You can forego the distraction: Matrix Lobby Scene Shootout (HD) - YouTube
I thought of one scheme years ago. Get a small pistol like a browning 25 auto. Buy a waffle cone ice cream at the airport. Lift up the ice cream, place pistol in waffle cone (they are quite large), replace ice cream. Your accomplice is walking ahead of you and clears the scanner. You set it off, or course. Innocently hand the ice cream cone to the accomplice while you take off your huge metal belt buckle using both hands. Place it on the scanner belt, and walk through the scanner un-beeped. Retrieve your belt and weapon. Take the pistol. Leave the ice cream.
And a prank to play on a (different) buddy. Make an accurate pattern of a pistol using aluminum foil. Get a hold of an item your buddy will be traveling with. Let’s say a book. Place the .001" thick foil pattern between two pages and carefully glue them together. Or carefully place in folded shirts, etc.
Hilarity ensues when the agents tear everything in his luggage apart looking for the pistol.
It would take a heck of a long time to build up an entire statue through electroplating. Much easier to make a box that looks like a statue (so they don’t even think to try to open it, because it doesn’t look like a box). A head that unscrews from the base, or something like that.
Of course, even with a genuine metal statue that doesn’t even have anything in it, there’s always the risk that they’ll just confiscate it. One of my aunts was traveling with a painted rock in her bag, and they tried to confiscate it as a possible weapon (she instead gave it to a stranger leaving the secure area).
Or you could just go full Die Hard 2 for 90s fiction and use a Glock 7. Ya know,
John McClane: That punk pulled a Glock 7 on me. You know what that is? It’s a porcelain gun made in Germany. Dosen’t show up on your airport X-ray machines, here, and it cost more than you make in a month.
There’s only the problems that Glock never made anything called a Glock 7, Glock is an Austrian company, not a German one, the frame is polymer, not porcelain, all of the internals of Glocks are metal, the magazine and ammunition are metal… small things like that.
That you know of. That’s why they made it in a different country from all of their metal guns, and why McClane assumed the person he was talking to wouldn’t have heard of it.
It does take time, but we used it to make rocket engine combustion chambers and nozzles. The cooling passages were complex shapes and couldn’t be formed any other way. The passages were fabricated of plastic (this was before 3D printing), coated with graphic and put into a nickle plating bath. The resulting casting was removed from the bath every few days and roughly machined as it builds up in nodules. The chamber walls ended up about 3/4" thick.
So if you wanted to make a statue with a gun inside that was insanely expensive it might be able to be done. Plus the gun has to withstand the corrosive nature of a plating tank but coating it in plastic would work.
I guess the modern version of this would be to just 3D print the statue around the gun.
The weakest part of the metal detector is the human operator. I ‘defeated’ one just last week; not sure if it was the way I was dressed or my handsome good looks 
I was (photo) shooting a WWII reenactment weekend. there were multiple signs, both in English & pictogram stating no weapons allowed; I actually adhered to them & left my pocket knife in the car. I walked in wearing multiple cameras, my various pockets had additional lenses & other shooting accessories, a phone & keys. I’m hearing the thing beep multiple times at this pocket or that camera as he runs the handheld scanner over my body. Instead of making me take everything off/out to confirm one of those beeps wasn’t a weapon I got a, “Have a nice time; get some good pics”
Before walking away, I asked him about the different treatment of the reenactors I saw arriving - I saw one walk in, openly carrying a rifle while another one was having his bag searched. He told me anyone with the appropriate wristband wasn’t subject to search.
Additionally, some of the vendors was selling pocket knives, bayonets, &/or swords that I could have purchased & then walked around with & one vendor was even allowing you to fire various WWII guns, including sub-machine guns in a designated area.
Cut the bottom off a medical oxygen cylinder and put the metal item inside, then figure out a way to reattach the bottom (glue, magnets,). Add a nasal cannula and regulator and wear it to the detector. I din’t think anyone is goint to look at it too carefully.
Pretty sure I have seen border customs drill into statues and other objects on one of those TV shows about that sort of thing. The problem, I think, is that they’re not just going to run the statue through a metal detector and then conclude it must be solid. It’ll go into the X Ray machine.
The point is that X-Ray machines cannot penetrate steel after a certain thickness to provide enough resolution for an image. Here is Table 1 from , Article 22 of ASME SEC V - SE-94, para 7.0 showing the different X-rays / Gamma ray sources needed for radiographing different thickness of metals.
Granted this is for radiography of welding defects, but I am pretty sure similar limits will be applicable to all X-ray imaging
Fair enough. I wonder if it stops becoming practical as luggage at that point though
“Just 3D print around an existing object” is decidedly nontrivial, especially with the 3D printing technologies that can be used to print metals. So far as I know, that always involves having a bin full of metal powder, that you then get to stick together in the shape you want it (either by melting it together with a laser, or gluing it together with a glue extruder), and then topping off the powder and smoothing over the top. And then it might follow up with dipping the thing in molten bronze to fill in any gaps.
I still like my idea of a statue with a hidden screw-lid at the head a lot better.
For caching, you want to store the guns (or whatever) in big PVC pipes, an then seal the ends. The pipes should be buried vertically to minimize the signature seen by metal detectors. And then you should bury some old, metal car parts above the pipe, with the idea that they will think it’s an old dumping ground if they start digging.
Screw lid or any gaps resulting from any lids will show up on X-ray, since they are not deep enough
And be sure of the location of your buried treasure (GPS?). It’s devastating when you need your weapons cache in an emergency and aren’t able to find it (this happened to one of the preparedness types in the article I read).
Can’t you just bury a bunch of anti-personnel mines all over the place? Not sure if you want the ones that show up on a metal detector or the metal-free ones, though.
Or place sheets of plywood around, and paint them with a contact explosive.