M3 Predator pistol Day 1

I love Mass Effect. Bioware really did a spectacular job on this game. Although it does have its flaws and the learning curve is astronomically steep, I looked past all its problems to the beautiful, lush game play and narrative at its core.
But I digress...
The M3 Predator is the pistol that Commander Shepard and many other characters use throughout the game. The design looked simple enough so I decided to have a crack at it whilst studying for my high school finals to keep me sane.

Day 1
I started by drawing up a quick and dirty set of blueprints. If you'r interested in crafting an M3, I suggest you look for blueprints of superior quality elsewhere but if your desperate here are mine.

First step was to print out the blueprint to scale cut it out. A really cheap way of scaling a pistol is to assume that the pistol grip is 11cm long and scale the rest of the gun accordingly.

I then traced the blueprint onto 15mm MDF and cut it out with a jigsaw. MDF can be bought at any hardware store. A better option is to ask the owner if they have any MDF off cuts that you can have. all my MDF so far has been 100% free. At this stage i wasn't particularly fussy with being very precise with cutting and lines because I planned to clean up all the rough edges further down the line

Realising that I was not happy  with the thickness, I traced and cut out another two pistol body's from 5mm MDF.

I then glued the 15mm piece to the thinner 5mm piece. I decided to glue them one at a time so that I could experiment with the thickness's to figure out what felt right.

I was losing light fast so I decided to call it a day.
Total build time so far: approx 1hr
Total expenditure: $0

stay tuned for part two coming in the next couple of days.