Building your own life-sized Bolter!

Fellow Servants of the Emperor!

You surely agree that the holy Bolter is the appropriate Tool to spread the word of the Emperor among the stars. 

I recently visited a styrodur (hard foam, XPS) crafting workshop held in Hamburg by Gerard Boom aka GeBoom from Shifting Lands, which allowed me to fulfill a long standing dream: building my own bolter!

Gerard is a fantastic person and a great tutor especially for working with hard foam, of which he does not only know all the tricks but is also freely sharing them! I can honestly recommend attending his workshops. You will be able to work on a project of your choice and get Gerard's advice on it! Also, check out his online shop where he is selling great tools (which I could all try at the workshop for free) and even a book for building tabletop terrain with hard foam. 

So I had two days to build a bolter. First I cut several parts with a hot wire cutter:

Things coming together:

The ammo clip still missing:

And the muzzle of course! No problem thanks to Gerard's circular cutting tool:

End of day 1: Everything glued together:

Day 2: Detailing:

A comparison to the original:

At the end of the workshop the build was done: 

If you look closely, you can see the evidence of my poor first attempts at cutting hard foam with the hot wire cutter, especially at the hand guard. 

But nothing that can not be fixed with some filler at home:

After carful sanding, the bolter was ready for paint:

Base paints done:

And now to the fun part: aging!

And, here the final result:

For the Emperor!

Thanks GeBoom!

Building your own Miniature Transport Case

Initial Thoughts and Motivation (skip to pics at bottom for construction guide ;-))

I don't know about you but I have never been really satisfied with the available storage and transport solutions for miniature, in particular the foam trays which I initially used: Too much hustle to pick up the individual miniatures from the foam and fuddle to put them back. In addition foam trays need a lot of space. 

Then there is another aspect to consider: I would like to display my miniatures at home in a glas cabinet. So I was looking for an overall solution which would allow me to transfer miniatures from my cabinet to a transport case, take them on a spin at my gaming club and put them back into the cabinet after with the least possible hustle. 

The solution is probably obvious to you: magnetise the miniatures and put them onto steel trays! 

There are some excellent solutions for this out there like the transport system from A-Case. Two downsides for me personally: the very high price, and the shape of the trays not optimal for my cabinet. 

So why not do it yourself?

Materials

I did not want to build outer case myself though but was rather looking for a suitable aluminium hard case. The best I found was this one:

The Theatro Case from Comair (for hair dressers):

It has the following dimensions:

Width: 42 cm

Height: 33 cm

Depth: 20 cm

Most important for me it were the side doors in the fron which would allow easy putting in and taking out of trays.

At the time, I bought it (in 2021) I could get it for 65 € (in Germany). I am afraid that it is not that easily available so you might have to look for something similar that is available in your place and adopt the dimensions of the other materials below.

Further stuff:

- the steel trays! Ordered and pre-cut online to 40.5 cm x 18 cm. Important: Use raw steel not stainless steel! Stainless steel is much less magnetizable, i.e., the magnets do not hold as good!

For the construction of the tray hold on the inside, I used ply wood plates and some pine wood stripes, and that's basically it.

The tools used:

Step-by-Step

The finished case

Let me know if you have any questions!