nerf blaster

9 Articles

Building A Hydrogen-Powered Foam Dart Cannon

November 1, 2024 by 18 Comments

Nerf blasters are fun and all, but they’re limited by the fact they have to be safe for children to play with. [Flasutie] faced no such restrictions when building his giant 40 mm foam dart launcher, and it’s all the better for it.

This thing is sizeable—maybe two to four times bigger than your typical Nerf blaster. But that’s no surprise, given the size of the foam ammunition it fires. [Flasutie] shows us the construction process on how the 3D-printed blaster is assembled, covering everything from the barrel and body assembly to the chunky magazine. Loading each round into the chamber is a manual process, vaguely akin to a bolt-action mechanism, but simplified.

It’s the method of firing that really caught our eye, though. Each round has a cartridge and a foam projectile. Inside the cartridge is a quantity of flammable HHO gas generated, presumably, from water via electrolysis. The blaster itself provides power to a spark gap in the cartridge that ignites the gas, propelling the projectile through the barrel and out of the blaster.

We’ve seen plenty of Nerf blasters and similar builds around these parts, including some with a truly impressive rate of fire. Video after the break.

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Pushing The Boundaries Of Tiny Mechanical Devices With Compliant Mechanisms

October 8, 2023 by 12 Comments

Mechanical actions underlie much of what makes modern day society function, whether it’s electric motors, combustion engines, switches, levers, or the springs inside a toy blaster gun that propel foam darts at unsuspecting siblings. Yet as useful as it would be to scale such mechanisms down to microscopic levels, this comes with previously minor issues on a macroscopic scale, such as friction and mechanical strength, becoming quickly insurmountable. Or to put in more simple terms, how to make a functioning toy blaster gun small enough to be handled by ants? This is the topic which [Mark Rober] explores in a recent video.

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Powerful Nerf Blaster Aims To Fire 100 Darts Per Second

September 19, 2023 by 14 Comments

Nerf has made plenty of fully-automatic blasters over the years, but their toys typically lack punch, precision, and fire rate. [3DprintedLife] set about building a blaster to rectify that last shortcoming, aiming for design that could fire 100 darts per second.

The design uses half length darts which tend to fly a little nicer from high-powered blasters. It fires them using belts driven by powerful motors, similar to wheel blasters. The darts themselves are loaded into a drum magazine which has sliders to push the darts into the wheels as the drum rotates by.

It all sounds straightforward enough, but getting it all working in harmony is a challenge—particularly at a fire rate of 100 darts per second. The build video explains the trials and tribulations involved in getting near that fire rate, with darts getting shredded and magazines throwing out parts along the way.  A good helping of iterative design helps get everything playing nice, with the darts neatly leaving the magazine and flying downrange at great speed. The slow-motion videos of darts flying out of the blaster in rapid succession are a special treat.

Files are available via Onshape for those looking to dive deeper into the design. We’ve seen some other neat Nerf blasters before, too. Video after the break.

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Modding A Nerf Blaster The Old Fashioned Way

September 3, 2023 by 3 Comments

The Pistol Splat was a very weak blaster built for children, designed to shoot toy-grade paintball-like ammunition. [Matt Yuan] recognised the potential of the single-shot design, though, and repurposed it as a powerful Nerf blaster.

The blaster is a simple spring-plunger design. Upon pulling the trigger, the spring drives the piston forward, shooting the ammunition out the barrel. As stock, the Pistol Splat featured an incredibly strong spring and an unrestricted barrel, giving it plenty of performance capability. With some finagling, it’s capable of shooting a Nerf dart at 100 feet per second in stock form.

[Matt] improved the blaster by removing its dry-fire protection spring, which consists of a second spring to resist the plunger’s motion. Modification also involved fitting a barrel sized to properly seal on the darts. These two mods boosted the dart velocity to 110 feet per second. Adding a spacer to ensure the spring fully drove the piston forward for its full travel further boosted the dart velocity to a mighty 145 feet per second.

It bears noting that serious Nerf blasters like these demand eye protection. Video after the break.

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A Nerf Ball Turret Complete With FPV

July 23, 2021 by 2 Comments

Sentry turrets have long been a feature of science fiction films and video games. These days, there’s nothing stopping you from building your own. [otjones99] has done just that, with his FPV Nerf Ball launcher.

The system works on the basic principle of launching soft foam balls via a pair of counter-rotating wheels. It’s a remarkably simple way of electrically launching projectiles without a lot of fuss and mucking around, and it works well here. A blower fan is used to gently roll ammunition towards the launcher wheels as required. There’s a hopper-style clip which uses a servo to drop one ball at a time into the launching tube.

An Arduino Uno is responsible for slewing the turret, and handling the firing process. A joystick is fitted with an NRF24L01 radio module to send signals to the Arduino to aim the turret, while an FPV camera mounted on the turret allows the user to remotely see what the turret is aiming at. With a simple pull of the joystick’s trigger, the turret opens fire.

It’s a fun build, and one that shouldn’t do too much damage to anything given the soft pliable nature of the Nerf ammunition. Of course, if you don’t want to aim your turret yourself, you can always go ahead and build yourself an automated sentry gun. Video after the break.

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3D Printing A Long Range Nerf Blaster

April 15, 2021 by 11 Comments

The modified Nerf scene used to be about getting the absolute maximum performance out of Hasbro’s off-the-shelf foam dart blasters. The community quickly found the limits of plastic parts made down to a price, and an underground market for heavier springs and CNC-machined upgrades sprung up. Eventually, however, the advent of 3D printing and cheaper home machine tools led to a rise in popularity of bespoke blasters. [Zach] has long advocated for their supremacy, and has made a long-range blaster aimed at newcomers to the hobby. (Video, embedded below.)

The blaster is built around the popular Caliburn spring-powered design, originally created by [Captain Slug]. Modifications by [Zach] involve a longer barrel, relocated side-feeding magazine port, and other modifications designed to suit the long-range sniping role. There’s even a special “rifled” stabiliser on the end designed to reduce the effects of muzzle blast from disturbing the dart as it leaves the barrel.

It’s a design that very much builds on the efforts of the wider Nerf community, and is all the better for it. [Zach] has shared files and links to parts bundles to help get enterprising builders up and running with a minimum of fuss. We’d love to take the long blaster out for a round or three ourselves – it may just be time to fire up the 3D printer!

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Big Nerf Bazooka Packs A Wallop

November 20, 2020 by 4 Comments

Nerf blasters are a fun toy, often confiscated from children once they hit one too many precious ornaments around the home in the midst of battle. [Ivan Miranda] is bigger than most children however, and set about building a much larger blaster.

The bazooka-like design uses a several meters of 160mm PVC pipe, firing “darts” constructed out of foam yoga rollers and buffing pads. The build uses a littany of 3D printed components in its construction, both as part of the firing mechanism and as jigs to help machine the pipe. A large plunger is used to propel the darts, which is pulled back against the tension of thick rubber tubes before being released by the trigger mechanism.

It’s an intimidating device, to be sure. However, we suspect its short range, huge size, and slow reload time should stop it from breaking the meta-game at your local Nerf battles. That said, we still wouldn’t want to take a shot from this bad boy to the head. Hackers do love a good Nerf build, and they’re particularly popular in sentry applications. Video after the break.

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