hey guys it's norm I'm here with Adam and we are in your man cave we are in my
man so obviously you have a ton of cool things remain k-pro ongoing projects and
we're here to talk about this one it's a little familiar this is familiar and
this actually of all the projects I've currently got going on this is the
oldest oh I I started being obsessed with this is the gun called the zf1 zorg
industries this Org industries ZF one from the fifth film yeah it's got like a
million weapons on it you can see gary oldman demoing all the things does web
shooter flamethrower guns and all of that stuff and I wanted one right after
the movie came out so somewhere around 1999 I started hunting around on the web
for someone who could help me to replicas I'm still working on it it's 13
years later I've made several close friends I joined the replica props forum
because of friends I made and it actually is kind of a sad story it has a
weird bump in the road so back 10 years ago when you're just
starting to make a list you just took photos from the movie whatever
promotional photos were available well more than that actually what I noticed
Newegg I'm gonna spin this around here what I could see in the movie when I
found photos was that this piece right here yeah was familiar to me and it was
familiar because it was the novel it was the nozzle on the gas torch that I had
in my toolkit that's the flamethrower part of the CF was and I thought I can
build this gun because I know what that part is I could scale everything off of
that part so I began to and I took screenshots after hundreds and hundreds
of screenshots uh the Boreas Lee sat there and made 3d files of each one so I
could see how they place I worked out all the geometry of the of the
infrastructure that held everything in place then I went and machined one of
each thing and each one was slightly wrong once I got it all together so I'm
Rhema Sheen everything again they didn't use the same prop for all shots they
well I could see that there were several different shots right so there's ones
when he's actually shooting bullets there's actually an eject yeah hole
right here because they actually put a modified ak-47 inside the thing the
flamethrower one has different grimsey yes there are many differences between
the various the gun that you see in the film
Changez many times so I went this is probably that probably comprises like
seven years of research and then last year in comic-con that but the guys who
I love from prop storm London I believe had one of these reels the f1 was the
the real prop the movie only time it's been shown in public none of us had ever
done one in the wild or ever gotten access to one and I thought I mean
there's a big crew of zf1 fanatics out there and it was the flamethrower model
it was yeah there was the NAS at the end where you could attest the NAS into a
gas pack and it and you sought there so you get it up well and one of the most
disappointing things about seeing a prop that you've been obsessed with for that
long in in the wild is what you got wrong one of the most rewarding things
is seeing what you got right my dimensions are all off a little bit I
have noticed being me now I have some access to some things that I wouldn't
have had ten years ago and so when I see props and get to hold them where I've
only built them from screenshots I noticed that I have a tendency to build
things about 10% too large these are how things are in film usually thing is some
reason well also I think it's an artifact of parallaxing in the camera
that I don't necessarily always account for if it's not in the center of frame
or high perhaps I should be adding or subtracting dimensional measurements
from it so at any rate there are some guys in the replica props form who had
access to that prop for a while and so I've been purchasing machine parts from
them but I basically abandoned my zf1 because although it was nearly complete
it's wrong on almost every front and tiny little ways and I strive for
accuracy so this is my new ZF one in mint construction all right and so these
are parts like for example this shell here yes something you bought from the
forum someone else would access the model they took photos of it yes I mean
you weren't on the convention floor taking 500 photos I did go on to the
convert so last year at gamma gun every year Comicon I walked the floor in
costume often the customs too cumbersome for me to visit things that I really
want to see so last year at comic-con I just walked out on the floor with a
camera and I walked all the way over to booth and I held it and I took pictures
with it I use Arnold Schwarzenegger's trick about when you're famous and you
don't want to get stopped just never stop moving and at comic-con it's
literally like being a shark right you just move move move move move and if you
stop they actually start the organizers start to yell at you for clogging things
up so I never stop moving got all the way to prop start up pictures with it
ran back to my correct let me put out a costume and then hit the floor again
awesome well how so how far along is this model um this is fairly far along
there's a lot of work to do to shape the this is I've only just put the shell on
the outside of this and it needs some customizing the bottom shell and frame
need to be fitted to each other that's a couple of hours of work there's some
internal frame work that needs to be done to put the gun handle into this
there's electronics work to do I actually have two separate sets of life
I've got to have that the red button here's the red button it is actually
totally accurate and it's funny because I had actually also sourced my own red
button and while I had gotten pretty darn accurate this guy did better he had
found that a much better way and it you know and when you're buying buttons like
this actually it ends up being it's not like you can go to a switch store and
say I want a button you actually have to go inspect what's the voltage that it
can handle what is the voltage of the lamp in it what is the color of the lamp
what is the angle of the bevel and so when you order it's not even that you're
ticking boxes you actually have to read this whole chart and tell them I want an
e nine one three one two four five sixteen twelve volt and when you get all
that they send you hopefully the right switch and still not as perfect as but
it was no wrong hey that's still wrong that is the story of my prop collecting
life we worked really hard and it's still kind of so will this not will be
operational with the flamethrower with the net I toyed around with the idea of
making it airsoft friendly and being able to fire airsoft pellets from it I
have some air airsoft guns that are prop guns and it's just not that thrilling to
be able to shoot something out of it there's not recoil the way I don't think
it would yeah throwing so quite honestly what I think I might do is make this one
so that the yeah this back part the the viewer comes
up like this that I'll do the arrow shooters that come out like this I will
actually add that functionality in and of course it will have the full
electronics and maybe sound effects we'll see we'll see what the sound
effects the the work that he did is really really beautiful though it's it's
totally exciting to have seen that somebody else is also as obsessed as I
am and be able to reap the reward but it's not a race at all no no no no total
collaboration they were having trouble with this whole thing has a blue finish
on it and they were having trouble replicating the blue finish they tried
anodizing they tried painting and nothing was working and the trick was is
that as a machinist I actually knew what the blue finish was and it's called
marking fluid when you are what if I have some here when you are machining
something and you want to make marks on your metal for like I'm going to machine
up to this limit what you do is you spray it with this a clear blue lacquer
called marking fluid they also make it as a red lacquer and now you can
actually buy these in a spray can and it's it's basically it's a very thin
coat it dries really quickly but you can etch in it you can make
notes so for a machinist it's a kind of an invaluable tool for seeing where
you're going it also happens to be the way they colored these blue and I knew
it because I see how marking fluid wears at the coroner's so they were like
wondering how to do the blue and they're asking me and I said at the marking
fluid they tried it they're like bingo that's exactly right so unique kind of
weathering on that exactly so it's a total it's it
I love the replica props warm because it ends up being a real collaboration
between fanatics well we'll definitely have to come back later and check up on
the progress on there well 12 years hopefully not another 12 years later at
maybe another year let's I have I could not possibly hazard it guess
whoa Thank You Adam and we'll be back with more from Adams man cave you will
see it next time