If you’re making any costume that features a gun prop, Aby has an interesting tutorial on how to make the gun from Sintra. We highlighted an armor build with the lightweight but rigid PVC plastic sheets yesterday, and though you could use craft foam or styrofoam to build a weapon, Sintra looks like a good choice. Aby’s tutorial is for a straightforward gun (it’s Ebony from The Devil May Cry), but you could adapt the instructions to make anything close: a blaster from Star Wars, a different gun for Blade Runner, or weapons in Battlestar Galactica. Before you take your creation to a convention though, be sure to check their weapons policy. Some conventions don’t allow even fake sidearms.
The tutorial uses Sintra, polymer clay, expanding foam, filler, paint, and a few other necessities. It starts with patterns, and Aby laid down the outlines of the guns in Photoshop and printed them. She broke that down into parts and cut several layers from Sintra to build up the gun to the proper thickness. She says:
Step 3: Assemble & Glue
Now that the various parts are cut out and you have an aching wrist for the rest of your week, you group the pieces together and glue them together.
Now, you can cut off and sand protruding edges or edges that are supposed to be more blunt.
Step 4: Fill small gaps
Of course, there will be some small gaps left that still tell that the components were not molded from one piece. To counter that, we use filler and spackle it onto the sides.
After the filler is dried, you have to sand the whole thing again, to have it as smooth as possible!
Check out the rest of the tutorial at Aby’s website.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
