Ahem...
So, my wood working skills, even in balsa, are embarrassingly lacking. I wont look for excuses, but suffice to say, there's something missing in my brain - I can't transfer the shape I have in my mind to a block of wood.
I don't really know why I thought it would be better with XPS foam, but maybe because I can easier make changes to its shape it was more alluring.
So, I dropped the balsa for now. Changed to blue XPS insulation foam. Diligently filled in every void in the, much amputated, handle and glued more foam blocks on the handle to shape into.
It was going OK, but then ADHD got the hold of me again and I decided, I would just do a rough undersize shape in the blue foam and then add FIMO style polymer clay (AKA polyclay) around that core. That should be easier than filling in strangely shaped undercuts/hollows on the handle with foam.
I love how when working with the Shapelock it becomes quite easy to make a 3d imprint of your hand - basically by just grabbing the "dough" and adding material for support where needed. All in real time.
Polyclay offers the same, so I went for it.
In the beginning, I considered just adding the carbon fiber onto the shaped polyclay handle, but it soon turned out that even with the foam core, the handle would be way too heavy.
So, now, I have decided to take a molding of off the handle.
It's been messy to get this far and when I went to bake the clay, I made the very stupid mistake of not thinking of the low melting point of the XPS foam. So, of course, the foam collapsed in a few spots.
Anyways, next step will be to do a quick silicone mold of the handle shape as it is now (the fundamental shape itself is now perfect for my hand). Then I will use that mold to make an intermediate "dummy handle" in epoxy filled with microballoons or maybe just plaster. Something that I can sand and spackle easily as I will make the final shape and finishing on that "dummy handle". Once that is OK, I will do a second mold.
(Yes, I could tidy up the real handle, fill it up with spackle and so on before taking the molding, but I'd rather do it on a dummy. Eg. the XPS gets dissolved by polyester filler, which I like to work with since it is sands easily and cures fast).
If there are no tricky undercuts on the handle I can make a rigid split-mold that I can use to vacuum-bag the carbon fiber handle in. But depending on the final shape, I may have to do flexible mold instead. If it is flexible, I don't know if I can lay of the carbon fiber in it and make it stay put though. If I can't, then I could pour casting wax into the mold and once demolded, cover the wax handle with carbon and finally melt out the wax. (This way, the handle would become a few mm bigger though. Don't know if it will matter.)
Either way, once I have the CF handle skins done, I will epoxy it onto the remains of the Mirage handle and fill the hollow interior with a closed cell expandable two-part PU foam. I don't think I will make it detachable, though.
Yeah, I know, this is a very, very, very long way around what could have been a somewhat small job. But as they say, at least, I am learning... I hope, haha.
Nah, it's all good. All these materials are dirt cheap in China and I've been wanting to play around with the lost wax process as well as PU foam and silicone molds for a while.
Also, this way, I'll actually get a way to produce an identical handle for my second Mirage and perhaps for other guns, too. I might have to make 100 handles before it makes up for all the extra work it will take to make this one, haha.
End of novel, here are some pics. I really, really hope my final handle will make up for this, haha.
Here is that much amputated handle that I did not dare show earlier.
I spent a bit of time to make sure every little hollow in the handle would be taken up by the foam, so that no water could mess with my buoyancy. It was a mute point, as I will eventually get rid of this foam and fill it up with PU instead.
Shaping the foam back when I still thought I'd glass over it.
Now, this is where I took a turn - I started using polyclay over the foam core to get the best possible, personal shape to my handle. As you can see, I am adding the clay in layers. Might not be kosher, but much easier to add a bit of support/bulk where you feel it is needed.
As mentioned earlier, it is not neglible how much bigger my hand is with 3mm gloves on. So, going through the pain of making a custom handle, it makes sense to wear the gloves you'll be using most when shooting. The latex glove makes sure the neoprene doesn't stick to the clay - works wonders in Shapelock, too.
This is the shape that fits my hand like a... glove. It really does. And it seems to have good support and I feel like I have the angle very close to perfect, too.
If it was structurally strong enough (which it isn't) and didn't way a ton (which it almost does), I could keep it as is. But since I wanna try to go for some swank carbon fiber, I will take a mold of this shape. Work on an intermediate dummy handle produced from that mold to tidy the whole thing up and make the finish prettier. And then hopefully make a cool CF handle