Colonel Moran's Aetheric Neuralizer

What ho! Welcome to Colonel Moran's Magnificent Manufactory!

I promised someone I know vaguely that I would keep a build log for a steampunk prop I'm building, the eponymous Aetheric Neuraliser, and, well, this is the first installment.

The concept is simple: a semi-portable weapon-like thing that hangs off a sling, looks menacing (hopefully) and wins me first prize in a Halloween costume contest.

It will consist of two parts:

• A 2-2.5 ft long likely-looking rifle-like thing slung in the same way as the heavy weapons seen on a certain company's 29mm miniature soldiers of the future - sort of like a guitar. This will feature all sorts of light effects to hide the basic lameness of the device itself.
• A box to hold the power supply for all those effects, dressed up to look like something other than a box with a battery in it.

The box will feature a lumin disc, a green one, set front and center in the long side, and a handwheel from a sillcock as a switch so it will look like I'm opening a valve when I turn it on. I have most of the parts for this already.

The weapon will consist of two sections assembled from various PVC schedule 40 pipe fittings, separated by a frame made of threaded rod clad in copper pipe, with a clear tube running down the center containing a special effect to simulate the Aetheric Resonator.

I have the forward and rearmost structures figured out. The rearmost part will be made from a dome-like end cap fitted to a screw-cap adapter. The screw cap itself will be where the threaded rods get mounted, forming the space-frame surrounding the clear tube which will be fitted into the middle of the screw cap. At the other end of the threaded rods will be a second screw cap and adapter fitted to a series of reducing couplings (fat pipes joined to less-fat pipes by a conical chamber, sort of like a broad funnel) and finally to a short section of pipe forming the "barrel".

Sounds complicated, but it really isn't. Here's a bad drawing of what I'm aiming for.

The green effect in the center tube is achieved by use of a cold-cathode tube, one that is engineered to produce a similar effect to the lumin disk. In reality the copper tubes will form a narrower frame because the thickness of the PVC parts prevents the nuts that secure the threaded rods that run down the center of three of the four copper tubes from being located that far out toward the rim.

The forward assembly has two conical steps, not one, and a shorter barrel, required by the availability of parts more suited to plumbing sinks and toilets than making Victorian Steampunk Rayguns. I'll post photos as I get the particulars sorted out.

One wrinkle is that I need power at the front of the gun as well as the back. I can run power down one of the threaded rods, but having two rails live and a short circuit path for a lead acid battery is asking for trouble. I don't want to weld the thing to my fly zip at the wrong moment, or set my clothes on fire when someone's medallions get tangled in the thing.

So tonight I had an idea that I could maybe make do with only three rods, with the fourth pipe left hollow so an insulated wire could be run down it. This would mean I'd need to make threaded bushings for mounting the pipe. I broke out the drill press and only broke one drill figuring out the correct technique for drilling a 3/8ths of an inch hole down the middle of a two-inch length of threaded rod. It wasn't perfect, but it will do. I'll make the other one tomorrow, and post pictures then too.

I also machined the cold cathode tube mountings so the lamp would fit in the length of Plexiglas tubing. This amounted to removing the "wings" on the mounting brackets molded into the lamp ends with an oscillating belt sander. Pictures tomorrow.

Toodle pip!