If you're a Steampunk (or costumer of any variety) and you don't know what Rub 'n Buff is, this tutorial will make your life so much easier. You have no idea.

So, what is Rub 'n Buff? Well, it's a product made of wax and very, very fine metal grit. You can rub it on any smooth surface, and that surface will then look like metal. It's a miracle product, and no Steampunk should be without it. This is what it looks like:

As you can see, it comes in a tube, and I paid $5.15 for it. This particular color is Gold Leaf, and one tube of Rub 'n Buff is supposed to be able to cover an area of 20 square feet, which is far more than you would use on any prop that I can imagine.

For this project, I'll be using it on a Nerf Rough Cut, which originally looks like this:

When I got mine, I went ahead and sanded off the Nerf logos and whatnot (like I did in with Nerf Dart Tag), and then painted it black. I highly recommend that you use black as a base color for anything you plan to use Rub 'n Buff on, as that way, if the wax wears off, or doesn't get into all the cracks, it just looks dirty or weathered.

So here's my painted and prepared Rough Cut:

Obviously you need to decide what colors you want to use on your prop, so I decided to use these four:

In case you can't read them, that's silver leaf, antique gold, ebony, and gold leaf. One thing to note before getting started is that sometimes Rub 'n Buff will separate into wax and oil, so if you open a tube and find that it's too watery, you may need to close it back up and massage the tube a bit until it mixes up.

Once you have a paste of suitable thickness, it's time to apply it to your prop. I recommend starting with any intricate areas first, as it will be hardest to do those later without getting Rub 'n Buff on the areas you've already done. So I chose to do the inset parts of the gun.

As far as application goes, I find that it's best to just start with your finger, and do any detail work with a Q-tip, or something similar. Below, you can see my very dirty finger. If you don't like getting your hands dirty, this may not be the style for you.

But what I do is to just put a tiny, tiny bit on my finger, and then apply it from there onto the gun. Use a rubbing motion, because you want to spread the paste out as thinly and as evenly as possible. The less you apply at a time, the better it will look, so try to refrain from just dumping a bunch onto your prop and rubbing it around. I'll admit that my patience was wearing thin, and I used a little too much from time to time, so you'll be able to see some mottling in my finished product.

Once you have the general motion down, all you have to do is just rub it all over the prop with your finger. Because it's wax-based, I didn't have any trouble cleaning my finger afterward with just soap and water.

If I had to estimate, I'd say that this took me under an hour.

Here's a close-up where you can see that I applied too much at a time. Rather than getting a smooth, shiny sheen, you get streaks:

I mean, it still looks pretty good, I think, but you can see the streaks I'm talking about.

After you've finished applying your Rub 'n Buff, what you need to do is to take a soft cloth and buff it. Buffing is basically just rubbing vigorously back and forth, to bring out the shine. You don't want to push against the prop too hard, as you can move the wax around and create holes in the finish, but you still want solid pressure on it.

Once you have a good shine, you're done!