Borderlands Sniper Rifle prop weapon build

Hi guys, I thought some of you might like to make your own Borderlands sniper rifle cosplay prop build, so I’m doing a little write-up in case it helps anyone. Right to start with and to save you some effort you will need a base pistol. This will save you sawing or modelling the trigger, grip and main body. I just grabbed a cool toy shotgun and sawed the barrels off because they weren’t long enough for this particular gun. You will also need plenty of bits of dowel and some wood.. here’s a full rundown of what I did, you can tweak this as you see fit…

Borderlands sniper rifle prop build
The barrel section
As you can see the main barrel on this build is pvc pipe, just find something that will cover the pistol holes and is long enough. All the other front barrel sections are dowel of different sizes and an old / empty deodorant can, for specificity it was an impulse can, the reason I’m telling you that is because the lid on this can worked great and looks kind of post apocalyptic when you’re looking down the barrel and it also happens to have that nice scoop from the side. I used ‘Death to Skags’ and the Borderland decal on the front to make it pop a little and also to leave no doubt this is a gun from the Borderlands videogame.

Borderlands sniper rifle prop build
The rear stock section
More dowel and mdf here. Remember when you’re cutting sanding mdf to wear a filter mask. I only had one image as a guide here, so cut the buttstock pieces to look similar and glued the struts that attach to the rear of the pistol. I dressed these up a bit with my magical hair-rollers, cut pvc clipped and glued over them at the other end, swiftly followed by nylon string wrapped over both struts. The rear part of the stock also has the small additional part attached below it, this is an irrigation pipe from the gardening section of the hardware store, but you can use anything you have that’s similar.

Borderlands sniper rifle prop build
The rest
The sight is off another gun, I imagine you could easily make something similar with different sized dowels, but if you have something handy that looks like what you need, save yourself the effort / time as this build will be time consuming enough.

Paintjob
As this prop build was based on the one picture you see below (inset top left), I went with the yellow and orange color scheme… how very Nerf. Obviously keeping with the metal look trigger area and the multi-tone brown grip. There’s also some subtle gold and brass edging highlights all over the blaster. To finish off I did some rag work to dirty it up a little with some brown and black paint. Job done!

I hope that’s been of some help to those of you who want to build your own Borderlands sniper rifle prop weapon for cosplay, or just to sit in your games room.

Till next time fellow videogame / blaster fans.. over and out!

This post was written for GirlyGamer.com.au that’s the blog of Ms. Nerfenstein. Join her.. err.. me over on Facebook, for more updates and blaster / prop fun!

Good luck with your builds!