Most expensive prop gun sold at auction

The most expensive prop gun sold at auction is a BlasTech DL-44 Heavy Blaster, made for the character of Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy. The gun, the only survivor of the three originals made for A New Hope in 1976, sold for $1,057,500 (£904,342) at Rock Island Auctions in Illinois, USA, on 30 August 2022.

The prop gun was one of three “hero props” (high-detail master versions, used for close-ups and publicity pictures) assembled by London props house Bapty in 1976. The basic components of the blaster prop, chosen by Star Wars set decorator Roger Christian and assembled by armourer Carl Schmidt, are a World-War-I-era Mauser C-96 “Broomhandle” pistol (that had been previously adapted to fire blanks), the flash-hider from a World-War-II-era MG81 machine gun, and an early twentieth-century rifle scope made by Hensoldt-Wetzlar. To this functional model were added various bits of “greebling” (surface detail), including parts from a model aircraft motor, to make it look more futuristic.

As the gun and its parts were only rented from Bapty, the gun was returned when filming was completed, where it was stripped of its greeblies and disassembled. Star Wars was not a big-budget or high profile production, and the gun had already been used in several high profile movies. It was only in 2010 that Terry Watts, the new owner of Bapty, asked Carl Schmidt to dig through his decades of miscellaneous parts bins and reassemble the gun.

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