I’m back on an Aliens kick (sorry.) Like I ever left. There is one prop from the movie I never attempted: my Mount Everest of 1980s props. The M314 Motion Tracker ( you have to love that James Cameron named all the hardware.) Bad enough that it’s made from seventeen individual 40-year-old parts, but it has a video screen and makes noise. I mean the originals didn’t necessarily have video screens and make noise, but it would be boring without it.
Crazy brain woke me at 3:00 AM and I repeated my internet search of three years ago. If anything the results were worse than before. I admire the patient souls who have standing eBay searches for years. Some of the camera bits are easy and cheap: the shoe flash, the calculation panel. The solar calculator can be pricey. Strange to think you will chop these working devices to bits.
Careful with that flash unit, kids. The capacitor can seriously hurt you, even after years of sitting around. As I set about destroying things with some difficulty, it occurred to me I would probably never find all the bits. Even if I did, $950??? I am a prop heretic and known for my impatience. Back to the internet with refined search terms.
A lucky find! I took a chance it was a knockoff of the Hama and it is. More search refinement lead to a kind soul on the Replica Prop Forum who owns all the parts and scanned them. God knows how long it took, but they are interchangeable with the originals. Price of STL files: $10. Off to Etsy to browse 9,000 3D printing services. This could be a blog post on it’s own, but I ended up with this guy. Great communication, cheap and fast.
In my wanderings I discovered another clever fellow who solved the video problem. There are unholy individuals out there who have created working motion trackers, the drill body filled with electronic guts. Much has changed since 1986. I’m happy with a cheap MP3 player that runs video. It fits in the battery tray of the slide viewer, and the magnifying lens fills the screen. The wee Bluetooth speaker makes the grating noise nice and loud, and fits in my pouch. A gazillion things are ordered, now we wait.
