hey robot fans welcome back to the build here I hold a DC 15 shorty blaster from
Charles Bowman aka woodchuck his handcrafted american-made blasters are
the most sought-after well respected and best built blasters
in the community and I'm gonna cut it to pieces
let me start this off with a huge disclaimer here the modifications I make
in this video are in no way a critique or criticism of woodchucks work or his
blasters he is the best in the business hands down this blaster is truly a
beautiful piece of woodworking and out of the box all it would really need is a
paint job to be the envy of anyone without one I just love to play with
stuff and put tons of unnecessary electronics in all of my clone parts so
that's what I'm gonna do let's do this first up we have the trigger the gun
comes standard with a fixed trigger and a little push button built in this is
cool and I'm actually going to be keeping a version of the button for the
final circuit but I think I'm also going to be building out a real trigger
mechanism to make it feel a little bit more like a real gun I'm going to be
building this and other parts of the gun in 3d studio max and printing them out
luckily someone was nice enough to upload some blueprints for this blaster
to the five-o first clone detachment forums so I have a good base to go on a
quick look at the plans will show you that they are definitely not the same
plans that woodchuck uses but they provide a nice starting point and I can
modify the parts as needed to fit the woodchuck gun I have received permission
from woodchuck himself to provide all of these parts for free on my github page
for anyone who is dumb enough to cut up their woodchuck just keep in mind they
are not 100% the same as the existing woodchuck parts and I take zero
responsibility for you ruining your gun
here you can see our 3d printed trigger mechanism it's a trigger with a hole in
it that hole will house this Arduino switch which will look not unlike what
we already have now but in addition to that it has a little spring attached to
the back of it and that spring will get attached into this plunger and that will
give us our spring-loaded trigger mechanism that is pushing this limit
switch here this limit switch will go straight to our circuit board and give
us all the electronics that we want as I built up the handle in 3d studio max I
actually found I can print the bulk of this in one piece which is awesome I was
able to maintain some of the original wood chuck look while adding in some
rooms how's our upcoming circuit board I even
managed to keep the original woodchuck hardware on the lids the blaster comes
standard with a 10 millimeter blue LED at the end of the barrel which is
activated by the trigger which is perfect I also want to add in an audio
circuit with some cool blaster challenge the problem here is making it loud
enough generally speaking the only speakers loud enough to make this worth
it are too big to fit inside the gun luckily there is an alternative
transducers transducers are speakers that can generate some serious vibration
and rather than vibrating a paper cone like in most speakers they vibrate
whatever you attach them to so for this gun I'm going to make a housing right in
here to hold the transducer and have it vibrate the entire hollow barrel and
make some cool sounds and even some vibration coming back for the shooter
with every blast I decided to reprint the entire barrel assembly this will
allow me to house the transducer route the wires properly up to the lights in
the barrel and make sure it doesn't get vibrated apart from all the blaster
firing I think the glue joints between the wood and the plastic will be the
weakest and most likely to fail so I'm going to print the barrel with the ends
split off into two caps that will screw into the wood in addition to being glued
the barrel is printed in two parts with recesses for some steel rods to hold it
together tight at the joint I also printed it with inset hardware holes so
I can use some real Hardware pieces for the grape leaves I think this will add
something extra to the final look so we have our lights and sounds worked out
and we have our double trigger mechanism ready to go now it's time to wire in all
the circuitry in between so why have two triggers this really comes down to the
audio I downloaded this DC 15 blaster sound which is great but it's really
only great as a single shot if I was to hold down the trigger to get an
automatic blaster rifle sound it would sound like this
the most boring blaster on the planet I can edit that sound to make it go a
little bit quicker like this it sounds great but now our single shot sounds
like this not so great so we need to keep those two sounds separate hence two
triggers okay so here's our circuit I know what you're thinking why would he
put this on three separate bread boards but believe it or not when I started
setting this up my goal was to make it very visually easy to follow which as I
started adding components really quickly became not the case that's okay I can
just explain it to you so on this breadboard here we have our single shot
input and on this breadboard here we have our multi shot breadboard and then
up here is just basically our light I dedicated this entire breadboard to a
light which was kind of silly here is a buck converter taking our 12 volts down
to five here is our Adafruit sound trigger this is our amplifier and here
is our transducer so the way the circuit works is the switches are connected to
ground and when I activate the switch it sends ground to two places one it
grounds one of these pins on the sound trigger which makes the sound go to the
speaker and the other ground goes to the collector of this I'm sorry to the base
of this transistor and that sends power to the rest of the circuit for the light
so if I press our single shot button you'll see that the light comes on for
the duration that I hold in the trigger and also it will loop the single shot
sound over here on this side over here it's a little bit more complicated we
have our trigger that our limit switch trigger that's inside the handle and
that does the same thing only instead of going straight to the light on the
positive side it goes through this five five five timer which will blink our LED
so I can hold this down and you can see the LED blinking along with the sound so
the way that works is with a variable resistor here I can turn this and it'll
change the frequency at which the light blinks so I can really dial that in to
the sound now you're probably thinking wow that's really not very loud at all
that's because the transistor or the transducer is pointing up if I turn this
over and put it down on the desk you'll see that now it's going to vibrate the
entire desk with each sound
you can see it vibrating underneath my finger as I push it so yeah the more
pressure I put on it it changes the tone a little bit and if I let go a little
bit so it's really gonna be a matter of dialing in how much pressure we put on
this plate and getting it really nice and tightly packed inside that handle we
should get a nice loud sound with some good vibration going back to the user
I consolidated that whole circuit down to this little board that will fit
inside the handle from there we can start wiring everything up to power
I found these awesome little stick style lipo batteries this 11.1 volt lipo will
be our power supply and it just so happens to fit into the woodchuck
electronics cavity with ease this battery doesn't have a ton of life
to it and I want each charge to last as long as possible so I'm going to add in
a main power switch so I can turn everything off when I'm not going to be
using it the DC 15 has these small circular grepolis on each side I'm
thinking I can drill through that and have the arm of the switch poked through
I ended up making a pretty large hole so I can print a switch mount that will
hold the switch into place I can then reprint a matching circular greatly with
a slightly lower profile than the original so the end of the button sticks
out enough that I can effectively push it as you can see just with the switch
and battery we're already getting a little congested in here luckily two of
our boards the sound trigger and the voltage converter are very small and can
actually be mounted onto the lid of the electronics cavity this means covering
up with Chuck's name which I hate to do but it's definitely for the greater good
our amplifier is just a bit too big to mount to the lid but still fits nicely
along the inner wall after everything is mounted and wired together it's just a
matter of connecting the outputs to the speaker and the transducer and we are
good to go okay with the power plugged in we're ready to give this thing a shot
right now I'm just using a dedicated DC power supply instead of the battery just
to make sure everything works so if we put our power switch on see everything
power is on so that's good and now we can start to test I just move this so we
can see that LED a little bit better and we could try our single shot and our
multi shot
cool everything is working so now we could start tearing this thing down for
sanding and painting and getting it ready for the final look the paint
scheme I have in mind is a very layered approach the gun is broken down into
about 20 pieces at this point so I'll demonstrate the whole process on the end
of the barrel here after gap-filling the 3d printed portion and sanding the whole
thing down I do my first layer with rest Oleum two-in-one filler and primer this
is my usual go-to on the primer side of things because it does a lot of the work
for you with regards to a smooth finish next we add our first top coat layer
which is krylon fusion for plastics black this is going to be a topcoat for
a small portion of the gun so I'm using a satin finish my goal for this whole
thing is to end up with subtle color variations and finish variations
throughout the whole gun to give it an assembled metal look rather than a one
solid chunk of black look with the black done I mask off some parts which I will
keep black in this case it's these three little gravies at the front of the gun
and deeper ridges between sections the rest will get sprayed with this
dupli-color dark shadow gray automotive paint this paint has a flaked glossy
finish which looks really metal II and the dark gray isn't too far a cry from
the satin finished black so the difference in color is nice and subtle
as I peel away the tape you can see the slight color variations and the
difference in finishes this is exactly what we are going for and we're going to
accentuate that with our weathering the first step in this weathering process is
vignette agree painted areas with some black acrylic paint I'm using a dry
brush technique just really poking the gun with the end of the brush in using
paper towel padding to remove excess in a non streaky way finally we add in some
chips along the rims where the paint might typically chip revealing what
would be a bright metallic undercoat I actually planned on doing a metallic
undercoat and actually chipping this part away but I thought I would have
more control if I did it as a fake topcoat when this is done you can see
what I was aiming for with this subtle color variation and finishes look to try
to get the look of real metal I continue this throughout the rest of the gun as I
assembled it but before we get too far there is one more key component yet to
discuss so I'm not much of a gun guy and I was always a bit curious about this
part of the gun on the standard wood chuck it's fix
in place so I thought it was just some funky handle or a place for a clone to
hold his gun without getting his hand burned I don't know
well TK won 9-8 one to a local garrison member stop by one day and showed me how
his DC 15 unfolds to reveal this cool shoulder stock after seeing this there
was no way I wasn't adding it into this project this is all going to pivot from
this point here where I have recesses for two bearings at an axle these
bearings will be free spinning with no end stops so I will need to find a way
to fix the two rods together and have them hold in there to desired end points
I'm going to use some small but extremely powerful and 52 magnets to
accomplish this I have one inset into the handle area of the gun and it's mate
is inset into this piece here this piece will be attached to the two rails and
hold them together while giving me a back end stop and hold this process is
repeated on the front end with more magnets and now we have a free-spinning
yet controllable shoulder stock with all this assembled I paint it with the same
concept as the rest of the gun and added into the assembly the last bit is the
end piece this needs to rotate as well from its resting position to a
perpendicular position I think trying to add in stops to this is a little
overkill so I'm just going to use some tension to hold it to where it needs to
be and in a patch spots first I printed a custom PCB for this project I've been
looking to dip my toes into the PCB waters for a while now and this project
seems simple enough to be a good starting point as you can see it makes
my electronics much much cleaner and I am super excited to do more of this kind
of thing in future and past projects l-3 not twenty Imperial March the
Imperial March by John Williams and London Symphony Orchestra
the Imperial March on banjo that's gonna do it for this video thanks for tuning
in I'm really happy with how this blaster came out I'm also really happy
to finally have my own custom PCB I think that's gonna make a lot of future
projects a lot easier a big thanks to woodchuck for giving me the blessing to
post these files and thanks for making such a cool blaster which was a lot of
fun to play with definitely keep an eye out for his next run of DC 15 shorty
blasters on the Facebook groups if you like these videos please hit the
subscribe button at the bottom and as always we are going to finish with a
progression shot so I will see you next time
whoa