It all starts with a plan. This is a 1:1 scale drawing I did, based on the Rubies toy and screen captures in my Flickr gallery.

Then I used that drawing to mark out the pattern pieces on my MDF.

Stack up the MDF and glue it and you have your base.

I drilled into the MDF and installed a 1" PVC pipe. I made the hole a bit bigger than I needed so that I could adjust the barrel to get a straight line. I used epoxy putty in the hole to set the barrel into once it was straight.

To create the tapered part of the barrel, I used one of these, sanded here and there, then filled in with some epoxy putty. Hard to explain, but you'll see it in the next couple of pics.

You can see the liberal use of putty all over the thing.

for the outer barrel, I used 1.5" PVC. I cut the grooves with a table saw. The cut depth was set to about 1/16" or so.

Here is the outer barrel attached to the body.

The tip is 1" pvc, one of the connectors used above, and a 1.5" coupler. More table saw grooves have been cut. Some of the lines will be filled back in with bondo later. The stock is MDF.

The clip is more MDF, and is eventually skinned with 3mm sintra.

It's a terrible picture, but it's almost done!

Getting closer... I'm at the point here where I'm just doing primer, small spot filler, primer, repeat...

That will keep going until no obvious flaws are showing.

Once we get to where there's nothing visible to the naked eye...

We'll mold it!