Forum Thread: How Did You Start?

The perennial "first Steampunk project" is painting a Nerf Maverick. Practically everyone in Steampunk has done this at one time or another, and I may post a tutorial for how to do it before too long. In the meantime, Google will certainly turn up many other tutorials for how to do it. If you find a particularly good one, please share it with us here. =)

I'm going to try this and have ordered a Maverick online, just waiting for it to arrive so I can paint it. After looking for a good tutorial I didn't see anything that made one stand out. The other day I found a broken bike tire pump with a pressure gauge. I wondered if it would be possible to attatch the dial to the side of the gun and attatch some kind of plunger to the trigger and into the end of the pipe leading to the gauge, meaning when the trigger is pushed the air pressure in the tube increases, making the arrow on the dial move. I know I would need to lower the resistance of the gauge to make the trigger usable but other than that can you think of any problems? This is the kind of thing I want to do:

I'm sure you can see I'm not an artist. Do you think this would work?

Hmm, that looks like a pretty difficult mod, though it would certainly be awesome if you got it to work.

The two problems that I foresee are essentially the same problem, which is physically attaching the gauge and the wire in a manner that won't interfere with the functionality of the gun. Unless you don't care about the gun being able to function, in which case this is less of an issue.

Still, there will be a fair amount of pressure put on the wire when you pull the trigger, and due to the curvature of the gun, that pressure won't be strictly lateral. As such, it'll be difficult to attach the wire such that it A) properly increases the air pressure inside the wire and B) doesn't crush or compress the wire, preventing it from functioning.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with, though! This sounds like an awesome project!