Fallout 3 Railway Rifle

I've got a confession to make. The only reason I made this one was because I wanted to make use of a little pressure-gauge thing I had lying around in the garage.

For those of you unfamiliar with this particular video game gun, check out this link. It more or less gives you everything you need to know.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Railway_rifle

 As you can tell from the pictures, I'd started out trying to make it from a small handgun and a plastic bucket.  It could have worked except the bucket was flimsier than I thought it was, and wasn't going to hold up to the stress the gun's own weight would put it under.  If nothing else, I needed to bolt the nerf gun to the gun stock, and I couldn't make that happen no matter how hard I tried.

So, I went back to the game, and thought "It's built with a pressure cooker in the game, so why don't I be more authentic to the original idea?" And so, I hurried to Goodwill to mutilate a pressure cooker.

I don't remember why I had to switch nerf guns. I think the pressure cooker would have made it impossible to cock the Nerf gun with the way I had it sat up.  But yeah, this is a Nerf Dart Tag Fury Fire wedged into a 4 inch PVC pipe. Because I had no idea how long the barrel was supposed to be on the game gun, I cut it to be almost four feet long in this picture.  It ended up getting cut down eventually, but this creation is my heaviest yet.

 Cutting into the pressure cooker devoured drill bits and reinforced cut-off wheels, but eventually I got a hole big enough for the Nerf gun to fit through.

I toyed with the idea of leaving it unpainted, since the game is set in a post-apocalyptic world, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought I needed to make it look rusted and beat up.

This is its current paintjob, but I don't like it. I'm probably going to get a bottle or can of some chemical that makes metal rust and blotch it all over the pressure cooker. I also want to repaint the barrel with a generic metallic spray paint and then sprinkle actual rust powder over the wet paint.

Unfortunately, I could not get this Nerf gun to fire seamlessly.  It was too hard to move the trigger; I don't have the tools necessary to machine a better trigger to integrate into the pressure cooker lid, so I'm stuck with the Erector Set contraption I had to create. The gun itself can be fired (but good luck aiming it at your dog or roommate because it's so front heavy!), it's just that the trigger is really hard to reset.