A journey to a billion suns

I thought I would have a go at making my own bases for these complete with firing arcs.

To start I found a company which would laser cut shapes in acrylic are order a load of 30mm rounds in 2mm clear acrylic. To hold up the mini I also got some 3mm clear rod and clear tube with an inside diameter of 3mm to serve as a socket for the rod on the base, see the first picture. I cut rod into 30mm lengths and the tube in 5mm lengths for the sockets.

In my mind these things being the same size would just slot together seamlessly, however as things turned out these were so tight, they did not really fit together and as I could not find anything like a clear acrylic tube with an inside diameter of 3.5mm it took some work with the dremel to widen the sockets to fit.

Next was making the fire arcs, 180 degrees for the auxiliary fire and 45 degrees for the primary weapon. The 180 degree arc I marked using the tool in picture 2 which is an engineer’s centre finder and not a Klingon throwing star! There didn’t seem to be an easy way to mark out the primary arc so I used tinkerCAD to make the tools in picture 3 and printed them on my FDM printer. The first one is used in picture 4, with marks from the centre finder aligned to the grooves in the tool I used it to mark the 45 degree arc. These marks were scored in using a scribe, I am wondering if they will need to be enhanced if they are not on a totally black background.

Once the arcs are marked you end up with picture 5.

I then used the second tool, upside down, to centre the socket on the disk while the glue dries as in picture 6, with final assembled stand with all the protective covers removed in picture 8.