pat 1st Lt

I didn't see this info in any other topics, so I decided to make a new one.

Hasbro.com now has the Longshot listed.

You cannot purchase it from the site, and I haven't seen any online retailers stocking it yet, but since they have it listed, it can't be too far away. Maybe late August, or early September? But, then again, I've heard people have contacted Hasbro, and they said that it'd be out 'for the Christmas season'. I would think that would mean maybe November, but stores these days start all the Holidays sooooo early that "Christmas" might mean September.





So, I hope this isn't a useless topic, since I haven't seen this info anywhere else yet.






Sincereley,
Pat

This is an article taken diretly, and in-context, from the Hartford Courant, today, July Fourth. This is a real article, which can be found here.

I hope that this isn't too 'much' for this site, but since it's not pornographic, it's not spam, and it's not a flame, i think it'll be ok.

I find it hillarious, but if you have a fairly week constitution, you probably shouldn't read about this fairly disturbing sexual incident.


Well, I stop stalling and get to the goods:









"75-Day Sentence In UConn Dorm Incident

The Hartford Courant, July 4, 2006
By DAVID OWENS, Courant Staff Writer VERNON --


A former University of Connecticut student admitted Monday to his role in a bizarre incident in which he, and allegedly two others, ejaculated onto a female student while she slept in a dorm room.

At Superior Court in Rockville, Zak Allan Brohinsky, 20, of Simsbury pleaded no contest to a single count of first-degree reckless endangerment and was sentenced to 75 days in prison. He is the first of three former students to settle a case that prompted the state legislature to close a loophole in the state's sexual assault law.


Brohinsky was in court last week and opted to have his case placed on the docket for a jury trial. Assistant State's Attorney Elizabeth Leaming kept her plea bargain offer on the table, and on Monday, Brohinsky's lawyer, Elizabeth Foran, told Leaming that he wanted to accept the deal.

Brohinsky, who had already apologized to the victim, apologized again Monday when entering his plea. He also agreed to cooperate with the state if the cases against the two remaining defendants go to trial. Brohinsky is the son of Scott Brohinsky, UConn's director of university relations.

"Sometimes good kids do some bad things, and I believe that's the case in this matter, that Zak has accepted responsibility," Scott Brohinsky said Monday. "I think he expressed profound remorse and he's committed himself to making amends. He hasn't wavered from that commitment. Those who know him are confident that he will not waver from that commitment."

Charges are still pending against Jared Skvirsky, 20, of Brookline, Mass., and Martin V. Piscottano, 19, of 72 Root Road, Somers.

All were initially charged with disorderly conduct, conspiracy to commit disorderly conduct and public indecency. They were not charged with sexual assault because what they were accused of doing did not fit the definition of sexual assault. Leaming has said that a charge of sexual assault would have required "some kind of contact between the intimate parts of the body involved" and that "semen is not defined as an intimate part."

But the case prompted the state legislature this spring to expand the definition of sexual assault to include contact with bodily fluids.

According to arrest warrant affidavits, the incident began in the early morning hours of Sept. 24, 2005, in Skvirsky's dorm room in Watson Hall, where he and the female student went after they met at a party at the Carriage House Apartments off campus.

The two began kissing, and then the woman stopped, deciding she didn't like it. Because it was late and she didn't feel safe walking home alone, she decided to stay in his room and fell asleep on a futon. Skvirsky fell asleep on his bed. Both had been drinking, but said they were not drunk, an affidavit said.

A short while later, Brohinsky, Skvirsky's roommate, came into the room with his friend, Piscottano. They tried to wake the woman so Piscottano could sleep on the futon, but she would not get up, according to an affidavit.

The three men watched a porn video on a computer and then took turns ejaculating onto the woman's face and body, an affidavit said. The woman said that when she woke up, she felt something on her and thought she had drooled on herself, an affidavit said.

After Brohinsky and Piscottano left the room, the woman asked Skvirsky what was on her face. He said he didn't know, according to an affidavit. The woman returned to her dorm room and washed her face, but was concerned about the substance.

The next day, Skvirsky sent an instant message to the woman stating, among other things, that "they were really drunk" and ejaculated on her, an affidavit said.

According to an affidavit, Brohinsky and Piscottano got together, and Piscottano typed a story they all planned on memorizing and repeating in case the woman called police. Brohinsky also e-mailed the made-up story to the woman, hoping that she would buy it and not call police, according to an affidavit.

The woman went to police on Sept. 27 to press charges."





So... Now that you've read it through, discuss. I think the weirdest part is that it's classified as reckless endangerment. How is it endagering anyone?






Sincereley,
Pat

Dear Forumgoer,


Recently I've been experimenting with different barrel lengths for my UBS system stolen from Baghead, from the here and here

(I hope I did that "tag" thing right. Sorry if it's all messed up and just a bunch of URLs)


Anyway, I've been experimenting with different length barrels, made of the same materials from the same shipment of material, and using the same darts, just so I get fairly accurate results. While I was cutting away at my PETG and Brass, I wondered "How do other people determine their barrel length so effectivley? It seems like in all the 'write-ups' you find, there's always the little thing that say 'I've found 8 inches of brass to be best', or something."


So, that's what I'm here to ask: how do you know that the length of your barrel you've got on now is giving you maximum performance?


Do you just cut it long, and then keep hacking away, an inch at a time between range testings?

Do you just guess and hope?

Do you wait for 'them' to do the research for you, and then copy it?

Do you use some super-secret equation, or calculations?

Do you have voices in your head that secretly whisper to you while you sleep what barrel length to use?



I'd like to know, and I'm sure there are many others out there that would too.


So, when you reply, just say Spring Guns: ' insert whatever you do to find it', Pump Guns: 'insert whatever you do to find it'.


Thanks in advance guys. I know there'll be some secret ancient Nerf technique revealed to us by the old members for determing the best barrel length. I can feel it.




Sincereley,
Pat

Dear Forum-Goer,


This is my first posted modification. Generally, I do not post modifications, as there always seem to be ones that are so similar there's no point taking up space on the forums.

To gein with, I've never heard anyone talk about this gun: The Lanard Sonic Bazooka
If there are write-ups for it, I have never seem them, nor found any in my preliminary searches before I posted this topic. Sorry if one already exists.


Anyway, I went to Ocean State Job Lot yesterday, and to my surprise I found a hefty stock of Lanard products: about twenty LBBs, a dozen Max Shots, three or four First Shots, several Blowguns, and an odd contraption resembling a GyroStryke (I cannot recall the name). However, on the back of the shelf behind the LBBs were several small guns labeled 'Sonic Bazooka!', for 5 dollars a piece.

I called up HQ and requested permission to purchase and mod them with the Clan Funds, and they appropiated 13 dollars for me to buy and modify them.


I don't have a camera, so I'll describe it:

It is light blue, with a yellow handle and pump handle, a grey trigger, red accents on the front of the gun, and a silver area on the top back half of the gun.

It is 15 inches long

6 1/2 inches tall

3 inches wide

the handle is four inches tall

the pump range of motion is 3 1/4 inches

The pump handle is a miniaturized LBB handle

The trigger is upward-rotating, like a RF20, or Powerclip

The 'missles' are 6 inches long, and are yellow with red tips. They ahve small fins, and the missles 'whistle' much like the whistling arrows that Nerf had out for a while

The missles are loaded over the 3 inch barrel stub, much like the LBB

There are two yellow air restrictors in the first inch of the barrel

The barrel is a tiny bit more than 1/2 inch wide.

Just to give you an idea, the gun's dimensions are about the same as a Maverick plus a LBB pump handle.

The handle and trigger of the gun are halfway on the gun. That is to say, there is a 15 inch cylinder with a handle 7 1/2 inches in from either end




Ok, now that's over with and you have a very vauge idea of what it looks like, onto the gun.

The box proudly flaunted that 'this product is fitted with a safety relief valve!', yet the box also claimed that it could attain ranges of up to 60 feet with the stock missles. This was very promising, as 60 feet with very prominant air-restrictors I could see without even opening it is amazing.

I found that on the very rare occaison that the missle didn't go into a crazy death spiral straight to the ground, it attained an average distance of 57 feet (Taken from 20 shots, on flat astro-turf in a football field, fired from about 5 feet 10 inches off the ground, with little to no wind, and measured by a yard stick measuring the distance between the yard lines on the field).

However, the missles were incredibly inaccurate, and that standard Nerf arrows could not fit on it, due to the small opening in the casing surrounding the barrel post.

The very first thing I did to this gun was to cut off the first 4 inches of casing, so as to expose the barrel post. This did not impede the function of the gun, since there is a built in 'wall' that seperates the 'firing chamber' section from the internals.

The gun now could shoot Nerf Arrows, and got them around 60 feet also, though they were much more accurate.

However, I was, nor am I now, interested in the Missle/Arrow capability of this gun, so I shall now move on to the internals.


The Sonic Bazooka is very simple to open up: very large screw holes, with screws very similar to those found on Powerclips (large headed, short, stainless phillips heads). There are 9 screw on the main body, and 7 screws on the pump handle.

When the gun is opened, it is a very simple layout.

The pump handle is attached to a pump rod, which is very heavily lubed with some kind of organic oil-based lubricant (Lard). On the head of this rod, is a fairly heavy-duty o-ring, and three over-pressure release holes.

I plugged all three with hot-glue, making sure the glue was flush with the top of the holes, so the head was still flat.

The pump-rod on mine already had stress-cracks in it, and I had only fired it around three dozen times. I took some very thin strips of metal sheeting, and bent it to fit on the pump, without interfering with the pump guide (The thing that keeps it from falling out), and epoxied them on.

The tube itself is 1 inch wide by 3 3/4 inches long, meaning that at 8 pumps (When it gets very difficult to compress further) it holds ~ 74 cu inches of air.

Using my amazing abilities to determine barrel length, I decided that I'd use 8 inches of 17/32 brass (Somewhat longer than what I have on my SplitFire).

I cut off the first 1/4 inch of the barrel stub, and found I'd cut off one air restrictor, but that there was another, slightly larger one farther down. I ended up cutting the first 3/4 inch off the barrel.

I tried to nest the 17/32 in the barrel stub (which, coincidentally, fits stock Megas rather well), but it was much too loose. I rummaged around my supply of various tubes, and discovered some 1/2 inch thickwalled copper tube, that fit well around the 17/32, and fit decently in the barrel stub.

Just to be sure the air would go into the barrel, not around it, I took a random o-ring I had lying around, and epoxied it to the nested brass/copper, and it turned out to fit rather snugly, with no need for any other spacers, like electrical tape, or anything.

I then expoxied my barrel assembly into the barrel stub, and held it tightly in place in a vice for twenty minutes, to let it get a good hold while it continued to dry.

While it dried, I just went fiddling around with the trigger valve, and found that there was a leak around it: when the tank was pumped, it would hold air fine, but when the trigger was pulled, the valve the trigger engages would leak a fair amount of air, before the vavle in the barrel would engage.

I fixed this small leak with some epoxy that had not yet dried from when I epoxied the barrel in place.

Once this all set, and was in place, I tested out the the trigger vavle, and it worked beautifully.

As a final touch, just because I could, I placed all the internals back in, and filled the shell with some of this expanding foam insulation I had recently picked up.

It does not stick to the plastic in most guns, and when it dries, it is a perfect cast of all the internals. When I removed the two halves of the shell, it was a perfect mold of the inside. I took an exacto knife and cut this mold in half, and hot-glued a half to each side. It now acts as a stabilizer (which is good: the pump tube is sort of shaky and not well attached on these things), and sort of a muffler.


I went outside to test ranges, but it started snowing. Yes, snowing. On april fifth. In Rhode Island.... I didn't want to stay outside with no shirt or shoes on (I always mod half naked. I don't know why.) and only got to measure three shots, and they were all in the mid-90's. 97, 93, and 94, which averages to 94.6.

In my oppinion, being 10 feet short of a LBB for half the price and half the size, isn't too shabby.


As I said before, I've never seen these or read of these before, but that doesn't mean that this isn't a copy of someone elses write-up. Sorry if it is.

So, if you've got $5 and want two guns that rival a LBB for the same price, go for it.



Sincereley,
Pat