So now the blaster is all cut up, time to fill some holes! And there sure are some interesting ones to deal with.
Seeing as I've never used builders bog/bondo before, it was an interesting learning experience.
I started at the front, where I'm filling in the gap under the barrel, and the ones in the fore grip. There's little in the way of support under there so I'm trying to spread it in in such a way it spreads out on the inside. I also covered up all the screw holes on the right side of the blaster.
I let it cure some 48 hours or more before working on it. I was quite pleased to find that it's very workable stuff with a sharp Xacto blade. Rather than sanding away at big blobs of the stuff, I could cut and slice away the majority of what wasn't wanted, and then proceed with rough grits of sandpaper down to smooth ones.
I'm using 200 to start with, then 400 and 600. It also holds a nice clean edge - I can see now why some people sculpt with the stuff
So I was quite satisfied with my first foray into working with the bog. Not perfect by any means, but a decent place to start. There were minor pinholes and areas where there wasn't enough laid down initially so i had to add more on top. I went back and forth a bit, slowly getting there, when I went ahead and mixed up a big batch to fill in the biggest holes - the ones alone the back of the barrel, and the area above the handgrip/trigger. As you can see I had to basically trowel it in there!
And that's when I hit my first real problem with this project. It wouldn't dry. I'd left it for a couple days as the temperature was down a bit, but it still felt a bit tacky and squashy. So I left it for a week and got on with other things. But it still wasn't set hard when I came back to it. Oh oh
After leaving it another week (just to make sure) I had to face it - I'd not mixed in near enough hardener into the bog. I'd used less than I'd done previously, and the batch was bigger. I figured I'd have more time to spread it and get it into the body before it went off, like it had in previous sessions. So yeah, this wasn't ever going to set. I then had to spend a very un-fun time at the bench scraping the soft bog out. Luckily it was easy enough, just time consuming and annoying. Awkward too.
So I cleaned it all out as best I could, then left it a couple days before going back and removing what was left and to clean it up a bit. Rather demotivating, and a huge waste of time, particularly aggravating as I was short of time to work on it in the first place
Anyway, the whole mishap was a good learning experience.