Friday, February 5, 2010

Toshiba Satellite Casemod

I've been super busy with work and stuff lately, so I haven't had time to post or work on the space suit. I am going to post some older stuff from the last few years. The first is a case mod of my Toshiba Satellite A70 laptop, the biggest piece of crap ever. Sci-fi shows always have these overbuilt laptops. They look cool, but are bulky by today's standards. I had to tear this one apart repeatedly to keep it working, and it suffered a little more each time. I cracked the screen case the last time I repaired it, so I decided to give it that lived in futuristic feel. The very first step if you ever want it to work again is mask everything you don't want paint getting into. Then do it again.
I cut out some styrene cladding to cover the crack, and give it some useless detail. Next I sanded the hell out of it to get glue to adhere and paint to stick. Then I glued down the styrene using a solvent glue and weighted everything down so it would stick evenly.
Now it gets a coat of primer to fill gaps and pitting that the sanding missed, and to ensure the paint will coat well.
Now it gets an undercoat of metallic paint. I used Rustoleum "anodized bronze". It's nice and dark and looks like real metal. I usually use krylon over Rustoleum because it dries faster and runs less, but they don't make a good metallic paint. It looked so good like this I almost left it, but I bought a faux rust kit and wanted to try it out.
Now for the fake rust to make it look like it gets used for downloading Jawa porn. On this project I used sponges like the package suggested. This is fine if you are Martha Stewart antiquing a credenza, but it looked unconvincing. I did a Czerka rifle for a tusken raider Halloween costume and found that spraying straight from the can looks alot better in the end. If I did this over again I probably would have left it bronze or maybe white.

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