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Steampunk theater prop pistol

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I have some friends who wrote and act in a play called "You've Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery" [link] , and it's headed to the New York Fringe Festival this fall. They needed a new pistol sidearm for the "Watsonesque" character. Steampunk, you say? Pistol, you say? Why certainly, I can put one together in 24 hours!

This is a Nerf Nite Finder that I bought to study to see what kinds of things you could do with it. I've always wanted to see what a faux gauge would look like there, and it turns out it's really easy to GIS gauge faces, clean one up in Photoshop, scale it down and print them in Illustrator and glue them in place. Why dick around with trying to get a real gauge there when you can print out something that looks this good?

Several things about the paintjob:
1. Aside from the base coat of Bulldog and Krylon satin black, the whole paintjob and decal printing/cutting/placement took about 90 minutes.

2. Yes, it looks pretty sloppy. I could have spent several more hours carefully masking off parts and taking my time with the paintjob, but that's the thing about theater props: They're seen from a distance and don't need to have a lot of intricate details. If anything, you want to keep your paint schemes to a minimal amount of different colors, and ones that will contrast each other. I really shouldn't have used brass for the barrel and gold for the body since they're pretty similar, I should have gone for an iron or darker silver, but whatevs, it's theater, not 1080p film.

3. I also really wanted to do more than take a dremel to a Nite Finder and glue on a decal. I was hoping to add a hammer, maybe some wires, and perhaps a longer barrel, but Tech Week is coming up fast and I have a deadline to meet.

4. Having these two halves in front of me REALLY makes me want a pair of these!
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