On Sunday a friend and I headed over to TRU to see if there was anything worth getting in preparation for our local groups Nerf Night. I ended up getting the Switchshot. As I both have a Wii and nerf, it seemed like a great way to support two hobbies with a single purchase.
As has been noted on other reviews, the blaster does seem a little small to hold. I like to think I have average sized hands, but my pinky is completely off of the handle when holding it. I've yet to bust out House of the Dead with it, so I have no comments on it as an actual light gun.
The blaster itself proved to be humorously disappointing. As the Toycyte review notes, the AR's inside of this thing are ridiculous. In fact when firing the stock blaster you can watch the plunger handle move back into position. Firing the blaster just around the house I estimate roughly 20ft. I apologize for not measuring the ranges officially, but quite frankly I was more interested in cracking it open.
And doing so this is what I saw:
Pretty standard stuff. Inside was the usual post and AR combo that would need to be removed. To get to that we'll need remove the outer barrel. Here's a close up:
You can see the line where the barrel assembly was attached to the plunger tube and unfortunately Hasbro glued it on tight. To remove this you'll want to saw it off just a little below that line. Sawing at the line (which is what I started doing) takes too long. Once that comes off it'll be simple to add on a barrel of your choice. My choice was a 3" barrel of 17/32" brass attached with epoxy putty. You'll also note that the hole that the air travels through is fairly small and you may want to widen that just a bit. Personally I didn't though.
Here's the new barrel placed back in the blaster shell:
And another:
It should be noted that you'll need to consider what exactly you'll want to use the gun for before you do any kind of barrel replacement. There is a reason that the barrel is so short for the blaster and that is to allow it to be swapped in and out of the gun shell. For example, with my 3" barrel in, I can't get the blaster into the gun shell at all. The barrel prevents the orange retaining bar from securing the blaster. Since I had planned on leaving the gun shell with my wii stuff and never actually taking it to a war, no bigger. However if you want to use the shell your barrel will need to be fairly short.
Now without the shell, I needed to find a way to fire the blaster. For that I took an extra AR I had, like this:
From that I cut of a 1" nub from the top:
I wanted to make sure it stayed in place on the trigger plate so using a pin vice and a paper clip, I pinned the new trigger in place and then super-glued it.
This shows the new trigger, with the paper clip piece in place running to the trigger plate. Obviously the end of the paper clip will need to be trimmed when it gets glued, but the shows the three items in relation to each other.
Once that's done, all it needs is to be reassembled.
I don't have any kind of ranges, but should have those by Saturday. But just messing around the house seems to indicate that it has better ranges then my NF (which has AR's removed and a 4" PETG barrel but is admittedly a bit beat up.)
Now my original plan was to take this assembly and epoxy it on to a tactical rail a la the "tactical shot." I actually went through all of that and finished it, but discovered something. Quite frankly I didn't like it, nor was it terribly useful. On the Longshot it obscured aiming. When mounted to the top of the Recon it made it more difficult to cock the slide, as well as trying to cock the switchshot blaster when mounted would pull the whole unit off! The only gun it felt comfortable on was the NF. However for all guns it was inconvenient to reach up to the top to fire the extra weapon. Plus the whole thing was ugly.
With that in mind I'm going to have my wife make me an armband and place this blaster in that as seen in Cheese-Boy's mod. In fact, here it is:
And here it is locked and loaded with a sonic micro:
So far it's pretty comfortable and is reasonably accurate. Again, I should have ranges as well full battle review after Saturday.
Feel free to hit me up with any questions or comments. I'll be back with ranges as well as pictures of the blaster when arm mounted.
Edited by akmetan, 30 October 2008 - 09:37 AM.
