These things wreck when modded. Super underrated.

 Anyway to fix this short of brassing a new bolt or putting in a worker breech and barrel? Also I'm using a talon mag.

No simple fix, you do need a mechanism for pushing in the dart.

I want to make sure my homemade internal making skills are good enough before I make any guides. 

Nah, just post it even if it's garbage.

It's definitely a mod of it's era.

A quick update to the mod: if you have a 3D printer, you can use these tip replacements that I designed instead of modifying the coupler.

https://www.thingive...m/thing:4616582

Very cool. Bravo on using Creative Commons licensing to enlarge commons of knowledge.

 

 

 

It’s having some reliability issues, but only with Pyragon drums. I’m not 100% sure what’s going on here. Might be just because it’s firing so much faster than the Nitron and the drums can’t keep up. 20 round stick mags are fine. I’m waiting for the chance to combat test this to see how it works there before I spend too much more time on it.

There's quite a lot of variability between drums, only 1 of the 3 I have work well. 

I wonder if you could come up with some sort of pully systems, so that it could be a pump to prime?

You can't hide from us 

We use meetup.com (among other things) here in Houston. I won't say it's been the most successful tool we have, but there are several regulars that found our group through that site.

I'll have to give that a try.

Reddit is cute for showing off completed projects and capturing the culture, but not the proper layout for sales, write-ups, and organizing wars. I am assuming Facebook groups are more local and great for organizing wars?

Facebook has been a good tool for connecting with new nerfers in the Minneapolis/St Paul area of Minnesota. We have the very searchably named  "Minnesota Nerf" page and "Minnesota Nerf Community" group, which draws in a lot of randos to wars hosted by various people in the area. I do post war announcements on reddit and some of the discord channels, but I've never had anyone show up who didn't see it on NerfHaven or Facebook. I could see Facebook dropping off in usefulness in the near future as young people shun the platform en masse.

The disintegration of forums and the balkanization of online social media is not unique to Nerf at all. It's completely common nowadays to have multiple parallel social groups of a particular hobby active in the same geographic area, and be completely unaware of each other. It's interesting how the internet of 2000-2010 had a lot of centralized hobbyist forums that really brought everyone together, and how much that has disintegrated in a few short years.

I would take a look at these two threads first:

http://nerfhaven.com...-modifications/

http://nerfhaven.com...emade-blasters/

The fragmentation of online nerf is distressing, there's no longer an compendium of all information. Some people are still around and active. I certainly still do mods and homemades (I'm working on a Fang QS-4 mod this evening).

As for nerfing itself, this is arguably the best time ever to do it.

For reference 3/8" darts were referred to as "nanos". Not much ever came of them. One major issue is that the dimensional tolerances of FBR seem to be consistent across sizes, which makes the barrel fit very inconsistent on small sizes.

It's definitely possible to make practical small darts, but you need to use different materials and construction methods than is typical for stefans. Boomco's straw darts, for example, are 0.4" in diameter, and do perform well.

Pistols are the one case where I think modding existing blasters will give you better results than building a homemade.

I don't think either method is really going to revitalize the darts as much as you think. Darts are super cheap now, I would buy some from China.

War planning has gotten extremely disrupted by the expansion of social media, it's difficult to find them now. Basically, whoever hosts in the area has to post on whichever newfangled site/service that people use. For the MN wars I host, I end up having to post here on NH, on Facebook, on Reddit, and on Discord servers... and I'm still probably missing a huge chunk of potential nerfers. I don't think there's an easy answer for discovering nerf wars other than just spamming everywhere with questions, or trying to build up a local community on your own.

Ballzooka topics are evergreen

It sounds like you're talking about a different blaster. Titans are air-powered, not electric.

If only...

That IS a giant jolt, not a dcit

Crazy you're dragging this up DB, it's a giant jolt which is all the knockout is.

By "just a giant jolt", I assume you mean "the best homemade blaster ever made"

...if only a mk2 version was in the works...

Unfortunately Photobucket broke a lot of links to pictures in the years since this has been posted, so a lot of mod guides no longer have pictures.

https://www.facebook...32361347480543/

Location: Newell Park, St. Paul MN
When: Noon, August 29th, 2020

https://www.facebook...35141707190974/

Location: Newell Park, St. Paul MN
When: Noon, June 7th, 2020

https://www.facebook...44866366163913/

Location: Newell Park, St. Paul MN
When: Noon, April 25th, 2020

 

Oh also, I've had great success using coarse thread screws like wood, sheet metal, plastite, etc. Inserts are nice, but IMO overkill for 99% of parts - you don't really need to open and close these things so much that a coarse thread will strip the plastic out except in the case of an access hatch or battery bay. A machine thread could certainly strip though, those are too fine for the plastic to hold long.

One thing I saw was that often the surrounding plastic fails before threads, whether they be 3D printed or when using brass inserts:

https://www.youtube....h?v=iR6OBlSzp7I

Yo Koree, fix your pictures.

 

 

The reason I don't think tree supports is useful for this project is that there are a lot of larger, flat horizontal surfaces to support. Tree supports I thought were good for small overhang features, which is rare in this project, surprisingly. I do a lot of bridging instead.

Your intuition is correct - tree supports do not leave a very good underside surface, worse than standard supports. Designing with a reliance on bridging instead of supports will give you a nicer, more consistent underside surface.

This is some of the best content ever posted on NH, thanks for sharing in detail!

Manual supports is a good approach for a lot of these kind of parts, even if it's a lot of work. In a sense, the major design consideration of design for 3D printing is dealing with overhangs, as they're a necessary part of a lot of parts.

I've had mixed feelings about tree supports. They're really great for parts where you need support, but where there isn't clearance all the way to the print bed. When that's not the case, then regular supports often work better.

Facebook event link

Location: Newell Park, St. Paul MN
When: Noon, July 27

Is there a 3D printed version of worker's mag well that can go along with this?

Some type of magnetic paint?

This looks good, I'll see if I have time to make one. My ESTL from years ago is still functioning as a loaner blaster, so this general type of design is quite robust.

It sounds like you're not getting a good seal when the breech is closed.

I'll jump on. This is the right place to find information.

To follow up on what we talked about at the war:

I think what's happening is a combination of a short, tight barrel and a small-radius plunger tube, combined with full length darts, means that when the dart is half-way out of the barrel, the pressure inside the hollow stem of the dart is quite high relative to atmospheric pressure. Cylinders that are experiencing stress due to positive pressure on it's inner surface will tend to split in the longitudinal direction. This is because axial stress is about twice as high as radial stress. The splitting you see is in the direction you would expect if the pressure inside the dart got high enough to rupture the foam. You normally only see this kind of splitting on air valve blasters with large volume pressure chambers, such as Big Blasts or Jobars. With those blasters, the pressure in the barrel remains quite high even when you're using a very long barrel - they're releasing so much high pressure air that even a very long barrel doesn't drop the pressure very much.

The solutions to this problem are:

• Lower the peak pressure of your blaster. You can do that by using a weaker spring, or pumping up your air blaster less. This approach sucks because you lose range.
• Use a longer barrel, so that the pressure inside the barrel (and dart stem) is lower when it exits the barrel. On a high volume air blaster, this sometimes requires you to use an impractically long barrel. On this pistol, you maybe only need a few more inches (maybe just 2-4 more inches?).
• Use half-length darts, which will clear the barrel sooner and so there won't be as long of a section of the darts with a pressure gradient acting to split them. It's still possible for these to split, though.
• Use solid foam darts. This is the most straight-forward solution, but most darts you can buy have hollow cores, so this is usually a no-go.

Are they getting cut by something in the mechanism?

Foam splitting is typically caused by high peak pressures in the barrel, but I don't think you would necessarily see that in your setup. Possibly the barrel is too tight?