40K Chaos Marine NERF Bolter - Part 1

So,

What's probably the most iconic weapon of the whole of the 40k franchise? The one that the Emperor's elite armed forces, the Space Marines, use to mete out His justice and ensure compliance across a million worlds?

That would be the Boltgun then.

I've often toyed with the idea of building one, and looking around t'internet it appears I'm not the only one.  A quick Google brings back loads of people who've built them as props out of MDF and resin and whatnot. All very nice, but standing there with a lump of wood going "Pew! Pew!" might be great for some people, but wouldn't it be nice if you could actually, well, shoot people with it?!

Enter NERF.  Now when I was a kid, if you wanted to shoot somebody, the options available were:-

• A catapult
• A Spud Gun (ask your parents)
• A crappy spring-loaded plastic gun that fires sucker darts about 2 feet
• Tin Can Alley (again, ask you parents)

In any case - none of these particularly lend themselves to building a bolter you can actually shoot somebody with.

So somewhere in the intervening 20 years or so, Nerf stepped up and made running around the garden shooting at each other a whole lot more fun.  I've been looking for a reason to get my hands on one of these for a few years, so the idea of combining my love of 40k with my childish desire to own one made making a Nerf Bolter sounded pretty awesome to me!

BUT - would it work?  And how would I go about doing it?

Well - for random reasons, I had four old sheets of aluminium kicking around in the workshop, waiting for just such a project.  I figured that if I could find the right gun, I could build an outer skin of plate aluminium to look like a bolter and mount it inside.  Sounds a bit tricky, so I decided to do a mock-up first to see if it was a goer.

SO - it all started with this picture:-

Of course - being a Nurgle player, I'm not about to do a loyalist bolter am I?!   I mean, come on!  "Death to the false emperor" and all that! ; )

Next step was to scale it up to "actual size".  I did a few calculations based on the usually assumed height of a marine being 2 metres tall.  Then I found an old bit of cardboard and sketched out the template below.

As soon as I picked up that template, felt the size of it in my hands, and yes, stood in front of a mirror going "Pew! Pew!"  I knew that this project was a definite goer!

Next, all I had to do was find a suitable donor Nerf gun....