Making a convincing steampunk raygun starts with simple materials that you can change up to give the weapon a unique look. Instructables user sweetrocketsky has a tutorial showing how a plastic toy gun from the Dollar Tree can be transformed into the raygun pictured above. Other supplies include tubing, spray paint, and a bulb socket and a switch. Here’s how she prepped the $1 gun:
Paint the gun with a base coat. I used flat black with splashes of metallic and stone texture to give it a gritty, urban look. If you like a more retro, sci-fi look, keep your colors neat and the edges clean.
Good colors to use for retro are black, red, and yellow. Good colors for the industrial, gritty look are black, gold, copper, silver and stone texture. For the urban look, there is no need to be neat, over-spray from one color to another is good.
The light-up feature was crafted from the bulb socket with a switch previously mentioned. You can buy one or take apart an old lamp and salvage it. She attached the bulb socket to a clamp:
Attach a clamp on top of the gun to hold the bulb socket. I got some clamp-thing at the Scrap Exchange. I have no idea what its original use was. It was .50 cents. I left it in the rain to get rusty. I attached it with electrical tape and then painted the tape.
She used a low wattage ceiling fan light bulb in the socket.
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