8 replies to this topic

[Tangent52]

Well, this is not what I intended my first post to be about, but I need some help sooner than later, so if any of you have a Nerf (not Air Zone) Arrowstorm I would appreciate your knowledge. I found somebody selling this item and couldn't pass it up, but since it is so unusual and I haven't seen one in 15 years I opened it to at least make sure I hadn't just bought a box of sawdust. Two things make me skeptical and two things make me confident...

Confident: 1) There don't seem to be scratches along the main slide, indicating the handle was never pulled back.
2) I started to notice fingerprints (that I was leaving) and realized that there weren't any prior ones.

Skeptical: 1) This is the main one - the fletches on the arrows are the speckled type and I thought the Arrowstorm came with the solid black.
2) There are long stress marks in the plastic in certain places, which I guess I wouldn't expect in a blaster that'd never been fired.

I could believe that the old nerf plastic is such that it might just move and stress itself over time, but I'm more concerned that it was used and the arrows are a replacement. Do any of you know for certain if arrowstorms ever came with the speckled arrows?

Edited by Tangent52, 06 January 2013 - 03:27 PM.

[Demon Lord]

Post a photo (or several) of the blaster, that will go a long way in determining a solution to your problem.

[Blue]

Post a photo (or several) of the blaster, that will go a long way in determining a solution to your problem.

Very much agree here.

Don't stress too much about the blaster because it is worth under $50 even NIB, I sold a very beat up NIB Arrowstorm for around $35 a year or two ago. I believe the version I had said "NEW" on the box and came with purple arrows.

Questions I would ask:
Did the box have any packing in it? There should be cardboard besides the box to keep things from mushing around.
Do the barrels of the blaster have ridges in them? If so, then you have a second gen.

From my limited knowledge and probably some misinformation the very first run ones came with purple arrows. Ones after that came with the speckled ones (Xbows have these arrows too) and none came with solid black fins. I think the solid black finned ones came from refill packs.

But yeah, snap some pictures and get back to us. I'm assuming the real question you want us to answer is "Did I buy a used Arrowstorm when it was sold to me as a new one?"

[mr trouble]

I don't own a Arrowstorm but it's my experience that sometimes older Nerf guns can get stress marks on them from age. I have had several blasters that as they got older the plastic became brittle and developed stress marks. It may be the environmental factors for my area but that could be one explanation for the marks.

[Tangent52]

Yes Blue, that's it exactly...I just want to make sure I got what I paid for, since I've been waiting to get this gun NIB for a long time. To answer a couple of your other questions, though, the barrels do have little ridges inside them and it did come packed properly - there is a piece of folded & cut cardboard that holds the blaster in the middle of the box and the sticker sheet and 'other Hasbro products' booklet is in there too.

Thanks to you all for the help - sorry, but my camera is not uploading properly, so I will try to post pics tomorrow, though the more I look at this gun the more I believe it is new. The stress lines just don't seem to be where stress would occur from use and it really does look very smooth and unscratched.

[Split]

About a year and a half ago we opened Talio's NIB Crossbow and it had some stress marks around some of the screw ports. Yours sounds legit to me, though I can't comment on which arrows different arrowstorms came with. I have a collection of pictures of NIB vintage blasters, but don't seem to have any of an arrowstorm of any version.

[Griever 2112]

Adding to the stressmark portion. I got a brand new Roughcut and the 2 airports by the tactical rail are stressed like the screw heads are too big or they screwed it too tight. So it's not just vintage blasters.

Edited by Griever 2112, 07 January 2013 - 05:59 PM.

[Tangent52]

Sorry about the pics, but I'm caught in a technology catch-22; my computer OS is too old to upload pics for photosharing websites and the mobile versions on my new ipad are too new to register with the websites. If I can get ahold of my girlfriend's computer, I'll give it another go - at least for the sake of your collection, Split.

[Langley]

From the New Members Guide:

Posts that lack photos when photos are expected, and posts with poor quality or bad grammar will not be excused because you are posting from a phone or other unusual device.

You're asking the members of this forum to verify that your NIB Arrowstorm is indeed an NIB Arrowstorm without providing a photo. Putting aside that this site isn't really big on mint condition never-opened nerf toys, I think you've gotten about as much useful feedback as you're ever going to get.