by Zagadka

M56 Smart Gun from the film Aliens (and a hundred games).

I've split this into a number of sections to allow those peasants among us without 1.2M print beds to make one ;) With proper positioning it should squeeze on a 300mm cubed build area.

This is not a perfect model - I made it primarily to learn to get to grips with Blender and a couple of the sections have poorly assembled meshes BUT they should all be printable (As the photo's show I have printed and assembled one entire gun full size.) If I recall correctly the main problem was the fore grip which has some mostly internal voids (I've just reworked this and it should be fine now) and the aft firing grip has a thin skin over the firing lever receiving hole but the correct space IS underneath.  Some of the section location lugs and recesses may need filing or sanding to size or need filler. The handles are bare and designed to accept proper foam bike type grips which should squeeze over and then be held in place. I designed the main stress points to have bores to accept re-enforcing rods. I'm sure you could assemble one purely for display without these but I doubt it'd hold up to being swung around ala Vasquez and Drake. If I recall correctly I used 8mm glass fibre tent poles (and they were a very tight fit). Where the fore grip meets the body I have two reinforcing rods meeting at ninety degrees and they should be shaped to fit snuggly before gluing together. The firing lever is designed to be fitted with a bolt and a spring attached to a couple of tiny self tapping screws to allow it to operate. Finally the oval cover piece goes on top to hide the parts.
I hope the photo's and complete model file should be enough guidance to anyone who want's to build one bar the rods, bolts, springs, screws and wires but you should be able to work those out.

Please bear in mind if everything goes perfectly it's a very long print - some of the individual pieces took a couple of days on my (admittedly very slow) printer.

(Just ignore the Turnigy sticker on one photo - it was for a competition and is NOT present on the print model! ;) )