Tomenosuke Blade Runner Blaster Part 1: Cleanup
I hope everyone is staying safe out there. For my Covid-19 quarantine project I decided to tackle the Tomenosuke Blade Runner Blaster. I purchased this kit off ebay just after the release of Blade Runner 2049, and I have just been sitting on it; frankly, too scared to even touch it. The kit is more or less a model, everything mechanically attaches with screws, so that is not the hard part. The hard part is that the model is mostly cast zinc alloy. All the metal parts require considerable cleanup work to remove flashing and mold lines. Everything needs to be polished. About 90% of the parts need to be cold blued, a process I have never tried. And if it is not blued it needs to be enameled. This should be difficult but fun.
This is what the kit looks like brand new out of the box. (I did poke around and open some of the bags before taking this picture.) Everything is metal with the exception of the transparent orange resin grips, the Steyr magazine and magazine well, the pistol frame, and the cylinder. The frame and cylinder are a cold cast zinc polymer alloy. Essentially, they are resin, but have a zinc powder throughout the casting so you can actually polish them to look like blued metal. Unfortunately to comply with regulations these parts are required to be plastic. However, I plan on adding an aftermarket steel barrel (which I already have), and a real Charter Arms Bulldog .44 cylinder (which is on the way). The remainder of the frame almost fully concealed by the rest of the blaster parts, so the plastic should not hurt the aesthetic.
The first thing I decided to do was to have a go at polishing some of the larger metal parts. I started by deburring the parts with a set of metal files. This got rid of any of the casting marks. Then, I proceeded through ever finer grits of sandpaper starting at 320 – 600 – 800 – 1000 – 1500 – 2000. After that was done, the parts were rubbed down with 000 and 0000 steel wool.
I don’t have any electrical polishing tools, so this is about as good as I could get by hand, which is okay by me.
Next, I gave the plastic parts a good scrub down with the 000 and 0000 steel wool. It just looks black in this picture, but this step actually made the whole part have more of a graphite appearance, and all the edges have nice silver highlights. I will try and get it to show better in later images. You can also see I removed the plastic barrel. I cut it off with a hacksaw leaving an extra 2-3 mm of material, then finished it off my by belt and disk sander to final dimensions.
That is all for now. Polishing took me about 3 days from start to finish with about 3-4 hours each day. The next step will be bluing and painting which is going to be quick
Thanks for looking!
Other parts of this project
► Tomenosuke Blade Runner Blaster Part 2: finishing
► Tomenosuke Blade Runner Blaster Part 3: final
