Before I forget- Boltsniper, obviously, provided the stimuli and clip holding solution for this, so thank you Boltsniper.
Here are instructions on how to make a very simple, easy-to-use, and effective homemade clip system. It’ll look like what you see above when finished. First, you’re going to need some balsa wood, I had wood about ¼ inch think.
Now this is probably one of the harder parts of the project, as I cannot give you exact instructions; the clip needs to be made in accordance to your dart size. First, you need to cut 6 pieces of balsa.
“A” are going to be your main sides. You want to cut these a little longer than the length of your darts, but not by too much. You want it so you have a little room, but not enough where you can slide the dart back and forth a considerable distance. How tall it is does not matter, it just depends on how many darts you want. Considering the strength of your wire you use for the spring later on, dart capacity will vary with individual construction.
“B” are going to be your front and back, if you consider how the clip would look on a gun. You want these about the width of your dart, plus a tiny bit over ½ inch, because looking at this, the widths of the two main sides are going to be subtracted from the width of the front and back, which is why you have an extra ~ ½ inch. Also, make these pieces about 1/3 inch less tall than your “A” pieces; you’ll understand when you try to stick it on your barrel system.
“C” is obviously going to be the bottom piece, so assemble your clip like the picture above, and then just trace the bottom onto the square piece. You now want to glue all of this together in the most obvious way possible, so it looks somewhat like this:
Now, onto the spring, I used this particular type of wire because it was the only type of wire I could really find in my house, short of taking the strings off my violin or piano.
The picture 2 above shows how you would bend the spring, so it somewhat resembles a leaf spring. MAKE SURE your spring is at least a centimeter less in length as your darts, or you will have friction problems with the spring. You want to make the spring longer than your clip, compress it, let it go, and see how long it expands back to. You want it to expand from the bottom of your clip to the top, so it may take quite a few bends.
“D” will simply be a piece that is smaller on all dimensions than your darts. Attach this to your spring, slide it in, and you’re pretty much done with the basic clip. You can always add spring catches and whatnot, but I’m lazy. I used superglue for all bonds, because it’s a wonderful feeling to get all your fingers superglued together.
After that, cut a piece of PVC in half lengthwise and glue it to both sides, so the final product looks like this.
PART 2 IN NEXT POST
This mod is property of NH
~ompa
Edited by ompa, 25 July 2005 - 02:47 PM.
