This has been covered before, including the fact that it's not a found piece in any way. This thread might be helpful.

Harry

Dude, that is what I needed!!!!! Thanks!!!!!!!!!

I can tell right now from the pictures that it is a prism periscope. It has some sort of slight overlay on it. Parts were taken off of it and looks like some of the bandai parts were added and blended in.

Is the long square tube all metal coming from the eye piece extension?

You're welcome!


I'm not sure what that means, what's the overlay you mention?

If you look inside the eyecup you see the prism at a 45 degree relative rotation to a normal right angle viewfinder periscope. The core unit would have to have an overlay of metal or resin to cover up the original part. I was just not sure how they went about it.


No, it's made from resin. All of the arm and eye-cup on the end is made from plastic/resin. There's no metal in that piece apart from a long machine-screw holding the square arm on to the Megatron part near the 'knuckle'.

Harry

What is the prism/screen part made of? Glass or just a clever resin application?

Given that you are saying it is made of resin, I am thinking they did a prototype build and then did a resin casting off of it tweaked a few things and then made a master mould to have on hand.

The little screen is just made from plastic and painted on the inside. It could have been vacuum formed or taken from something like a camera maybe - the guy who made these, Terry Reed, used a lot of camera parts to dress the Motion Tracker props as we all know.


That's doubtful, Terry told me that they didn't have much time to build these pieces (he had a weekend to build the Motion Trackers for example), plus they look very hand-made if you study them closely. The only moulded parts would have been the square tube, the large eye-cup and the smaller dome section on the cup.

Harry

So in short I probably stumbled on a base part they built things out of, but everything was custom hand made.