Scratch Built Leia Blaster ANH

[timothyoevil1]

Hi all. I thought I'd show off my first scratch built blaster...Princess Leia's blaster from ANH. I made this for my rebel sister and next in line are 2x E-11 blasters and 1x DH-17blaster.
First I found a really cheap toy that had a handle that closely resembled the high end replica on the market. You can't beat $3.

Then came the fun part of pulling it apart and 'gutting' it for it's new life ahead. You can see that I started on rebuilding the barrel housing of the blaster and glued in lead sinkers for a more weighty feel.

Next came the ugly but effective way of attaching the new barrel, in this case an old curtain rod.

I am racing through this build as I don't want to stretch it out too far. Next I did up the rear sights from styrene plastic which worked really well with the plastic of the toy. Please excuse the poor images.

Then I jumped to the forward sights but this was difficult to attach due to the mystery plastic around the curtain rod. You gotta love that plastic putty! The forward coil is just from a handset off a walkie talkie.

The next challenge was the muzzle. I tried all sorts of options and finally found out that a bloke i know was once a marine engineer and has a full metal work shop...YES! So I drew up designs in Sketchup and he turned it up for me from aluminium.

And then we have the final assembly...

Undercoat...

Finished!

Thanks for reading.

 

[Country Paul]

Great looking blaster, well done

I was thinking of trying one of these myself, not sure it'll come out this well though

 

[Lichtbringer]

That´s a really cool scratchbuild. :cool

 

[thd9791]

:love

AHH! this just made my day, great build!

could you go into more detail on how you cut something to fit around something else that you couldn't measure? Like the parts you fit on the back near the "hammer", would you cut like..a profile out of paper or something?

Odd question I know, I'm doing a similar crap/scratch build and hit a snag

great work, very inspiring!

 

[sdmicp]

That is awesome. My daughter absolutely loves Princess Leia from ANH and one like this would go great along side my blaster collection! Very nice indeed! Looks like a difficult build though.

 

[rebelyell]

Wow. That looks great. Always liked this gun better than her Return of the Jedi one.

 

[Coop]

Your project turned out great. It inspired me to do my own Defender based blaster on the cheap. Found the pistol at Big Lots! for $5.00 and the rest was laying around the garage - wood dowels, wire and some plastic bits. Wasn't really concerned with accuracy, just going for the basic shape.

 

[Badsprout]

Really nice blasters, folks. I love builds like this, it's amazing what you can do with a cheap toy and a few bits and pieces. Keep it up.

Badsprout

 

[Broilermaker]

Very nice

 

[Nomad Angie]

I'm looking forward to build myself one of these. I can't afford to buy a pre-made one and most builders use real weapons for their guns. Still out of my price range.