Sacrilege!

If you're a purist, you may want to just skip to the next post.  Here's the part that separates my Megatron clone from the others floating around the internet.  All the other ones I've seen are painted, then have Decepticon stickers put on them.  Given the value of original P38s, that's understandable, but I don't want people to think I'm a poser.  So I'm going to engrave the logos into the slide, because it's my gun, and I can.  I've never engraved on moderately hard steel before, so I wasn't sure if my engraver would last, but it held up just fine.

Weld, it's about time.

With the frame piece machined, it's time to weld it all together.  Almost.  As you can see, the angles of the two pieces didn't match and there was a lot of overlap.  So I had to fixture and mill them to match.

To hold everything while I welded, I made myself a jig.  It's a pretty basic jig that just locates on some pin holes.  Because the exact alloy is unknown but similar to 4140, that's how I decided to weld it.  Preheated it up to around 400°F and went for it, then slow cooled it back to room temp.  All the impact from the slide and barrel are on the new front section, so weld strength isn't something I'm overly worried about.  Plus, they made these frames out of aluminum too, and even soft 4140 is tougher than 7075 aluminum.

With the welding done, I could get all the parts fitted and functional.  I haven't done any cosmetic finishing on the welds yet, just did what I needed to make it work.  For what it's worth, my P38 parts kit was made in 1961, though I bought some of the early style grips for it, which are the correct style for Megatron.

Finishing with the danger glitter

If you're a regular follower of this blog, you'll know that dropping off the face of the internet is a thing that I sometimes do.  Stuff comes up, stuff gets put on the back burner, stuff gets picked up again.  Life was a serious struggle for a while there, but I'm back for now.

Time to finish up making the danger glitter on my Megatron P38 project.  Have I mentioned how much I hate machining steel?  There is nothing about it that I like.  I miss my aluminum.  But steel is what I got so steel is what I'll cut.  Few pictures and fewer words because I didn't take may pics along the way.  It took 3 more setups to get the machining finished on this frame chunk.