Customized Steampunk Nerf Guns - Part 9

Picking up where I left off in Part 8, I had been forced to start adding the dreaded orange markings to the prop weaponry I was creating if I wanted to continue to sell them on eBay (unless I wanted to risk getting my account suspended). Of course that didn't mean that I had to use large markings or make them entirely obvious.

After finishing the "Lunar Disruptor", I began work on my first Nerf ball shooter. I had never customized one and had actually been avoiding the idea for awhile, but since I had managed to acquire a few from my many scavenging trips at the local junk store, it was bound to happen sooner or later. The base was a Nerf Atom Blaster that was colored in the usual hideous Nerf coloring. Once I got rid of the printed text and gave the gun a base coat of flat black, I could see that there was something usable in the design. Unfortunately, I also had to contend with a few unwanted orange peel spots. To avoid having to go through all the rigors of stripping the paint off and starting fresh, I simply minimized the worst of it and decided to give it a more rusted and corroded appearance. A few layers of dark copper, copper leaf, verdigris, brass, gold, rust, and steel paint later, I had what would be renamed the "P.F.W. Aether Cannon".


After finishing it, I decided to work on a few others before I put it up for sale. So I turned my sights on a Nerf Firefly Rev-8 that I had managed to pick up. Before doing any customization, I had to remove the dreaded air restrictors from the barrel assembly. I have to admit that of all the Nerf guns I had worked on to date, the Firefly has the most complex internal mechanism I had dealt with to date and the barrel assembly was a pain in the nether regions to disassemble. I also had one other issue. I was running out of model paint and hadn't gotten my latest order of acrylics from the Great Models Store yet. So I picked up a few more cans of metallic spray paint and used it to add coverage to some of the parts to try to save the model paint. A few hours of tedious fine detail painting in little crevices later and a fair amount of copper leaf, gold, verdigris, and black, I had finished the "Zeppelin Commander".


I went ahead and listed the "P.F.W. Aether Cannon" and the "Zeppelin Commander" on eBay while I got to work on modifying a Nerf BuzzSaw I picked up a few months before and hadn't gotten around to doing anything with. I had seen a guy online add an remote control car electric motor to the side of one of these to save the user from having to charge it up by hand, so I set about trying to find an old RC car at the local junk store while I waited for the base coat of spray paint to dry. On the plus side, I managed to find a few RC cars on my junking expedition. On the down side, I found out that a few of them were actually worth a little bit of money and ripping them apart might not be a good idea. So I decided to go ahead and sell all but one of them and scavenge the parts I would need from it. After quite a few failed attempts to determine the best mounting position, I looked over at my pile of Nerf guns awaiting customization and decided to hold off on the electric motor thing until later. I finally got my order in from Great Models, so I laid down some copper, brass, gold, black, and verdigris over the gun and considered the "Wix Aether Turbine" completed. It joined the other two guns on eBay and aside from a it taking a little longer than normal to sell the "P.F.W. Aether Cannon", they all sold for a respectable amount.


As I was finishing up the three guns, I realized that I had just reached a milestone on the customization journey. To date I had successfully modified, customized, and sold thirty toy guns to buyers from the West Coast to the East Coast of the US, a few in England, and one in France.

Customized Steampunk Nerf Guns - Part 9