Dude in a secret santa that I was a part of got grinched, so I volunteered to do grinch relief.
Basically, he signed up for secret santa and gave a gift, but the person assigned to give him a gift did not
So I read through his posts and built a profile on him.
I found out where he lives. What he likes. What cars he has. Who he has in his family, etc.
I also found out he loves the QBZ-75/T97.
So I made this for him.
Full scale custom cutaway… ornament?

This involved taking my existing CAD model that I had on hand and modifying it in a few ways:

• Doing the cutaways
• Adjusting tolerances
• Making slots, pins, and grooves for the receiver to be printed in parts and assembled together

At first I made this at 50% scale, but was very disappointed with how it turned out. The small size of things made it super hard to assemble, and it ended up looking pretty rough.

Overall, full-scale project took about a week in terms of CAD work, printing, postprocessing, and assembly
The Chinese text says “QBZ Assault Rifle”
(It actually says “Bing Chilling”)

Additional notes:

• I wish i had some superglue on hand that doesn’t leave that white residue that spreads around. Epoxy exists, but is slow.
• The 3D model was good, but certainly not 100% accurate. I had to go through and adjust things to make them fit or even make sense. It’s clear the original creator of the files only had limited access to the parts, or limited measuring equipment.
• The walls on this thing are so thin, I am surprised China went forwards with these. A typical wall thickness for the plastic body is ~2.75mm. Yeah, polymers have come a long way but even with the internal reinforcements and a good polymer, I would worry about this breaking under heavy use if I was ever issued this. Chances are it’s just that my source model is incorrect.

Finished 5/23/23