I started out with a rather angry looking grinding drum and gradually worked my way through 50 grit sanding paper all the way up to 400. Red oak is about as easy to sand as a block of concrete, so more drastic methods were used to get the stock into shape. The areas for the trigger mechanism and barrel mount were cut from the center section before gluing the sheets together, as this made these recessed cavities much easier to construct as opposed to chiseling them from a solid chunk of wood. I chose to make the stock on the gun from laminated sections of red oak. I scaled the stock on the Combat shotgun to that of the PPSH rifle, and the remainder of the blueprint was scaled accordingly.

I started off with a PPSH diagram lifted from a vintage WWII manual which gave accurate millimeter dimensions of all the associated parts. Barrel heat sink, sights, drum magazine – many parallels can be drawn between the two designs. The combat Shotgun is based quite heavily on a Russian machine gun put into service during WWII, the PPSH-41. I started off by making blueprints in Illustrator, based on as much in-game reference as I could pull together.

Fallout new vegas combat shotgun