Something a little bit different to the norm today! A free 3D printed life size bolt gun from creator AWPrintz over on Makerworld.

Regular readers are already familiar with Flippy the Bambulab A1 and possibly his newer brethren, Clippy (also an A1) and their work in the realm of wargame scenery and the odd model.

As it turns out, they have use outside of tiny buildings and tinier tanks – they’re also capable of producing significantly larger toys.

Despite the number of pieces this particular model came in, it still had a far lower piece count than a GW Saturnine Terminator.

I made a few mistakes along the way. Accidently printing a couple of pieces twice etc, using the wrong filament, a slight superglue accident – that sort of thing. Still, you live and you learn!

So what else could I do but print a few more pieces and end up with a second bolter? I mean, the printing part is basically set-and-forget and the assembly was on the level of a model kit for children (with clamps and superglue). How could I not?

One thing I should have photographed as well was these things all clamped up. There was a lot of clamping involved, using clamps. Especially since I had multiple sub-assemblied on the go at any given time. But it was a learing experience for sure. Much like my poor trigger discipline in these photos!

So much so that I actually have enough parts to assemble a third bolter from a combo of “mistakes” and then deciding the hell with it, I’ll just print the final few parts I need for another one. Which I will assemble at some point in the future, and then paint, rather than use the filament as my colours.

The overall plan is to leave this red one “as is”, add some weathering to the green one, and then completely paint and weather the third one. I’ll probably weather the green once I’ve built and painted the third one so I can do the weathering at the same time, since green still looks pretty solid as is.

I’m pretty happy with these. As someone who went through my teenage years as a Warhammer fan and have been interested even when not actively playing for decades now, I’m quite stoked for these to exist and to actually have them. Now to print some wall mounts and find somewhere suitable to hang these bad boys up!