What you do during lockdown, you buy a 3d printer and print stuff.
I found a cool print and I want to share you the process to come from plastic on a roll to this
A fully functioning 3D printed 40mm blunderbuss
So the whole process started with a link on thingiverse, I did not designed this, I just printed it and did some modifications to make it a bit better.
I’m not going into the details of 3D printing, there are far way better channels for it, but I’m using the Anycubic Mega S a starter level printer. Really happy with it and it’s perfect for what I need.
Printing
The real first step in this is printing the parts It’s always a bit tricky on how you want to position the parts to get the best result. So that is why some of them are a bit ugly.
Printing the barrel was my longest and tallest print so far, so this was a bit exciting.
After some hours, a lot of hours, the parts were ready and I did the first test assembly to see if most of the parts fit. When I tried to fit the 40mm grenade, it did not fit so I was very sad. I didn’t want to reprint it because it might had gotten me into more problems.
Barrel too small
I tried to clean and make the inside bigger with different kind of tools, but nothing really worked so I made something. Cut a small wood circle and nailed some sandpaper on it and wrapped it around it. It worked, after some passes the grenade fit in the barrel.
Assembly, Test fire
First time to fit most of the parts together with the grenade in and do a test-fire to see if everything works before I start doing the finishing touches.
Now the ‘making it pretty’ part can begin,
Sanding
First thing to do is sanding everything down as smooth as possible.
After smoothing it down I tried to use some spray filler, that didn’t work as good as I tought is was going to work. Spray filler is thicker than paint and will get into some small scratches, but it’s not enough to fill the 3D print lines. Lessons learned.
Painting
When everything dried up, it was time to paint it. I first did all the black parts because I didn’t know how to do the ‘wood’ parts yet. Some of the parts really looked very smooth, others not so much. But it was a first project and I’m learning a lot.
The first wood test was with a spray can, but that didn’t look really good. So I bought some acrylic paint and used the most ‘woody’ looking color and painted it. It started looking pretty good. Now the last thing to do was getting a file and make deep cuts into the freshly sanded, primered and painted piece… By doing that you create wholes for the black paint to get into and make it look used. It turned out much better than I hoped.
Copper screws
Now the last piece needed to be added. I had some copper screw laying around that I wanted to use to add some detail. But because of the short screw, I had to get a pin in the middle to keep it together. I needed to file down some of the screw to make them fit inside the printed wholes.
Trigger
The final piece is the trigger. The original trigger is just loose and that I did not like. I looked for a small spring , cut out the plastic a bit to make it fit and we have a returning trigger.
Now get the 2 halves together with some glue and the Blunderbuss is ready for testing…
Ending
Now we wait to get out on a field again to test this.
I’m really happy with this DIY project and I learned a lot for my future projects.