PissBacon

This setup looks absolutely amazing. It's too bad that Quake III only gets 30 fps max, but 10240x3072 is undeniably incredible. Think The Infinite Shindig has had a go at it?

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Here's my take on the reissue of the big bad bow. Unfortunately, I haven't had access to a decent digital camera for a while, but I promise to have good photos up very soon. If there is enough interest I will bother to create a writeup. Flat grey paintjob by the way (if you can't bear the photos).


The Breech

The breech is simply 17/32" brass within a special cut piece of 9/16" brass. The beauty of this breech is that it does not waste barrel lineage, as the breech slides back over the dart, creating an excellent, clean seal (which requires no shell). It's lubricated with silicon (silicone? wish I understood the difference) lubricant to ensure smooth loading. I may as well mention the barrel briefly now. After browsing for a recommended barrel type for the bbb, I ran into cxwq's suggestion, and stuck with it: 2" of 17/32" at the start nested in 6" of 9/16", all inside of 10" of 19/32". My setup gives the effect of these measurements, though not built quite the same. The breech slider offers that first 2", the breech piece gives the 4" in its size, and then the last 4" is covered by 19/32". What you see in the photos is some sch 80 pvc to protect the fragile brass assembly. At the very beginning of the barrel, there is a piece of dental floss taught tight across the diameter of the barrel, which is crucial to the functioning of my breech system (explained later).


The Clip

This clip (8 dart capacity) is actually made from a normal tape/cassette case with one end dremeled off. I've had the most luck with "Scotch High Position XSII-S 100 IEC Type II" tape cases since they have the least amount of excess crap on the inside to sand down. After dremeling away at the case and adding some nice black masking tape, I ended up with a perfect clip. Since this is a gravity system, the top dart is actually filled with weights evenly inside to press down on the other darts, and is not a fireable dart. In the photo there is a rubberband over the clip to prevent the darts from rolling out of the open end. This clip can be easily made, and with some velcro, many clips can be easily carried.

The Reciever

I had a bit of fun making this piece, which accepts the clip. It's a cut piece of plexiglass which I then heated with a candle along certain points, and bent, to form the shape you see. I marked the bend points ahead of time in sharpie to know where to heat and form right angles. If you decide to do this, make sure you have acrylic plexiglass and not polycarbonate, since polycarbonate is not a thermal plastic (will just make a big mess if you put it to the fire).

Parts I haven't explained yet

Once I take good photos, I'll be sure to have some detailed internal shots. The way the breech actually works is linked to the 'trigger' half of the gun. There is a length of coathanger (use musicwire in the future) which I carefully bent in several ways, which attaches to the trigger half, and slides along one side of the plunger assembly and out through one side of the gun. This piece is then attached to the sliding breech piece on one side (out of the way of darts), therefore making the breech move when the bbb is cocked. When the two parts are pushed together, the breech opens and a dart drops in; when pulled apart, the slider slips over the dart (which is held in place by the dental floss bit previously mentioned), and is ready to be fired.

Really-need-a-new-camera Photos



Questions welcomed (I've left plenty out).

I've been saving this post for a rainy day, and while it's not raining today, here's where I left off on a project started over a year ago. Sorry for the image quality; gotta love that legocam!


These are shots of the basic parts. That barrel is made of aluminum pipe, something I happen to have an abundance of in the perfect ID. It's got a cut halfway through it for about 2''. Next to it is a maglite solitaire (and a guitar effects box I'm working on).


Here we have an assortment of o-rings (you'll need to be lucky to find ones that fit just right), and a close up of the maglite, showing that when you unscrew it slightly, it can accomodate larger o-rings to create a seal.


If all of the blurriness is confusing you, this paint drawing might help. The maglite will be sliding inside of the back of the barrel, allowing a dart to fall through the opening, and then sliding back to create a seal. Lubricant and a perfect size o-ring will be needed for this to work properly. You'll also have to drill a hole down the center of the parts of your maglite, destroying it in the process, as this allows the air to flow through when the slot in the aluminum is covered. The drawing shows a cross section, one in the valve's open state, one in the closed state: the aluminum pipe is in white, the dart in grey, the maglite in hot pink (darker pink where threading is), a rod of some type in green for sliding the valve, and the o-ring in yellow. The hole through the maglite is where air will travel through when you fire a dart.

Soon I will be putting one of these in my LBB to test it out, and will post results (school's about to start though).

I've been trying to find help for a while, so I thought it would be worth asking here while I'm at it. For anyone who knows about litestep, do you know some basics about how it is programmed? About a week ago I got v24.7 and it came with a friendly and simple theme called 'austerity'. However, I'm not sure exactly, but at some point in using litestep, things went very wrong. I tried changing a few basic things in the codes, as the manual for the theme had offered specific advice for beginners. When I tried out a couple new themes though, they installed modules to run properly (this could be the source of the issue). The main problem now is, no matter what theme I run, they all have the same damn 'popup' when clicking on the desktop, and the normal shift+LClick does not even cause a popup to occur anymore. This seems very odd to me, as I can't think of any reason for this to have changed, other than maybe testing out other themes. Thanks if you have some advice, and if not, well I guess I wasted my time.

UPDATE: I have a sneaking suspicion that it has something to do with the "/litestep/personal/popup.rc" file, especially the first few code lines talking about default popups and allowing new popups. Still boggled nonetheless.

UPDATE: I've completely fixed the issue. Check out the end result; it is pretty nice
screenshot

Does anyone know, based on experience or word of mouth, if the new n-strike nite finder is worse or better than the old one. I'm aware the new one has a different barrel/dart size, but is the actual range, quality, and/or modibility of the gun different? Thanks.