My New Weapon: Blaster Carbine Rifle
I had been posting my progress of this in the "Blasters?" thread, but now I'm giving it it's own thread.
I've been wanting to have a new weapon for my RFT to use at informal events. Something like a rifle that would give me more firepower than a pistol, but short barreled to use in the confines of ship corridors, like a carbine rifle. So I decided to modify my Nerf CS-6 Recon blaster.
It started out life like this.
I never really liked the spindly stock, so I knew I'd be replacing that with something. I originally wanted to use parts of the stock and make something retractable, but it didn't work like I wanted it do and looked ugly.
Some of those pieces I was going to use are on the right side of the little table:
Anyway....the first thing I did was to open it up and remove all the Nerf dart firing guts. I already had a sound board that I'd ripped out of this toy blaster:
Then I ordered a red Luxeon 1 LED and the 5 degree lens and holder for it. When those parts came, I saw that I could put it inside the barrel coupler by adding a short piece of 3/4" thin walled PVC pipe (as a prop builder, I have various sizes and thicknesses of PVC pipe in the garage) to the inside of it and wrapping a couple layers of electrical tape around the lens holder.
I found out that a 3/4" piece of clear polycarbonate tube (left over from my old EL lightsaber blade making days) fit in place of the original inner barrel perfectly, so I sanded it on the outside to diffuse it so it would light up and shine out from the slots in the barrel.
I knew had to make a resonating chamber for the speaker (not the original one, because somehow I FUBARed that when I took the sound board out of the toy blaster pistol) because it wasn't very loud. I didn't care about the messed up speaker, because I had a TCSS premium speaker that I would be using.
I did some reading about resonance and made up a chamber 2" long and glued strips of styrene 1/2" from the bottom what would hold the speaker which I would later glue in with some RTV. I cut a slot in the side for the wires to come out, epoxied on the bottom and put a small piece of foam at the bottom of the chamber before the speaker went in.
I needed a DPDT switch to run both the LED and sound board, so I got that and I had already wired the speaker, the LED and the battery pack, so I was able to test everything before I soldered it all together.
I still had to make a mount for the switch and something to attach to the trigger that would press on the switch, so I built those 2 things out of styrene. I keep small sheets of that of varying thicknesses, too. Comes in handy for scratch building things.
But since my original stock idea wasn't working like I wanted, I reached a creative stumbling block that made me put it aside for more than a month.
My Fan Force was going to be in a Halloween parade. I knew we'd have Jedi and Sith with their lightsabers, and I really wanted a cool like up prop for the night time parade, since I was going in my RFT costume, so that got me re-motivated, but I still wasn't happy about even a static version of my first stock idea.
Then, last Monday, I was looking for something in the garage, and came across a crappy looking, cheap airsoft rifle that I'd had an idea to mod for a costume prop weapon. But when I got it it was so cheap, that I didn't want to use it. But I looked at the stock, and it was pretty cool looking, it was actually the nicest part of the gun, and it was removable.
I looked at the mount for it on the gun's receiver and thought it would be fairly easy to replicate it with some bits of sheet styrene, so I built the mount for it and it worked well. I also beefed up the inside of the end of the Nerf gun so it would be stronger where I was going to screw it all on.
Once I got that made and got it and the stock painted, I spent Friday mounting and wiring up the electronics. I had a few small problems, like the positive tab breaking off the first battery holder, but I worked them out and got the gun finished early that evening. The battery holder was one that I'd used for something else and had rather large gauge wires on it. I'm kind of glad it broke, because I did the next one better, epoxied the tabs down and made a strain relief.
Here's the guts. The battery pack it housed inside the cut down magazine. The speaker/resonating chamber is the black tube above that. The sound board is hot glued to the upper right and the red and white switch is below that.
The slide is locked back and I filled in the slots with more strips of styrene, because I wanted the sound to come out of the Access Door (used for clearing Nerf dart jams).
Here's how it turned out:
I didn't want to have to hold it all the time, so I made a 3 point rifle sling, I found the instructions for it online and got all the supplies from strapworks.
I like that it breaks down, because it will fit inside my small tub on either side of my RFT helmet.
Here it is in action:
No, I was not aiming right at the camera, the LED is VERY bright. I was actually aiming about the photographer's knees.
I had lots of fun "shooting" at the crowd along the parade route. I'm glad I was in front of the Jedi and Sith and their lightsabers. I got a good response from the crowd.
I was aiming so that the LED hit the ground 2 or 3 feet in front of the people, but it's so bright, you can still see the "muzzel flash". Even if I wasn't "aiming" at anyone, you can still see the slots in the barrel light up from the sides.
My crappy camera does not pick up good color saturation from colored LEDs.
I'm pretty happy with the way this turned out. I know a lot of the Mando Merc are using this gun, but they are just repainting it most of the time. So mine looks unique with the stock, and it has sound and an LED in it.
EDIT:
Here's a short video I did while I had my tripod out for something else.
Sorry there's no sound, but I don't have a video camera, this is the video setting on my digital camera.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks