Papercraft Portal Gun: When Life Gives You Paper…

Portal gun replicas are usually quite expensive. But with a bit of cardboard and creativity, you too can make a neat gun and get the science done. And that’s no lie. Just look at what deviantART member svanced was able to achieve:

portal gun papercraft by svanced

As you’ll hear in the video below, svanced made the gun using black and white cardboard, a few pieces of black cable, transparent duct tape – although it looks like scotch tape to me – transparent plastic and a couple of blue LEDs, one from a flashlight and one from a lighter. All in all it cost svanced about $10 (USD) in materials and about 60 hours of work.

So test subject, ready to make your own Portal gun? You can watch the guide that Svanced used on Indy Mogul’s YouTube channel.

[Svanced via Gamefreaks]

Portal Gun Turned into Gravity Gun: Levitates Companion Cube

One of my favorite guns in the history of video games has to be the Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2. Perhaps my second favorite is the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, which admittedly is more of a tool than a gun. Now, the smart guys over at Hack-a-Day have combined them both – sorta, kinda.

levitating companion cube gravity gun

How, you might ask? Caleb Kraft took his off-the-shelf model of the Portal gun, and added a levitation device to the front of it – currently capable of lifting a small model of the weighted companion cube. He achieved this by hacking his StellaNova magnetic levitating globe and tearing the magnetic coil from the desktop plaything (throwing the Earth off its axis and ripping a hole in it in the process.) He then attached the coil to one of the arms of the Portal gun, and attached the magnet from inside of the globe to a foam model of the companion cube.

Check it out in action in the video below:

Cool, no? Unfortunately, the magnetic levitation field doesn’t hold up well to movement, and can’t really lift anything very heavy. Too bad. I was really looking forward to picking up some circular saw blades and flinging them at zombies this Halloween.

[via Hack-a-Day (Thanks for the tip, Caleb!)]