How I made a Wynonna Earp Fair Plate

Last time I made the Peacemaker gun from Wynonna Earp (tutorial here), this time I made the Fair Plate which comes into play in Season 2

– Image from Pixel51 – goo.gl/RMPakf

And it ended up looking like this:

 

If you have any questions or any suggestions as to what I should make next, get me on twitter @LizzipFish

 

Materials List

 

Tool List

  • Drill
  • Drill Bit: 6mm
  • Ruler
  • Hand Saw
  • Sharpie
  • Knife
  • Large file (similar to this)
  • Sandpaper
  • Sellotape
  • Glue Stick
  • Soldering Iron, Solder and Superglue (not actually used, but will be used for improvements)

 

Process

Firstly I measured out a 190mm square section of the Acrylic sheet

Scored along the edges with a knife, before cutting it out with a hacksaw

Then I drew a circle 180mm in diameter (using the lid off a tub of Halloween sweets). The inner width of the top of the cake tin is about 183mm, and the inner width of the base about 175mm. We want the acrylic disc to sit slightly further than half way down the tin, allowing some room for the electronics underneath

Again I scored the edge with the knife

And cut out the disc with the hacksaw

The edges required a lot of filing and sanding (with the file and sandpaper)

Eventually the edges were a lot more even and smooth

Allowing the disc to sit in the tin with room for some electronics underneath it

Next I cut a square of the Vinyl

Peeled off the back and stuck it to one side of the disc

Then trimmed off the excess and tried to smooth out the edges

From the other side you can see all the trapped air bubbles. I removed as many of these as I could by pricking them with the knife and smoothing them down with my finger

Next I had to recreate the pattern on the disc. Most of the pattern I managed to get from this image

But as you can see the three closest symbols are pretty obscured. So instead of just guessing what the symbols looked like, I used the following two images from the Season One finale to piece together three symbols from the gate

While they may not be the correct symbols on the plate, at least they are canon to the show

So using all these images, I sketched out the design in Photoshop

I then stuck a bit of paper onto my monitor (that’s what the professionals do, I’m sure…) and traced this image

Note: Though this is the correct way around to look at as an image, I should have flipped it vertically before tracing it out as when stuck to the disc it is reversed

Then I stuck the tracing to the vinyl side of the disc using a glue stick

And trimmed off the excess paper at the edges

Then using a very sharp knife (trust me, it was sharp, we find out how sharp later) I started cutting out the symbols on the disc. I cut through both the paper and the vinyl and peeled off the layers so it was just the acrylic left

I went around the plate cutting out the symbols first

I made quite a few scratches on the disc with the knife, but they do not really show up so it was not an issue

I worked from the outside to the inside until everything was cut out

Next I removed the paper. The glue stuck it on pretty well, so some had to be carefully scratched off with the knife without damaging the vinyl

Small bits paper residue did not matter much as this side will not be visible anyway

Next I cut some yellow cellophane

And used the glue stick to stick this to the vinyl side (where I had just removed the paper)

I trimmed the edges and added a second layer of cellophane

This gave it a strong yellow tint. This was needed as the LED lights were more white than yellow coloured

Next I drilled a 6mm hole in the base of the tin, as close to the side as possible

This is where the wire between the lights and the batteries will thread through

And this is what the lights look like. In an attempt to make them brighter I tried to give them 6v instead of 4.5v and blew up the first set, so don’t do that. 4.5v is fine.

The switch on the battery pack sticks out, but I needed it to be flat. I cut through the switch using the Very Sharp knife mentioned earlier, and then cut right through my finger and had to spend 5 hours at the hospital and get stitches. It hurt. Don’t do that.

After all of that fun and excitement, I separated the battery pack from the lights

And removed the plastic coating

Until I had bare wires for the lights

Then I stripped the ends of the wires on the detached battery pack too

The battery pack was then attached to the base of the tin (using sellotape for now, but eventually superglue) making sure the switch was pointing away from the tin

Then the wires were fed through the hole

Next I drew a 170mm diameter circle on some tinfoil, this reflected the lights better than the dark tin

I cut this out and taped it shiny side up into the bottom of the tin, allowing the wires to come around the edge and sit on top of the foil

Next I attached a reed switch between one wire from the lights and one from the battery pack, and attached the other light wire to the other battery pack wire.

These are currently held with sellotape, but in the future when I can use my finger again and actually hold both an iron and solder I will solder these wires.

I then sellotaped the lights around the edge and slightly towards the centre so the middle would receive light

I had to bend the reed switch up and out slightly so the magnet would be able to reach it

The reed switch is activated by a magnet in the end of Peacemaker. When the magnet is near it forces the contacts in the switch together and turns on the lights

I drilled a 6mm hole in the end of the perspex rod/hot glue stick (depending on which gun I used) in the barrel of Peacemaker and inserted the magnet

Now I put the perspex rod/glue stick back into Peacemaker and placed the disc into the tin. Then when activated the plate looked like this

The final step is to add additional vinyl around the outside of the disk to seal it and reduce the light bleed