I play an inventor in the Dublin Steampunk LARP Society. The game is set in Dublin in the year 1862. One of the characters there ask me, in game, to build them a dueling pistol, as they'd called out a member of the society. Then the player ask me to actually build the pistol as they could carry it around. I of course say yes. I was given free rein on the design of the pistol. So I decided to make it a three barreled revolver, which the player was happy with.
I returned to my old friend, balsa-wood as I did not have the time to build the prop out of anything else. The handle and body were carved separately as I could find a bit enough piece. I started with the handle. I modeled the basic shape of the gun off the Hellgun Dueling Pistol from the Rouge Trader book. It's where the finger grips design came from. This part was not to much work, just a large amount of dremeling to get the grips to stand out.
The barrels of the gun were cut from 0.5inch plastic piping I got from my local modeling shop. Then super glued together. The chambers for the bullets were cut to an inch in length, glued into the same shape as the barrels and then glued onto a 0.2inch pipe. This would act as the pivot point for when the chambers needed to turn.
Another 3inch length of balsa-wood was cut and shaped to fit the under side of the gun so the barrels would feel part of the gun.
This was then attached to the main body of the gun. The carving of this was pretty effortless, with the only really problem coming from the trigger guard, as I didn't want to snap it off. The central part, where the chamber fits, had to be carefully cut away and sanded down so that the spin was unaffected.
This just took a lot of trial and (little) error. The barrel wasn't glued into place yet as I stilled need to paint the whole thing but this was just to check that the chamber was free to spin around. I also took a light grain sandpaper to the barrels, seeing as now they where meant to be brass I did not want them perfectly smooth. A small amount of Polyfilla was put on the nozzle in the pic to seal it over.
For a little bit of extra detail for the handle, I cut out a skull from card and glued it on. This was another design choice lifted from the Hellgun.
Then the handle was then glued in place, with a small amount of Polyfilla used to cover up the seam. As I wanted the whole gun to look like it was carved from one piece of wood. The trigger was just three strips of card cut and glued into shape and position.
I used a dark woodsheen to varnish the body of the gun and brass paint for all of the other details. Something I normal worry about (ie: painting taking Days to finished) went but within a few hours. as the body barely need a second coat of paint and the brass paint drying quite quickly.
As I was working on a second Steampunk project at the same time as this I had some spare cogwheels lying around, so I added them. As something is not properly Steampunk until it has some cogs in it. In this case I placed the cogs to give them an "in game" reason for being there. One of them was set to be the firing mechanism and the two at the side for turned the bullet chamber. I added a coat of gold paint onto the skull on the handle as well as two of the cogwheels to give a bit more variety.
There was also this pipe added to the side because of "Steampunk" reasons. Either way everyone who saw it at the Steampunk LARP game though it was a damn fine pistol. So I was happy with that and the player was happy with the gun. So Win/Win.
I'm hoping that this will lead to more people asking for me to build them Steampunk props for the LARP game. What I did learn from this build is that cogwheels are murder to cut out and will take up your whole day.
-Matty
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