Section 1: Taking it apart.
Whatever sections of the mod you want to do, you will at least need to disassemble the blaster as far as is covered in this section. Further disassembly required only for a specific section is covered in that section.
Tools needed:
#1 phillips head screwdriver
Needle-nose pliers
Before you can do anything else, take out this screw at the back in the center of the stock mount.
The stock mount then comes off easily.
Now you can take out the rest of the screws. One is longer than all the others. It goes in the top front screw port. Before taking off the shell, prime the blaster. This allows you to get the shell off easily.
I recommend de-priming the blaster now, before going further in the disassembly. To do this, pull the magazine follower down and load two disks.
Then move the priming lever all the way back, all the way forward, and all the way back again. This loads the disks into the chamber, and makes most of the locks happy. There is still one more though that prevents the trigger from being pulled unless the magazine is closed. It’s the white piece I’m pointing at in this picture.
Push it up with your finger like so:
While it’s up you can pull the trigger.
Next up, remove the follower and magazine spring.
There is one screw holding the internals in place, on the side of the magazine.
Take it out, and the internals should come out, looking like the following. The white piece is the tac rail.
In order to get to anything useful here, you will need to take apart the firing mechanism. These two screws near the priming lever need to come out.
There is also this little white plastic piece tabbed into place behind the priming lever.
Using your pliers, make it look like this. The plastic is pretty flexible, so this is easy.
That white piece covers up the spring behind the priming lever when the lever is forward. It proceeded to fall out while I was doing this mod, and I couldn’t be bothered to put it back in. It doesn’t seem to have affected the performance or anything, but if you’re worried about dirt getting into the mechanism, you might want to make sure it stays in place.
Once you’ve taken care of the screws and the white piece, there are five of these tabs around the mechanism.
Use your screwdriver and push them a little until all five are popped and you can separate the two halves. This will greet you inside.
Here you can see the spring, several locks, and the side-mounted firing arm that makes the Diatron unique among the vortex blasters.
Where you go from here depends on whether you want to just retension the spring, just remove the locks, or do both.
Section 2: Lock removal
There are several locks in the Diatron. One prevents you from pulling the trigger unless the priming arm is all the way back. One prevents you from pulling the trigger unless there are two disks loaded in the chamber. One prevents you from pulling the trigger if the disks are loaded upside-down. One prevents you from pulling the trigger if the magazine door is not closed. That last one is the only one I left in. Of note here is that removing all these locks will allow for dry-firing, which is a bad thing to do to a blaster. Since I haven’t noticed these locks leading to any failure to fire when everything was loaded properly, my recommendation is to only take these locks out if you want to be able to de-prime the blaster or fire upside down disks. If these don’t matter to you, skip this section and leave all the locks in.
Tools needed:
#1 phillips head screwdriver
Needle-nosed pliers
First up is the two-disk lock. See those two little arms at the top of the last picture? Remove them and the pin they sit on so it looks like this.
Next, turn this piece over. See those two little tabs?
Push them through, and remove the piece they were attached to.
Next is the lock that requires the priming lever to be all the way back. Look under the lever and find this screw.
Remove it and the pieces it was holding in.
That’s all the locks on this piece. Go to the top half of the firing mechanism. See this white piece here?
It has something to do with preventing de-priming, I believe. Just pull it out.
Now, here are two more tabs holding on the upside-down disk lock. I tried to leave this one in, but it turned out to just be a big pain in the ass, disabling the blaster for no reason when all the other locks are gone.
So push those two tabs in and remove this stuff from the other side.
There you go! Now your Diatron can be de-primed and can fire upside-down disks!
