Steampunk Nerf Gun

This project is pretty much my favorite of all the ones I've done lately. Though jewelry is fun, nothing, for me, can beat a good steampunk project.

Unlike most of my projects, this is not a project that can be completed in one sitting. You'll have to paint, let it fry, and repeat several times.

To start with, get a Nerf gun, or really any plastic toy gun of your choosing. I decided to use a Nerf Nitefinder gun, because I found it (and two other types of Nerf guns) in a junk pile at home.

To start with, sand every bit of the gun that you can find. Every smooth bit, every ridged and rough bit. This will be time consuming and seem pointless, but you'll appreciate it when it comes time to paint. And yes, this will take some time, but do it anyway. I sue a 60 grit piece for most of it, then went back with a 200 grit.

The biggest thing about this step: Make sure you don't kill the textures, if there are any cool ones on your gun. You can take advantage of those later.

For those hard-to-remove objects that you really want gone, use a dremel. These objects include raised or lowered plastic labels, like warnings for small children, plastic seams, and these NERF logos on each side of this gun. This particular gun also had a warning section at the base of the handle and on the yellow part above that orange stripe.

Using a Dremel with a sander attachment, I sanded off the parts that I wanted removed. This will take off paint, and it will also melt the plastic if your tool is spinning too fast, so be a little bit careful.

After dremeling, it should look like this. Notice the rough-looking patch on the yellow, where the warning label bit was.

And this is what it looks like after all of the sanding. Notice that you can't tell on most of it.

Next step is to paint it black. Most people disassemble the gun and use spray paint at this point, but I'm too lazy to take it apart. Notice that the pull at the back didn't take the paint very well, because I forgot to sand it, and also that I didn't paint the trigger (because too many layers of paint would just get scraped off).

I used black acrylic paint, but an actual 'plastic paint' would work/stick better, which is why spray paint is so popular.

This required a second coat to get everywhere, and you can see that after firing it once or twice, paint started to come off of the pull anyway. I left it like that, because it doesn't show in its uncocked state, and any more paint would just come off.

Now for the fun part. This is where it stops being mere painting, and starts getting creative and fun. The trick to this (and, I'm convinced, almost all real stempunking,) is a magical substance called Rub-n-Buff. It isn't exacctly paint, and it isn't exactly wax, but it's somewhere in between. It's sold in .5 oz tubes that are supposed to cover 20 sq ft each, for $5 a piece. A bit expensive, but any that you buy will last forever.

The three colors that I used for this project were Antique Gold, Gold Leaf, and Silver Leaf. For the parts you see done here, I used a rather heavy coat of Antique Gold, which has a bronze-y-ish tone to it. A thinner coat applied to the plunger really went for the antique texture I was going for, so I tried to replicate it on the nozzle.

As you can see, I'm not perfect at aiming with this stuff, as it's largely finger-applied (though I did use a brush for some of it), so I cleaned up the edges of the areas with some more black paint.

You can also see here that, though the trigger did end up getting a coat of paint, some of it decided to start coming off. Triggers do not like being painted.

I then added a thin layer of silver to the front areas. To get the black-showing-through effect, the best way I found was to put barely any on my finger tip, then rub it around quickly. The more quickly you move it, the faster it seemed to pread. Also, surfaces that were textured in the first place were easier than flat, smooth areas.

I used antique gold for the handle area, nad gold leaf for the sight and the area behind it.

At this point, the gun was painted and decorated, but not exactly steampunked.

I debated with myself over various combinations of gears, etc to cover the silver circle where NERF used to be, but thought in the end that that was overdone, and also I simply didn't have anything that I really liked.

So, I used a rather old piece of 1/4" copper tubing, bent the end, and realized that I wouldn't be able to get the end to do what I wanted without an elbow piece, which I din't have. So, I improvised using a piece of copper electrical wire.

I made a spring like so, about an inch and a half long.

Then, I shaped it to the shape that I wanted.

This was arguably the hardest part of the whole gun- attaching the decorating scope/barrel/thing to the top of the gun. Because I was using a spring, the force on the glue I used was huge, so I ended up using JBWeld, a sort of epoxy-like bonding agent that 'welds' things together.

As you can see, I blobbed the JB Weld in there, then smoothed it off a bit. As the picture above shows, the only way that the pipe would stay where I wanted it was if I held it up in the air while the back dried.

I then repeated the process for the front, squishing it this time instead.

 As you can see, not much of the JB Weld was on the top or sides of this one, mostly just underneath. This part I actually had to do 3 times, because I didn't mix enough hardener with the steel part. If you do use JB Weld, make sure to use the hardener, even if it seems you use more of that than the steel- you'll regret it is you don't.


And Ta-daa! there you have it, a steampunked Nerf gun, ready for a Cosplay, Halloween, LARP, or just to show off at your next Nerf battle showdown!

(As a side note: I also painted a few of my bullets black, then rub-n-buffed them, but the only one I  fired after doing this had the paint flake off. Though it looks cool, I would suggest not doing this if you actually plan on using the bullets)