Axle-Gear

First of all, word to the wise:

Windows Vista + trying to transfer pics via bluetooth = BAD

Moving on, I will try to show what pictures I managed to upload and explain the steps as best as possible. Sorry if they are all huge; I forgot to shrink them down before uploading them, and I have no wishes of wrestling with Photobucket to take some down and put others in their place.

That being said, Step One:


Cut off the turret along the visible seam. I reccommend a coping saw for this. After everything above the seam is gone, you may need to take a knife to what's left of the barrels to cut out the rest of the AR's.

Step Two:


Take your favorite Rose markers, pry off the backs with a good pocket knife, and empty those suckers out. The smaller part at the marker end should b e left on, as this will help you line up the new barrels.

Step Three:


Now take one of the caps from those Rose markers, and notch it like so. This will help it straddle the middle strut of the turret. Be sure to remove the middle part of the cap!

Step Four:


Take your notched cap and some epoxy putty, and glue down the middle of the turret. This will become the part where the removable barrels attach. I just eyeballed my centering job on it, which seems to work well enough.

DO NOT RESPOND YET, STEPS 5-8+ COMING WHEN I CAN GET THE PICTURES WORKING.

Much to my fortune, some friends of mine who are into modding nerf gun had a bunch of spare parts laying around, including the gutted shell to a BBB (they complained that when singled, it left welts with stefans, and decided to decommission it), and a broken magstrike. At the time, I had with me my buzzbee mega-missle. This is what I whipped up using all three:



It turns out the magstrike pump fits right in to the pipe for the mega-missle, and all that was left to do was seal it up with some hot glue. The integration into the BBB body to make it more wieldy was more of a chore. I made this with minimal dremmeling and a cut up missle from the buzzbee gun.



The barrel is a cheap crayola marker knock-off, and it simply shoved into place and held with some electrical tape. The PVC over it just looks cool. The trigger is scrounged together from some metal bits, a paper clip, the old buzzbee trigger, and some plumber's goop.



As you can see, I use the WHOLE magstrike pump in the mod, which means it only needs about 5-8 pumps to reach a good capacity to fire a dart nice and fast. A single pump can actually give me competent distances of maybe around 30 feet with more or less angling, and can be nearly silent with the right dart (stefans make more noise, it seems). It can go up to about 15 or 20 pumps before it won't take in any more air, and it makes a nice big POP noise when fired. At the capacity, stefans travel VERY fast, but anything else tends to spin out of control and reduce range.

I have no official measurements, since I don't have the tools for it, but an occassional 100+ range with stefans wouldn't surprise me. It can fire across the entire student lounge in one of the dorms, which is a big room mind you, I'd give it at least 50-60 feet, and still smack into the opposite wall really hard.

Plus the gun is very comfortable, which was the whole point of sticking it inside the BBB shell.

So, after a month of waiting for validation, I can finally post here on Nerfhaven! I decided I'll kick things off with a mod to one of the less frequently visited guns, the Buzzbee Tek Clip. I chose to buy this gun when I first saw it simply because it was something new, and a once-over at the internals revealed that it's almost exactly identical to the RFR, and even has a few improvements, like shortening the length the air from the plunger has to travel to reach the shell. But I found a few ways to make this a much more formidable gun, and if it wasn't for the fact that it used shells, I would consider using it in a war.


Here's my Tek Clip, which I have already modified. Fortunately, these mods are simple enough that you can tell what I have changed. Now let's open this sucker up...


Our main area of attack is in the green area, where the plunger tube attaches to the space behind where the shell sits. When I picked this up, I noticed that it had a very flimbsy connection that just slid right off, which would let a lot of air escape on firing.


When you open up yours, you'll find a nub with a small O-ring on it. To improve my seal, I wrapped the whole thing in teflon tape. And since it's not a moving joint, feel free to really wrap it on there to make sure the connection is good and tight. Just make sure you don't accidentally cover up the hole in doing so.


The last two things I did was improved the plunger seal and add another spring. To improve the seal, I just put a wrap or two of electrical tape around the plunger head, put the o-ring over top of that, and applied a liberal coating of lubricant (I used some o-ring grease kept with my pool supplies, which seems to work very nicely). The spring is stolen from an RFR, and is threaded through the original spring to fit.

All told, I got pretty decent ranges out of this thing. The average shot was comparable to my modded NF (AR removal and an added spring), which is around 45 to 60 feet level. The only problem is priming the gun, which requires me to hold the gun differently in order ot get the leverage to pull back the slider.