Finished prop: Zaku Heat Hawk on the cheap

Materials: Cardboard
                 Cardboard inner tubes
                 Masking tape
                 PVA glue
                 Hot glue
                 Plastidip Aerosol Spray

                 Green & Silver Spray paint
                 Permanent Marker

Time taken: One Week

So due to a chronically unreliable printer, the beam spray gun project was canned as I couldn't print off the E-cap (although I did have a brief foray into Blender to make the part, which may come in useful in future). Because of this, I was left a bit high and dry for things to do. Thankfully, some cardboard inner tubes were left hanging around and I figured since I'd scrapped one Gundam project I may as well move on to another. Since I'd been using up a lot of foam in the past two efforts I wanted to have a shot at doing something on the cheap, this Heat Hawk is the result.

The process: 

So, first up I took the cardboard tubes and cut them up, to create the angled part in the axe I cut the connecting section at a 45 degree angle. It was a surprisingly weird line to draw, so I had to first roll a tube out of paper and cut it to the right shape, then lay it over the tube and cut it to match.

The next stage was pretty simple, just glue the whole thing together, making sure the parts all lined up.

Throughout this process I was measuring everything to make sure every part was in proportion to some concept art I'd found online. After sticking the tubing together I drew the main blade of the axe out on some cardboard. and then cut it out and used it as a template to cut out another blade.

Once I'd cut out the blades, I stuck them together, then using PVA I pinched the edges together in order to create and actual 'blade'.

In order to cover up the corrogated edges of the cardboard, as well as the rough edges of the 'blade'. I'd seen this technique used in a tutorial on cardboard weapons and the writer swore by it. However I found that masking tape tends to peel away extremely easily ( which, when you think about it, is a good property for masking tape ). I used the tutorial writer's technique of sticking it down with PVA, but the glue didn't penatrate the tape well at all (again, a good property for masking tape). After a lot of PVA the tape did stick, but it took an awful lot.

Next up, I cut these two pieces of cardboard and stuck them to the top of the handle. These pieces would hold the blade away from the main tube.

Added a bit of hot glue and let it set.

After that, I cut out two more pieces of cardboard to fit along the tube and around the rear edges of the blades in order to cover up the empty space.

After sticking masking tape along the joined edges I used a little bit of left over foam ( I know, I didn't list it. It could have just have easily been cardboard, but for the sake of comfort I went for foam).

Next up, is the piping, it starts off with a hexagonal part at the top of the main tube, simple enough.

To make the tubing I cut a question mark shape out of a flat piece of cardboard and then wrapped lengths of cardboard into circles around it, spacing them relatively equally. They were stuck in place with got glue with masking tape along the seams.

Using thinner card (think cereal box thickness) I cut out circles with a slit missing to act as the tops and bottoms for the cylinders along the rear piping. All the seams were covered up with masking tape. I attached this to a piece of cardboard that was simply glued to the top of the main handle. I made the spike at the bottom of the handle with a tube of cardboard and a cone made from thin card.

I proceeded to cover the whole thing with plastidip to seal it against moisture. Annoyingly, somewhere along the way the top part of the axe became too heavy for the joint and the top came away from the bottom. The white you can see in this picture is from some hasty hotglueing.

To get around this, I made this support brace to hold everything together. I hotglued it to the main tubing and covered it with more plastidip.

Here's the whole thing at this point. As you can see, this axe is huge, so whilst it was entirely in proportion with itself, it's much larger in relation to me than a heat hawk should be to a Zaku II.

The final step was painting the whole thing green. I followed the green paint up by masking off an area with masking tape and painting it grey. Once both sides had been done, I added detail on with permanent marker. This also served to cover up the misty transition between the grey and green.

So there we have it! The finish wasn't so great, but to the undiscerning eye, this thing actually looks halfway alright.

SO, what did we learn?

1. Masking tape isn't great for covering edges. As I've pointed out, it peels away very easily and is very, very good at letting moisture through, all the properties you'd want ffrom it. Of course, this makes it terrible for the purpose I put it to in this project. Maybe the tutorial writer used sub par tape? We'll never know.
2. I should have used foam for the tubes on the piping, corrugated cardboard doesn't roll into a perfect curve edged.
3. The spray paint I use has a very glossy finish, which doesn't lend to the dull metallic kind of finish the axe is supposed to have. As you can see from the pictures, it's very reflective. I'm considering a clear matte finish spray, but the tins that it comes in are quite small, so it'd be pretty costly.
4. If I'm making a prop, make sure it's in proportion to me as well as itself. I did this with the beam gun, so perhaps next time drawing the whole thing up ahead of time.

So I'm pretty happy with it, it's surprisingly solid, the bladed edge is pretty painful if someone whacks you with it and it makes a very smooth swoosh when you swing it around. Considering this whole thing cost me nothing at all as I already had everything, I can't complain.