ferball

I have made a few of bows very similar to this. I would recommend heat forming your bow arms for a better aesthetic and performance. There are a ton of you tube videos on how to make a re-curve pvc bow, it will make a nice difference.

I am about 20 minutes south of Dartmouth. The closest I get to Nerf war around here is beating up on my 12 year old kid and his friends. I would not mind adding our numbers to an organized event as long as it is kid friendly, I hate being the creepy old dude, so I bring my kid along to excuse my behavior.

I have never played in an "official event" but my weapon of choice is bow. It is based off of one of Carbon's Snap bows so it was easy to make and cost less than $10, apply some of the other PVC bow tech you can find on the interweb to your design and you have some power, add a hopper and as fast as you can pull it back is as fast as it will shoot. I am not sure it would be legal at an event, but if you are playing with friends the thing is simple, powerful, and great ROF

The flywheel weight can go in two directions. The fully auto blaster probably has a heavier fly wheel to reduce the stall between shots. Heavier means more inertia. This is not desirable in the semi autos with the trigger actuated fly wheels as a more inertia means longer spin up time. So I am guessing the answer to the fly wheel weight question is like most: "It depends". I personally would lean toward the lighter wheel, faster spin up time means less battery drain, but my play style is not about spitting lots of foam, I like to pick my shots, I run my Stockade on a standard 9 volt and get pretty decent run times out of it. If I liked laying down a steady stream of foam a heavier fly wheel would make sense to maintain a high rate of fire but my battery requirements would mean a heavier gun if I wanted to to keep a respectable run time. There is a reason a Swarmfire runs on C cells instead of AA's. Just my thoughts to contribute to your query.

I'll try and dig up the link, but past experiments have shows it doesn't work very well. The foam tends to be too stiff, difficult to get out of the tube, and too open celled to be a good dart.

A little more experimenting today shows that the high expansion foam will indeed be to open celled. The low expansion 'window and door' type foam has a nice cell structure. Hopefully I will have time to make and test fire a few this weekend.