I'm Sure you're all thinking "What the fuck did you do to that manta ray Bags?!"
well the better question is what didn't I Do.
To start things off I'll explain the conceptwork
one day, while finishing up my last manta (the biling-blow camo one) I got this really cool Idea: What if I could take the defensive power of the manta ray, and give it the beastly power to shoot around 80 feet without loosing the number of barrels I shoot out of? I was thinking of sticking two splitfires inside a manta, and now I just had to figure out how to do it.
I knew I would have to bassicaly gut the entire shell of the manta, as well as flatten out the top to propperly compensate for the SFs, and also to help on proper coverage, I probably would need to use some kind of plastic to expand the edge to also help propperly cover the SFs. I knew I needed to extend the triggers so that they sat near where my hand would be, and I needed to fugure out how I'd place the SFs inside the shell.
I decided to place the SFs laying sideways inside the shell, and then I would attach them to the upper and lower halves o fthe shell accordingly and using their screws to primairly hold the whole creature together.
I quickly got to work on aquireing the propper materials and got to work.
The manta I aquired was once used for a double 2k Integration, so it was already partialy gutted for me, that was nice, but the upper shell was severely damaged. I decided to bust out the heat gun and go to town on it first, after it was nice and flat I got to work on epoxying it back together:
The Flattened Shell: I expanded the area where one's hand goes because I have beefy hands
After a ton of dremmeling I managed to clean out the shell enough to accomidate the splitfires: part of the SFs handle had to be cut off, I cut it right at the bottom of the opening for the trigger, Also I cut the guides off the held the pump shaft in the vertical position, so that it would sit without interfering with the triggers in final production. here's some pics of the first SF being placed into the shell, with a test version of the trigger extentions:
This one showes where both are attached to the bottom of the shell:
Now that I had figured out where they were going to go, I needed to figure out how to propperly extend the shell to accomidate the SFs and I wanted to do it with some style: so I started looking online for Relatives of the Manta Ray: I found the SickleFin Devil Ray, and it's name sounded soo damn Awesome I couldn't Resist:
So I designed something to attach to the shell to make it look more like one:
Here's the peices before they were cut:
...Stupid Image posting limit...
A couple of Pics of them attached: A suprisingly long process involvin waay too much epoxy:
I simply put a crapload of epoxy on to the halves of the SFs that were to make my top and laid the Upper manta half on top to attach it to the rest of the gun(s)
I went back to tackling the process of extending the triggers some; I had originaly wanted to make a complex pinion system that allowed the extentions to swing smoothly with the SF triggers, but it was too much work for too little gratification, so I simply glued on the extentions i had made:
so here's the really ugly working version of it:
Now it was time for me to paint it:
uncharateristic of myself, i went with a Flat Black for the bottom of this blaster, and for the bulk of the top of the upper half, it has a flouressent Green-Blue fade on the top to accent it though, and the underside of the upper shell is also flouressent blue.
The finished product, or so i thought...
Before I even got to geddon, perliminary tests lead to me breaking the trigger extentions, luckly I had gutted the lower half so that I could still fire the gun with my opposite hand. During Geddon I discovered that my hands had taken some damage from the use of the gun, the area around the handle was cuttin my hands, so I opened it back up when I got home and added some hockey tape also.
Internals, after Tapeing:
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More Pics:
underside:
A little closer so you can see trigger location:
Blaster Face on:
Operation is like having a 6-in brassed SF, pump approx 10 times, ramrod darts down into bottom of barrel, fire either semi-auto or shotgun bassed on trigger pull. SFs have 6 inches of 9/16 with small ammount of 17/32 nested inside, barrels are covered with petg to protect them. I used sicklefin in three rounds of geddon, and it proved worthy, I found it easier to aim if i swiched hands when fireing earch SF rather then shooting out of the top, and then the bottom.
I hope to have some action shots as soon as Kuhlschrank's Geddon Pics are uploaded.
Questions/Comments?
-Bags
