Thanks for the feedback, guys! I've taken apart the light switch to clean out all the gunk and to make sure that the electrical parts were okay. There's some corrosion on the metal brackets and the wiring is ready to be thrown out, but the rest seems solid and most of the grime came off pretty easy. Some more parts off of ebay arrived in the mail, so I now have a clutch/brake lever for the rear grip (not screen accurate and perhaps a little bit too big, but it's a start)
smrtazzsmrtgnnr wrote:
If you DO go the 3d printed route and still want to use that steadycam clone arm, add some weight to your finished 3d printed weapon. Fighting the arm all day because of a lack of counter weight is loads of fun afterall. Not that I'd know about such things...
Thanks for the tip, I've been experimenting with the vest and arm combo and with the springs dialled all the way down, I still need about 3,5-4 kg of load in order to achieve equilibrium, so the printed gun will need to have some weight to it and not just for the "feel" of a weapon instead of a toy gun. Taking my 3D printed Moritas as a reference, I expect the printed parts to weigh around 3-4 kilos on their own, so the final weight should exceed that bare minimum of my steadicam arm. I can always use the counterweight under the pivot point as a real counterweight in case the gun ends up being lighter than expected.
It'll be a lot of printing, no doubt about that. Each Morita was about 150-200 hours of print time and those are roughly 3/4 of the length of a MG42. Once you distribute this load to two printers that run in parallel, it's not that bad.
I have a question for smartgun operators with some drops and colony sweeps under their belt, is it necessary to have a pivot point with a bearing (the one that connects the "L bracket" to the barrel shroud of the MG42) or is a threaded rod/shaft good enough for normal use? I've seen one made out of a caster wheel with an axial bearing, but the screen used mounts look like a simple bolt with a lock nut on, nothing fancy. My exosuit used bearings for all the main pivot points, so maybe I'm just over-engineering this and there's no real need for a bearing.