the sand reservoirs, I decided to try molding them. Easiest way was to cut a template in cardboard, overlay one sheet from a toploader sleeve, and melt it into shape with the tip of a hot glue gun.

That yielded some weird shapes that were damn near impossible to seal with sand.  But they sure fit well.
 

I did manage to fill the parts with sand, and seal them up by sandwiching a ton of sand and hot gluing the space between the part and another sheet with copious amounts of glue. Then I tacked them onto the reservoir housings. They added a negligible amount of height but I could have compensated earlier by trimming down the housing heights.

The end goal is a very subtle, raised bubble that does absolutely nothing. You can probably just paint this red if you were lazy, and no one would really notice or care.

On the subject of painting... time to completely ruin my work by a lackluster paint job, a signature of every project I do. I used Krylon's satin finish nickel to do the outer components, and smeared a glob of horrendous red/silver mix all over the center for a metallic lavender. I made sure to use a pipe cleaner to spread some silver unevenly all over the center housing and outer rings for that extra "1st grade look", because nothing says winner like a grinning child who shat himself. 

 

 And thus Morning Rescue was completed. The project ultimately consumed more cards in development than the actual piece took to build. Probably took under 25 MtG cards for the final construction, and about 50+ for the abomination that never came to light. The plans I used are rough, but probably not good enough for an aspiring cosplayer to make use of. I don't think anyone's dedicated enough to machine their own gears out of cards anyways.