With the war-themed Flower Festival I decided to turn a cheap airsoft shotgun into a Remington trench gun so I could display my vintage 1917 bayonet properly (Whoever said that bayonet collecting is a gateway drug was apparently correct). This was a few months before S&T came out with their M870, which would have saved me most of the trouble…
Because I was short on time, the version used in the Festval had a sheet aluminium buttplate:
The making of the plywood fore-end was very fiddly, as expected. The slide is not at all shaped like on a real shotgun.
I got the (actual metal) heat shield off another $15 airsoft gun (based on the Mossberg, adding even more to the Frankenstein nature of the resulting beast). Historically the Remington trench had a wooden heat shield but I prefer the grille look.
For the bayonet mount I cut some “keys” from steel rod, that I’ll glue together with epoxy:
I forced some aluminum foil into the bayonet keyhole, to reveal the inside shape of the cavity:
After a lot of filing:
I ground a 16mm steel tube until it fit the bayonet hole:
The bayonet lug is epoxied together and nearly finished:
That bayonet is huge!
As part of the Flower Festival parade float:
As I was in a big hurry to finish this, I left the butt rather oversized; the pump mechanism on the airsoft rifle is rather different from the actual weapon so I couldn’t make the fore-end as thin as I would like, and I thought the oversized butt would balance it a bit.
But with a bit more time I shaved the forearm down as much as possible and also made the butt more realistically sized. I also added a brass rivet “bead sight”, and an “extractor”.
