Weekend project: Engineering a Minigun

Decided now's a good time to get working on making a 1:6 scale TF2 minigun for the heavy weapons guy. Luckily, it's largely revolved objects. The minigun is composed of six barrels, mounted on some sort of flashlight looking object that is mounted on a giant drum. No idea how this thing is supposed to operate if it was real, but who cares! It's a nice and pretty model to make.
Here's a shot of the near completed main barrel for Sasha, the minigun. It's propped up on top of what I presume is the ammo drum. The two smaller rolls are for some inexplicable components that I'll have to sort out soon. The background sketches are the only two images I'm using so far to draft up parts. The rest are from screenshots. Right now, it's looking a bit small. Let's put something in frame to show the scale of the gun.


Here's a 28cm tall Engineer, with a ruler to illustrate how massive this thing is. Just the spinning barrel assembly is 30 cm long (yes, I allowed for rotation). I would have bothered showing construction progress of the barrel, but it's just rolling up tubes. Tedious work, and not too exciting blog fodder. I'll show some of the components broken down next.

The flashlight shaped object is the barrel spinning mechanism housing. The inconspicuously placed cylinder below the large ammo drum thing is the cap for the six barreled shaft. I currently have a separate, non-glued shaft spacer that's being used to hold the assembly together. Once the model's painted, I'll consider gluing it down.

Structurally, this thing is feasible. The sheer volume of paper consumed so far is quite incredible. The weight so far of the barrel itself nearly rivals the weight of a 1:6 doll. I estimate 16 sheets of cardstock used so far to construct the pictured components. While relatively lighter than plastic, it's still a large quantity. I expect the finished gun to be dragging along the ground, since no figure I currently possess will have any joint stiffness capable of holding it off the ground more than an instant. I'll see how much headway I'll get on Labor Day.