Next up; the rest of the support arms. This is a solid shell on the blaster, with no detailing.
I want to leave some support in place for applying new arms to, while preserving
as much as I can of the back of the blaster itself and the curved body.
I marked out the cutting guide, keeping it in line with the thickness of the arms above the trigger in front.
It clears the barrel at the back, making them look separate from the body.
Decided to use my trusty old (very old!) bench vice to hold the blaster in place.
It weighs a ton so doesn't need to be attached to the bench to stay in place
It made cutting straightforward and very quick.
But now I realise I've hit a snag. The red line shows what needs removing to clear the barrel,
and there's no real way to get in there to cut it all out and leave the arm in place.
After some careful thought, I decided the only forward is to cut the arm off altogether.
It's awkward to reach into the barrel. I want to leave as much intact as I can,
so progress was made in stages. In the end it was quite brutal, just taking chunks out.
As you can see it leaves a lot of plastic still attached where the barrel should be rounded.
However, after careful grinding to remove as much as possible, and then carefully chipping away
at it with a Stanley knife and the Xacto, it's turned out really nicely!
Knowing the approach now makes cutting the second side much quicker, as I can simply cut away chunks in one go.
Rebuilding the arms later might be tricky. I'm not sure yet how to attach them; perhaps a groove in back.
With the second side also cleaned up I could see how they matched up. Some minor mis-aligning was rectified,
and cut back again. In the end it's quite tidy and retained a lot of the rounded shape.
So now I've done all the cutting I needed to do, and the next stage will be all about building pieces back on;
the magazine on the side, the barrel, and filling in all the holes I've made
