I was "propmaster" for my buddy when he was making films (just some small ones, we had a tiny crew so propmaster is really overselling it I was the guy who knew how to make shit. Also held the camera. biggest we ever got was selling a short to HBO and that was because he won a big festival. Mad props to him) and this is legitimately how we'd build our props. If it wasn't already something we had laying around we'd head over to someplace like ACE hardware and look for cheap stuff that looked neat and we could glue/weld/bolt/whatever together and then paint. Made some really cool props that way.