The BatBerry gets some 30Cals!!

In my efforts to track down all the tough to find parts for the BatBerry, I’ve been trying to source some nice 30 caliber Browning M1919 machine guns.  These of course were the ones used in the scene from the original Batman movie where Batman blew up Axis chemicals to ruin the Joker’s plans and the Batmobile needed to get through a closed garage door.  The guns sliced through the door like butter and Batman successfully busted into the factory.

It’s really hard to come across some nice realistic guns that are both sturdy and don’t cost an arm and a leg.  There are some fantastic working replicas out there but they cost A LOT of money.  Don’t get me wrong, they’d be a ton of fun, but I’ll have a hard time with the local Police if I’m wielding working machine gun replicas on my car 🙂

One of the things I’ve learned about sourcing parts for the BatBerry is that if a good opportunity presents itself you need to make sure you take action.  These items just don’t grow on trees such as the WWII throttle quadrant I posted about previously.  So when I came across “R2lou” on the CLTC forums making solid resin castings of actual 30 Cal machine guns that were used in the movie Death Race, I had to contact him to make me a set.  The image you see at the top of this post is the original machine gun used to create the casting molds.  As a result, there are a nice set of these solid resin screen accurate bad-boys heading my way!

R2lou is creating his own Batmobile and he also makes solid resin remote control R2 replicas.  The very cool part about his projects are that they are both non-profit charity programs created to bring some joy or aid to those who may be less fortunate.

These resin guns are going to be for show only, and yes they will be controlled by my BlackBerry, but others have done some crazy fun with replica working guns as seen here:

Now I’m not sure if I want to make my guns pop up like shown in the above video via actuators, or if I want to go with more of a “flip” arrangement.  Some of it will have to be figured out after I see how the flip flop hood moves.   I’ll have to see what kind of clearance I have and how annoying it will be to open/close the hood based on how the guns are mounted and motorized.

One of the options that I am looking at is doing a “flip” or “rolling” mechanism to make the guns appear.  If you look at the movie footage (picture courtesy of chickslovethecar.com) you will see that they actually popped the gun doors right off the car and then the guns came up.

This is great for a movie, but I can’t have my gun doors go flying off!!  I’ve been looking for alternatives to the actuator based mechanism (seen in the video) and have come across a scale model that takes an interesting approach.  Basically the door sits on a bar that runs up its center axis which then rotates to reveal the guns.  I’m not sure yet if I would be able to pull this off without having a nasty gap around the gun doors.  You can see some pictures of this model car courtesy of MillionairePlayboy.com

It will likely come down to how thick the fiberglass is on the gun doors right around the edges that will rotate down and up.  I’ll have to create some prototypes to see just how tight a gap I can get with a rotation setup like this.  Otherwise I’ll stick to the tried and true actuator based gun doors secured to the top of the machine guns.

Some experimentation is needed….