Fortune's Railgun: Part 1

Those of you who know me know how I love big props, so when a client asked me to take on a several foot long railgun... I was all ready for it! First, one of my friends, upon hearing that I would be doing this from Metal Gear Solid 2, was awesome enough to loan me a PS2 CD that has all the character sketches and 3D models on it. How I needed this, as the reference pictures I could find were generally terrible! So sitting for several hours in front of my TV, I built this full sized paper replica of the gun.

It is 5 feet long, 22 inches tall, and 2 inches wide. I decided that it would be built out of foam insulation for lightness topped with resin for strength (and several dozen layers of gesso between them!)

Here was the gun mostly cut out of foam. The scope is not going to be out of foam - it will be metal and PVC pipe, but it is currently remaining there so I can sketch things out to proportions. Speaking of proportions, the proportions of the gun are slightly off. The actual gun is easily six feet long, but for the size of my client it had to be reduced in places to make it work. I believe it will be next to unnoticeable in the final product.

Now one thing you might notice are the red lines on the paper gun. Originally I thought I was going to include a wooden skeleton for stability on the inside of the foam, but realized that this solution would not work and instead resin would be used to strength the gun.

Here is the gun completely cut out. A drill and my jigsaw finished what the bandsaw was unable to.

Here the gun has been sketched onto the foam. The wiggly lines indicate where the gun needs to be carved into while the clean areas are the most up-raised parts. I am really excited about this project. Next up is carving all of those details into the gun.