40K Chaos Marine NERF Bolter - Part 2

Okay so in the last post I found out that making a 40k Bolter out of aluminium sheet and mounting a Nerf gun inside, to give us a fully shooty Bolter would probably work.  All I then had to do was to find a suitable gun that would meet the following requirements:-

• It had to be battery powered - you don't have to pump a Bolter!
• It had to be able to fit inside the casing made to the dimensions of a full-size Bolter
• Preferably it would be able to fire on full-auto, and carry a lot of ammo (more that 6 shots!)

After a fair amount of trawling, I came upon the Nerf N-Strike Stampede ECS.

A pretty awesome piece of kit.  It certainly met the first and last requirements - it takes 6 x D sized batteries, and has a clip for 18 darts.  In fact it comes with 3 x 18 clips and 1 x 6 clip.   The only unknown was whether it would fit inside the dimensions allowed for the Bolter.  I did a few image searches and hit Youtube a few times, and from what I could gather it would be fine.  Only one way to know for sure though, so I took a deep breath and reached for my wallet.  Actually it was only about 30 quid from Amazon, but when you know you're essentially buying something to chop  into little pieces it's always a bit nerve-wracking!

So, a few days later the new toy arrives on the doorstep, and up to the workshop we go.  The plan was to make two side panels out of ally to look like this:-

And then plop the gun in the middle, join the two sides together with another strip of ally, hey presto, add the grip and the pretty bits and away you go.  The top section with the spikes, arrows, clip exhaust etc. I'd make as a removable outer casing that fits over the top.  That way I can hide and inside gubbins, and if there's a problem at some point I'd have some kind of access to see if I could fix it.

BUT as you can see there are a few issues with this!

I could re-route the battery location without too much trouble - there would be space in the front hand-grip for them, so it's a simple rewiring issue.  Nothing I could do about the firing pin though, so in the end I had to extend the gun behind the trigger grip to allow for it.  I was a bit gutted about it, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't be that obvious in the final version if I also extended to top outer casing... 

For those of you interested in this kind of stuff, the inside of the Stampede looks like this:-

I've lifted this image from the guys at modworks.blogspot.com, who do some truly awesome things to tinker with Nerf guns.  This article tells you all you need to know about the insides of the Stampede, and believe me I wish I'd read it before taking the thing apart myself!  =) 

So the final plan looks like this:-

In the next exciting episode we'll start chopping up bits of metal and working out how to fit them back together in new and interesting ways.