Being late diagnosed ADHD (and bonus Autism) means that I’m usually working on about 15 things at any one time, 3 of which will actually get somewhere near finished while the others end up in the graveyard of unfinished projects. I also don’t tend to post much here about those various things despite always having the intention of doing. So, I’m going to try and start posting more about all the random stuff I have on my desk at the moment which includes Nerf, a new router, a 3D printer build, some DIY stuff…..
NERF!
First up…nerf. Yeah, the foam darts & blasters. A couple of christmases ago my sister bought my kids a couple of nerf blasters. They played with them a couple of times, the younger one took a dart to the face and they got put on top of a cupboard to gather dust. Last week I stumbled across them and apparently the bit of my brain that does special interests got really really interested in them because now I have 7 blasters and several hundred darts and a ludicrous amount of knowledge about the hobby. Because yes, it is a hobby. It’s much more popular in the US where they have competitive tournaments, but yeah grown men buy high powered foam dart flingers and run around shooting each other with them.
Wait, high powered you say? Yeah, see Nerf manufactures blasters that propel full length darts (the kind most people are familiar with) at speeds of around 60 to 70fps (feet per second). However, there are manufacturers (and hobbyists / 3D printers) who make blasters that can hit anything from 150 to 250fps. XShot for example released their longshot blaster a year or so ago which is a pump action springer primary that will handily hit 150fps. There’s some really good X-Shot Longshot reviews like this one from WalcomS7 that give a lot of great detail about the blaster, so check those out if you’re interested.
Pump action springer primary? So there’s lots of different types of blaster (I keep saying blaster by the way because in the hobby it’s frowned upon to draw paralells with real firearms. So blasters instead of guns, darts instead of bullets etc. Some of them, like this one, rely on a spring which pushes a plunger, creating air pressure which propels the dart forward. There are also flywheel blasters like the Nerf Elite Phoenix which have 2 battery powered spinning flywheels. The darts are pushed in between the flywheels at which point they’re propelled forwards. There’s all sorts of rabbit holes you can go down with flywheel blasters, the most common one being the batteries, since most people like to mod their blaster with lipo rechargable batteries, which have a much higher power output and give a higher rate of fire.
And if you like the idea of electric blasters but don’t want the noise of a flywheel blaster (and they can be a little noisy) you probably want an electric piston type blaster (or AEG, or AEB. I don’t know why). These use a similar setup to springers, ie a spring driven plunger, but the spring is pulled back by a motor. This type of blaster is a little thin on the ground since the increased number of moving parts makes them more expensive than flywheels or springers. Nerf invented the style with their venerable ‘Stampede’ blaster and more recently XShot released an AEB blaster which appears to be pretty impressive (although people in the US report it seems difficult to get hold of).
Since we’re talking about the XShot AEB, there’s a few features in that picture worth talking about. First off the darts in the magazine are half length darts. These are, as the name implies, half the length of tranditional nerf darts and are actually the de-facto standard dart used competitively in the hobby. The XShot longshot we talked about earlier actually comes with an adaptor to allow half length darts to be used in it, and comes with a half length dart magazine (commonly known and standardized as a ‘Talon’ magazine) as well as a full length one. Some commonly found half length darts include ones from worker and dartzone. They come in different weights as well as different shapes (with worker ‘bamboo’ darts for example having ridges which reduce friction in the barrel while still offering a good seal.
You’ll also notice the section at the end of the barrel that appears to be twisting or rotated. This is a ‘BCar’ or ‘Bearing SCAR’ attachment which essentially does the same job as rifling in a real firearm, it makes the projectile spin as it leaves the barrel to stabilise it in flight and increase accuracy. The BCAR uses bearings to reduce friction compared to the older ‘SCAR’ attachments which used plastic grooves or string to impart the spin.
Mods
So, let’s talk about another side to the hobby: Modding. You know the flywheel blasters we talked about earlier? Well as well as lipo batteries you can get kits that include new flywheels and motors to improve performance. For manual springers you can (somewhat obviously) install new springs and remove air restrictors to make them hit faster and harder. You can even find whole 3d printed blasters on your usual 3d printing websites that fire faster, more accurately and harder than anything from Nerf or other manufacturers. I particularly like the ‘Silly’s Lever action Blaster’ because I’m a big fan of lever action blasters:
Which leads me to my current favourite blaster, and one I hope to be my first modding project, the XShot Lock blaster. This thing is so cool, just look at it! It’s a revolver (8 shots in a cylinder) lever action rifle with an admittedly stupid gimmick (those dials on the front act as a combination lock which won’t let you prime the blaster unless it’s set correctly). It’s not a pro blaster by any stretch, hits like a standard nerf toy, but that’s perfect for me since I usually just plink at targets or have battles with my kids. My plans for modding it are removing the front section and replacing the cylinder with a 3d printed magazine feed and a new ‘breach’ which seals more tightly and gives more performance. Watch this space!
If you’re interested in learning more about the hobby Check out the following Youtubers: