Home made lasguns

For Halloween this year me and my mate Rob (pic below) decided to go as men of Tanith. This meant building life sized replica lasguns.


We started with a bit of research and found very little in the way of home built lasgun tutorals. So we decided to design them from scratch. The first stage of the design was to go out into town a raid all the stores for suitable bits to use. Rob was especially good at this and credit is given to him for finding most of the key pieces.

We decided first to build the weapon from scratch rather than building on top of an existing toy gun. The reason we did this was because all the toy guns we found were made of cheap plastic and were also too small. It would have proved very difficult to make them look good. So from scratch it was.

The first important article came along in the form of a solid wood axe haft, which formed the base of the rifle and provided the wooden stock. This haft was perfect in size and length. What was needed then was to create the box shape around it with foamcore. A handle was also needed. This we took from a cheap paint roller we found in £land.


The barrel was the last piece to create and it was the largest worry for us because we could not find any tubes big enough for the scale. In the end I had a brain fart and asked the local stationers if they had any tubes as waste. They did and that was that! The inner barrel then came from an old curtain pole that my flat mate had lying about.

Finally we detailed the lasguns with bitz box bits and smoothed over any rough edges with milliput etc...

Heres is a list of materials used;

1x large axe haft
foam core
plastic tubing (inner till role tubes) to act as inner support for the foamcore
1x paint roller
1x cheap dog lead
1x mop handle (the tube on the top of the lasgun)
1x large thick card tube for the outer barrel
1x wooden curtain pole (inner tube)
.80 gauge plasticard
bitz box bits

Here is a picture showing what the gun looked like before detailing and painting.