2 replies to this topic

[The lord of fish]

Hell of a trip logging back into this website, happy to see so many folks that I grew up modding blasters with also followed a similar path into industrial design/mechanical engineering. Absolutely mind blowing how much this hobby has advanced, especially with all of the use of FDM printing. It's a little sad seeing how inactive this site is, and doubly sad to see the other forums completely gone, but I suppose that's what time does. I feel old.

This isn't much of a modification in the classical sense; no hacksaws, glue, or duct-tape. I tried attaching the step file of the shells I modeled up, but that seems like a no-go.

A little bit of an overview:

The blaster is very 'gun' like; it'll need some more bright colors before I take it outside. You snap the body of it together from 3 main pieces. Once snapped it, they don't easy come back out. It's shell fed from a detachable 4 shell magazine. Two mags were included. Shoots about 50ish feet with the included darts.

The 'barrel' is all fake, you can quickly detach it to reveal a smaller, orange tipped, faux barrel.

While there seems like a LOT of screws, you actually only need to remove 2 hex head machine screws on the bottom to separate the actual internals shell from the stock. Neat

From there, you can open it, up.  The stock shells that come with it don't have any pegs or air restrictors; neither does the bolt/plunger

Internals are pretty solid, I didn't want to remove the pin in the back, because I felt like I'd have a hell of time putting it back in, or risk loosening it up too much. The spring is uncomfortably beefy, and the usable plunger volume seems pretty similar to what I remember from a nitefinder, maybe a little more. There is a functioning safety too. As you can see, there's no barrel; the shell is effectively the usable barrel for this blaster. I had contemplated adding some brass, but more to that later.

One of the biggest problems with this thing was just how bad the included darts were. They're about 3/4 of the length of a standard nerf dart (in the same elite blue color too) but have very inconsistently sized suction cups. The shells also fit the darts pretty poorly, not like buzzbee shell poorly, but like stock nerf barrel tightness. I swapped out the stock darts with some Ekind bamboo darts. Feels great to not buy a roll of FBR, cut it up, and then make darts. With the plunger limited volume, and 0 intention of me trying to increase it, I settled on making new shells. Again, I had wanted to attach a .step file, but here's a bad drawing (in mm) instead.

So, after quickly modeling up replacement shells with a bit of a taper that hugs the darts better, and new darts, I loaded up a magazine.



With the new darts, and new shells, it's shooting much further, flatter, and more consistently, I don't have any way to measure performance past 50ish feet, but now can consistently nail cans from about 20 feet. 


I also made one with a wider inside diameter so that I could put a 17/32 brass insert, but there wasn't much of a noticeable performance gain between it and the regular printed shells.









 

[Daniel Beaver]

Hell yeah, sweet upgrade

[Silly]

Nice