DIY Portal 2 Lemon Grenade

You know what they say: when life hands you lemons...

 

...make lemon grenades!!

To those completely lost right now: yes, it's another Portal thing. Click here for the game tirade that (kind of) explains it.

This is one of my longest delayed tutorials, since I actually made my first grenade nearly three months ago, just after Halloween. The hold-up was finding the proper display, which I had to order, and then re-order, and then get a plaque for, and then re-order another plaque, and now FINALLY I get to share it with you guys!

Now, you might be tempted to think I just stuck a plastic grenade top on a fake lemon - and you would be *almost* correct. In fact, my lemon has a fun special feature. Observe:

This mod is actually quite simple, and shouldn't cost you more than $10 in materials. (Not including the display case.) Keep reading to see how!

First, you're going to need a toy grenade. I found mine at the Spirit Halloween store last Halloween for $2.99:

Since Halloween is long over, try looking online or at local costume shops. You want the kind that has a soundboard with the fun "tick-tick-tick-BOOM" feature.

Your other key ingredient is the fake lemon. Wal-Mart has the best fake lemons I've ever seen; they're weighted in the middle and textured so realistically I half expected juice to squirt out when I started cutting.

I believe these cost $1.99 each.

Disassemble the grenade by removing all the tiny screws (but don't lose them!), and slide out the switch mechanism and small speaker:

You're going to be tucking the battery compartment inside your lemon, so you want to get it as small as possible. For mine, that meant snipping off the plastic side pieces, giving me this tiny battery box:

Using a slim utility blade, start cutting a square hole into the top of your lemon, pausing every now and then to check the fit:

The inside of the lemon is made of Styrofoam, so after you slice through the thick skin you might want to switch to needle-nosed pliers to pull the crumbly foam pieces out, as opposed to trying to slice them your blade.

Keep checking the fit for your battery box; you want it to slide in perfectly, like so:

There's a concrete weight in the center of these lemons, so your blade might hit it as you're cutting down. Fortunately I found there was still enough room for the battery box to fit, though.

Ok, now on to the grenade top:

Snip off the top of the grenade with pliers. I did one side at a time, and found the plastic was easily bent and snipped. Try to keep those prong bits all the same length, if you can. Use a metal file to smooth out the sharp corners and any jagged edges.

My grenade was Army Green, so next I taped off the gunmetal sections and spray-painted the rest matte black, including the grenade handle:

After painting:

(This is before I removed the painter's tape; the inside areas on the head are still gunmetal gray.)

Now comes the tricky part: putting it all together.

Insert the battery box inside your lemon, and then use a sliver of tape to secure the excess wires to the underside of the grenade speaker. This speaker is going to sit on top of the lemon, directly over your battery box, and it will be held in place by the grenade topper.

So what holds the plastic grenade topper in place? Pins, like these:

You'll need to drill tiny holes in the "prongs" of your grenade head for the pins to fit through. Enter your trusty Dremel:

Here John's drilling the first hole, but I later took over and can assure you: it's not hard. The plastic is easy to punch through, so the only tricky part is making sure you angle your drill bit so the pins will be guided down into the lemon at a roughly 45 degree angle.

To show you how this is all going to fit together, here I'm holding one half of the grenade topper in place, with the speaker and wires tucked underneath:

Put your grenade topper together before attaching it to your lemon, though; this picture is only to give you an idea of the fit. You'll also need to re-insert the switch back inside the handle - don't forget, or your lemon grenade won't go boom!

I don't have a process pic for this next step, because it took too many hands for me to spare one for a photo, but it's just a matter of holding the grenade topper in place, wires and speaker nicely tucked underneath, and inserting the pins through the topper's prongs into the lemon. (Get a second person to help you.) Because the pins will all be inserted at an angle, there's no way the top can be pulled off without removing them. Trust me, I carry my grenade around by the head all the time; it's very secure.

Oh, and my pins were a little too long -  they kept hitting the concrete center of the lemon - so I had John snip off the ends a bit. You may need to do the same.

Once you've got the grenade top secured to the lemon, it's time to DECORATE. (Woot!)

I printed the Aperture logo on plain paper, and then used a craft knife to cut it out for a stencil.

Using a stencil on a bumpy rounded lemon isn't the easiest thing to do, but it WAS easier than I expected. I used an adhesive putty to stick the paper down on 2 sides, and then held each panel down with my fingers as a pounced acrylic paint on with a stiff brush.

As with all stencils, be sure to only pounce straight up and down, and watch your fingers: they'll get paint on them, so you don't want that getting smeared on the lemon.

Tada! I also found and printed the little yellow Flammable symbol, which I laminated with packing tape and then glued in place on the top.

I wasn't happy with the plastic pin that came with the toy grenade, so I replaced it with a stainless steel cotter pin (find them at the hardware store for cheap) and a keychain ring. That's completely optional, though.

The display is made to hold a softball (I found it on ebay for just under $20 with shipping), and I got the idea from this lemon grenade, which has a soundboard installed in the display base instead of the lemon. That one has the grenade displayed horizontally, though, which I just couldn't get to look right for mine. There's a hole in the base, so to fit the plexiglass top on you have to twist the grenade at a slight angle. After weeks of fooling around with trying to modify the base I had a EUREKA moment and realized I could just display the lemon vertically. Problem solved!

I thought an official sounding plaque would be a fun touch, so we ordered this one from our local trophy shop for about $8. The patent number actually DOES have significance: it's an obscure number found in Portal 2 - and if you already knew that, you get about 267 million geek points. (Can't stand the mystery? Then look for it here in the game's ending credits.)

So that's my lemon grenade!

I hope you guys enjoyed the tutorial, because now here's the best part: I made two lemon grenades, just so I could give one away here on the blog!

The give-away has ended, and the winner is Elizabeth of The Elizabeth Archive! Congrats, Elizabeth, and please e-mail me your mailing address!

Some caveats: you don't get your own display case (those things are expensive!), and the grenade I'm giving away does have an imperfection, which you can see in this photo: see the slight gap between the topper and the lemon? The battery compartment and speaker were either a little higher, or the lemon is a little bumpier on top, but for whatever reason I just couldn't quite get those prongs to sit flush. You can only see the gap from this angle, though; overhead and from the side looks fine.

The only other difference is that the give-away grenade doesn't have the Flammable stickers, since I wasn't sure you guys would want them. Other than that it's identical, and would look suitably impressive on any gamer's bookcase or fruit bowl. :D

As always, I'll ship anywhere, so just leave a comment to enter the give-away. I do ask that you only enter for yourself, though - none of this "I have a friend who would love this!" stuff. I'm not trying to be a Scrooge; I just really want this to go to one of you readers. It feels more like a gift to a friend that way, you know?


Ok, I think that's everything! I'll choose a winner at random sometime next week, so be watching for that announcement here and on the Epbot Facebook page.

Happy commenting, everyone!