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After doing the Clasic Phaser Green Mod inspired & instructed by Jayrob I've decided to laser modify a few of the other Star Trek universe beam weapons (mainly Federation).
My first of these additional phaser mods is the 650nm 220mW laser modified 1992 Playmates Next Generation Phaser with 10 segment bar graph led pseudo power display, keyswitch protected & spray rubber grips (and some red GITD on the fire button & inside the emitter cone).
Not perfect but I'm new to doing this so it is a learning process for me, a fun one at that! I purposely painted the body a darker metal color than what the proper color should be because I thought the darker color looked better, the other mods that I'll do will be the correct for the show (like my classic phaser green mod).
This is how it started out as a toy (I got it for 18.00 with shipping on ebay):
Plastic painted display that is actually the opening for the sound effect speaker & grips that are just black paint, had to change that (amongst other things)!
Here it is opened up:
Massive speaker, belt clip got to go! You can see (sorry, wished this was a better pic, I should have checked before I moved on) that it is pretty cramped in there and my best place I could see to put the keyswitch was in the back which meant I needed to remake the battery compartment.
Here is a better pic of the top half with the huge speaker out of the way:
The laser module I used for this was a strange setup I found on ebay High Power 250mW Focusable Laser Module Battery Case | eBay that is only 13.99 with shipping from China (I bought 3):
A 650nm (claimed) 250mW laser module wired to a 3xAA plastic box with switch. Since I needed to reduce the battery compartment for the keyswitch I decided to go with 1 to 2 10440 Li-ion batteries. The reason I say 1 to 2 is that I rearranged the battery compartment to fit two 10440s in parallel so that only their current would add so if I only put one in it will still work (tested this before I implemented it).
After cutting out the areas I needed to (display area, hole for keyswitch in top & battery compartment, connect up down power button area for slide potentiometer) I then filled in areas such as the hole for the belt clip & to rebuild a smaller battery compartment using milliput putty (insert pictures here I should have taken but didn't). I then went on to use painters tape to isolate both top & bottom sections of the housing and emitter cone and then made the paint job you see in the first pic.
I at first was going to make the display just a battery monitor so i went with a simple 3916 IC voltage monitor circuit. By the time I got the parts I changed my mind and decided I was going to use the 3916 instead for a fake power meter and since I wasn't going to use a decade counter chip where I could use buttons for up/reset of the bar graph I could just use a 10k slide potentiometer for power up/down instead. The next step was to breadboard the circuit I was going to use for the display:
(Was still waiting on the slide potentiometers so the breadboard is using a rotate pot.)
Of which I used an all red bar graph for the test circuit. For what was supposed to be the final circuit I had a nice red/green 10 seg bar graph and built it:
Unfortunately just before I first went to put it all together I was testing it and accidentally dropped a little screwdriver on the back of the prototype board circuit which shorted on the bargraph unit pins and burnt out an led!!! After chiding myself for the clumsiness I needed to replace the bargraph and the only one right there was the all red I used in the breadboard circuit.
Here is the top & bottom just before final assembly:
You'll notice the tiny speaker I replaced the massive one with, I didn't use a heatsink on this one because I couldn't see how to fit one (too cramped) so I'm limiting the duty cycle on this one to 15 seconds to be safe (I've test the module up to 40 seconds and it didn't really get hot). The Christopher Pike Laser & Klingon Disruptor will both have heatsinks (I have the perfect ones for each already).
Sorry there are no pics of the battery compartment, at the moment it is functional but not pretty. I will get back to that one later and finish it properly.
One other thing I decided to experiment with was an acrylic paint with a red gitd in it. I'm new to this so it was an experiment of which after painting the emitter cone gloss black I painted the gitd inside and the fire button chrome the gitd went into the button well (where there was a chrome foil). This is how it came out:
Not bad and the display was going too in this pic.
You can see that even though I gave the emitter cone outside 3 coats of gloss black that when I fire the cone becomes red (interesting effect but not what I was intending).
Here it is firing at the top of a telephone pole down the block
And at a tree that was annoying me at that moment (just joking):
I'm still learning to do so please bear with me, subsequent mods will look even better!
Next up will be my Star Trek Chris Pike Laser Red Mod (which I should have done is about two weeks, busy time at work at the moment):
My first of these additional phaser mods is the 650nm 220mW laser modified 1992 Playmates Next Generation Phaser with 10 segment bar graph led pseudo power display, keyswitch protected & spray rubber grips (and some red GITD on the fire button & inside the emitter cone).
Not perfect but I'm new to doing this so it is a learning process for me, a fun one at that! I purposely painted the body a darker metal color than what the proper color should be because I thought the darker color looked better, the other mods that I'll do will be the correct for the show (like my classic phaser green mod).
This is how it started out as a toy (I got it for 18.00 with shipping on ebay):
Plastic painted display that is actually the opening for the sound effect speaker & grips that are just black paint, had to change that (amongst other things)!
Here it is opened up:
Massive speaker, belt clip got to go! You can see (sorry, wished this was a better pic, I should have checked before I moved on) that it is pretty cramped in there and my best place I could see to put the keyswitch was in the back which meant I needed to remake the battery compartment.
Here is a better pic of the top half with the huge speaker out of the way:
The laser module I used for this was a strange setup I found on ebay High Power 250mW Focusable Laser Module Battery Case | eBay that is only 13.99 with shipping from China (I bought 3):
A 650nm (claimed) 250mW laser module wired to a 3xAA plastic box with switch. Since I needed to reduce the battery compartment for the keyswitch I decided to go with 1 to 2 10440 Li-ion batteries. The reason I say 1 to 2 is that I rearranged the battery compartment to fit two 10440s in parallel so that only their current would add so if I only put one in it will still work (tested this before I implemented it).
After cutting out the areas I needed to (display area, hole for keyswitch in top & battery compartment, connect up down power button area for slide potentiometer) I then filled in areas such as the hole for the belt clip & to rebuild a smaller battery compartment using milliput putty (insert pictures here I should have taken but didn't). I then went on to use painters tape to isolate both top & bottom sections of the housing and emitter cone and then made the paint job you see in the first pic.
I at first was going to make the display just a battery monitor so i went with a simple 3916 IC voltage monitor circuit. By the time I got the parts I changed my mind and decided I was going to use the 3916 instead for a fake power meter and since I wasn't going to use a decade counter chip where I could use buttons for up/reset of the bar graph I could just use a 10k slide potentiometer for power up/down instead. The next step was to breadboard the circuit I was going to use for the display:
(Was still waiting on the slide potentiometers so the breadboard is using a rotate pot.)
Of which I used an all red bar graph for the test circuit. For what was supposed to be the final circuit I had a nice red/green 10 seg bar graph and built it:
Unfortunately just before I first went to put it all together I was testing it and accidentally dropped a little screwdriver on the back of the prototype board circuit which shorted on the bargraph unit pins and burnt out an led!!! After chiding myself for the clumsiness I needed to replace the bargraph and the only one right there was the all red I used in the breadboard circuit.
Here is the top & bottom just before final assembly:
You'll notice the tiny speaker I replaced the massive one with, I didn't use a heatsink on this one because I couldn't see how to fit one (too cramped) so I'm limiting the duty cycle on this one to 15 seconds to be safe (I've test the module up to 40 seconds and it didn't really get hot). The Christopher Pike Laser & Klingon Disruptor will both have heatsinks (I have the perfect ones for each already).
Sorry there are no pics of the battery compartment, at the moment it is functional but not pretty. I will get back to that one later and finish it properly.
One other thing I decided to experiment with was an acrylic paint with a red gitd in it. I'm new to this so it was an experiment of which after painting the emitter cone gloss black I painted the gitd inside and the fire button chrome the gitd went into the button well (where there was a chrome foil). This is how it came out:
Not bad and the display was going too in this pic.
You can see that even though I gave the emitter cone outside 3 coats of gloss black that when I fire the cone becomes red (interesting effect but not what I was intending).
Here it is firing at the top of a telephone pole down the block
And at a tree that was annoying me at that moment (just joking):
I'm still learning to do so please bear with me, subsequent mods will look even better!
Next up will be my Star Trek Chris Pike Laser Red Mod (which I should have done is about two weeks, busy time at work at the moment):
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