Dr. Horrible's Freeze Ray - Part 1

Bwaaaahahahahaha....     BWAAAAHHHAHAHAHAHAHA.... ha.
K, so I'm working on my evil laugh as well. Why? Because yours truly is taking on the persona of he who has a PhD. in Horribleness for not only this Halloween, but for the New York and quite possibly the San Diego Comic-Con's as well. Yes, I am a fan of Dr. Horrible.

I've managed to scrabble together most of the costume with the lab coat being the only part remaining, and I have ordered one and it should arrive soon. I got a perfect pair of goggles and have painted them to match the silvery color in the video. As well, I have the exact pair of boots and gloves that were used. So I'm pretty excited.

However, what is any good Halloween costume without some accessorizing? I mean really, what's a pirate without his sword, or a Stormtrooper without his laser carbine? It was with this in mind I decided to pursue creating the perfect thing to go along with the outfit.

Now I've looked all over the internet. I've seen some great attempts at recreating props from the video. I've seen at least 1 or 2 of the arm mounted laser from the bank heist scene. I've seen many a Wonderflonium briefcase (which i will also be making). And I've seen many a nerf-gun or other toy gun either standard or modified to play either the stun/death ray or freeze ray, but I have yet to see anything try to be faithful to the actual looks.

With that said, I am creating Dr. Horrible's Freeze Ray.



Work has already started and is going well so far. What follows below and in the next few blog posts will detail its construction as much as I can afford to do. For today I even have a few photos, though they aren't the greatest quality as I just snapped them quick with my iPhone before running out the door. But I promise to follow up with better shots from my digi camera. So lets begin.

First thing when i came up with the idea was to do some research on the Freeze ray itself. This boiled down to heading over to hulu.com and slowly playing and replaying the scene in which you see said freeze ray, over and over again. As I did so, I tried to grab a few screen grabs of it so I would get a good sense of what components went into it. Once I got them I placed them in photoshop and lightened them up, moved them around and basically manipulated them to make the images as clear as possible to see what I needed. Below is a picture of the freeze ray by itself. It was originally very dark and lacking a lot of essential detail. I did a bit of work to correct this to what you see now.



With that done, and what few other angles I could scratch up, I drew a mock up in my sketchbook. I will try to scan these in at a later time. Once I was done setting a relative scale of all the parts, I tried to list which pieces I thought could be built out of what material. As you can see above the ray consists of 3 main parts. The long barrel of the gun, the middle "base" section and the back handle bar. At this point I also decided I would not be including the pole it sits on as I want it to be mobile, and also the second little "grip" pole as I noted in the actual video this was not used, in favor of Dr. H holding the actual barrel instead. From a weight distribution point of view this also seemed logical for toting it around. There is also in addition to these main parts, a second small barrel on top of the ray, and a side "panel" component that has two steel cables running into a box with a pulsing blue square of light and another cylinder on the front of that that could be taken to be a third small barrel.

Now unfortunately the ray is only ever shown from this side, and often at low angles, in dark situations or too close to see everything together. So I had to do a lot of guesswork as to actual positioning of elements. And as I have already established, I will be taking liberties with the design as I see fit. Without better shots of the freeze ray, and with my current situation, being lacking tools and appropriate parts/materials to build it exact, I am instead working on matching as many things as I possibly can and then being creative to fill in the gaps.

With that in mind I sketched out a second set of views. The second set were more for "internals". As it is clear I will be needing some electric components for at least the pulsing blue light, I sketched out some wiring running from the base out to the small side panel. I also decided I wanted to create the effect of the blue-white light that came from inside the barrel when the ray fired, and I wanted to be able to turn these two elements on and off separately with switches at the handle on the back of the ray. To create both of these sources of light, I would need LED's. After some quick math and creative decisions, I established for the barrel I would need at least 8 LED's running on one 9v battery in arrays of 2 each with a resistor for each in a parallel circuit. For the pulsing blue light I researched on the internet for a ready made controllable pulsing circuit board. Which I found and will detail in another post. More on these LED's later in this post.

On to materials. It's obvious from the video that the real life equivalent is built mostly from metal, and is probably quite heavy. As that won't do for carrying it around, nor my capabilities for working with metal or getting the proper metal components, mine will be built mostly from plastics and possibly some wood. With this in mind I headed off to Home Depot where I got just about all the components I need...
For the main barrel I got a 2 ft length of 2" PVC pipe, as well as some fittings to give it a more accurate/cool look.
For the second smaller barrel I got a length of 2 ft of 3/4" copper pipe and some fittings to get the same effect as above. This barrel as has not been mentioned I decided to run along the entire top length of the base and then turn into the base at the back. It will be held down by a series of binding clips of which the proper name I am unsure. None of this was clear from the video, so is instead, a creative touch.
For the Base I found a plastic container that the receipt calls a shoe box. It is tapered from its top to its base instead of the perfect rectangle seen in the video, but I think this may even give it more of a unique look. It also feels pretty sturdy which is important as it will be the center of weight and gravity for the finished piece and if it's not sturdy the whole thing will wobble and not be very strong. I am not sure yet, but I may need to later reinforce this with some extra material, possibly wood or metal. The fact it has a removable top will work well for dealing with the "innards" on a  whim.
The back handle as of yet is something of a problem. This, next to the base, is arguably the part that needs to be the most sturdy as if I intend to hold the rest of the weapon from there it would need to support the weight of everything in front of it. This paired with the fact it is uniquely shaped to diagonally move down to where the actual grip handle is located means I need something sturdier than what I bought I believe. I intended to use either thin PVC or Copper for this too, but the problem was, they didn't have PVC or Copper precut in the sizes I needed, and their pipe cutting machine was broke. So, making due I found a small metal part in the shape of a square, that I intended on bending to the correct angle, but it is also flat on all sides which won't do. this means I would need to wrap soemthing around it such as newspaper or foam then bind it together to give it the rounder shapes and the ability to hold it. the metal is also kind of flimsy, so I think this option is out. I have since drafted up in photoshop a rough template for cutting he shape from wood. I think 1 1/4" plywood could be cut to the shape and would be sturdy enough to hold the weight. More on this when I venture to the lumber yard.
For the side panel, and this is something I think I'm most excited about, I got an industrial electrical switch holder, the type of thing you see hooked on a wall in a big building's basement with huge metal conduit heading into it and a switch for power. Pretty neat looking. It had an open front and as I need a blue blinking rectangle here I got an empty switch plate that you would normally have in your house of which I intend to cover with a semi-seethru plastic. *And* it has 2 holes in either side perfect for the next item I'll talk about. I also got some little parts for this as I've decided instead of the third barrel looking thing to go a little more creative with the look. It should be pretty cool.
The next item as mentioned is some steel conduit, a huge roll of which I could never dream of using but for quite cheap, so who cares. And it perfectly fits right into the side panel box, and it will carry the electric cabling for the LED's from inside the box through the conduit into the side panel and right back out again. I actually feel like I'm making something functional! Hooray!
For the dark side of the freeze ray, that being the left and never seen side, I had to get entirely creative. For all I know, there is nothing there, but that's boring back in reality, so I found these great little canisters that look like they came from Ninja Turtles 2 mutagen canisters. For these I am going to hook them to the side and run more conduit into them through the lid, and label them... are you ready... Wonderflonium power source. I am trying to figure out how I could get a viscous shimmering liquid into them possibly in pouches so it even looks like Wonderflonum is in fact powering the beast right then and there. I am also considering trying to find one of those black and yellow diagonally striped "danger" stickers to put by it.

I will try to take pictures of all these components before I start transforming them into whatever devilish end product awaits. Now i know this post is going long, and will probably be the longest of the bunch, But i wanted to get all the prep info and materials info out there before I really dug in. So don't expect the rest of this series to be quite as verbose as this first part, but I do have one more thing to talk about. The barrel LED's.

After gathering all this stuff I had one more trip to make. So off to radio shack I went. There I got 6 ultra-high brightness white LED's, 2 ultra-high brightness blue LED's, a pack of 100 assorted resistors (actual project need is 3 - 100 ohm resistors, 1 - 150 ohm resistor but the pack is cheap), two switches, a 9v battery connector, a blank circuit board, 3 pack red green and black 20 gauge connector wire, a soldering iron, solder, and a pair of wire strippers/cutters. This actually took two trips to two different stores as both ran out of some of either components, especially the LED's. If I weren't doing this so quickly I would have probably ordered the LED's of the internet.

I figured out a new pattern for the LED's. Originally I was going to use 8 white LED's instead of the two blue ones, but I decided I wanted to mix some blue color in with the white to match the video. I also wanted them in a different pattern on the circuit board. So I hot glued them in place with 3 whites on top, 2 blues in the middle, and the other 3 whites on the bottom.



I'll talk about the process of the circuit hookup using the blue's as an example.

1) I made the blue array connecting the first blue's negative cathode to the second blue's positive anode. I wrapped this connection in electric tape.
2) I then cut 4 lengths each of black and red connector wire and made inline connections.
3) The red wire to the first blue's anode.
4) The black to the second blue's cathode.
5) I connected the 150 ohm resistor inline with the black connector wire

I repeated all the steps above for each of the 3 white arrays as well. I found it easiest to do each step at the same time before moving on to the next step. i.e.: I connected the red wires to each of the arrays anodes before moving on and connecting the black wires to each of the arrays cathodes. This keeps it more organized and prevents connecting the wrong wire to the wrong place and getting a short/burnt out LED or non working circuit. Also the white arrays work at a higher voltage so I only needed 100 ohm resistors for each of those 3 arrays.

When they were all done I twisted the 4 red wires together and the 4 wires after the resistors together. This is all temporary as I intend to solder these connections to make sure they are solid, but it was late and I didn't have enough time last night when I made this.



Once I was done I connected a 9v battery to one of the 9v connectors. (try saying that 5 times fast, huh?) Then for the sake of simplicity I touched the positive to the positive red wires, and the negative to the negative connection after the resistors and viola! There was light! I also tested a switch by placing it in between the positive lead and the red wires (it worked charmingly). It was very nice and bright, so I held the finished circuit board into the end of the main barrel PVC pipe and it was quite fantastic. The effect was very lit up blue-white internals in the barrel, so anyone looking towards it would see the light spilling around inside, and to my delight, it created a very focused perfect blue-white projection like a giant flashlight at the wall even with the room lights on. With the room lights shut off it was even more marvelous. My only advice is not to look down the barrel because it was actually blindingly bright in there. In the finished product the inside of the barrel will be painted a highly reflective chrome color, so hopefully the light will be even better then.

Well that's it for now. Like I said, more posts soon, so check back. And wish me luck in the rest of the build. I will be taking as many pictures as possible and some video when its finished so you can see it in action. Thanks for reading.