Early Mods

-note-
Images will be added soon

These are some of my initial modifications. I feel like these are necessary to share, but do not deserve to have an entire blog each.

My first flywheel nerf blaster that I had ever received was the Buzzbee Rapid Blast. It existed around the time of the barricade and dates back to 2010. The weapon never got used much by me, however, because poor design on behalf of Buzzbee rendered the gun unusable to all types of darts except their yellow and purple suckers. Even then, the blaster jammed quite much and was too impractical to use. For that reason it sat, collecting dust, in the back of my closet until just a short time ago. I broke it out one day, wondering “It would be a pity to let this go to waste, why not mod it?”

 And mod it I did, using what limited resources I had at the time, I used a Dremel to grind off the extra length of the lip that shrouded the flywheels. This allowed non-Buzzbee specific darts to be shot from the blaster and increased reliability tenfold. Although the weapon was more reliable, the range left something to be desired, so I inserted some old barricade flywheels into the blaster (this was because that was all I had at my disposal). This was possible because of the unique design of the cage. Instead of completely surrounding the flywheels, it more resembled a platform, holding the flywheels on one side without any sides, rails, or constraints. 

Soon another issue surfaced. The rapid blast was missing any sort of protective barrier on the underside of the flywheels (see picture), so any misguided darts would find themselves within the shell below the cage. To remedy this, I took an old payment card, chopped it to fit the outline of the shell, and glued it in place. 

I had the blaster powered with some Li-Ions, as they provide a quick, drop-in boost of power I am not proud to say that, but they worked adequately for me at the time. (this is because Li-Ion batteries (as well as other types like IMRs) are heavily frowned upon as a “mod” in the nerf community, as their output current cannot handle anything beyond stock motors. Be warned!)I have since moved on to other blasters, so this one hasn’t gotten much attention from me since.

My next more professionally made blaster was this Rapid Red (or as I like to call it, the Rapid Blue). I have a good friend who graciously donated this to me after he ran out of time to finish it. As you can see, he got around to painting it before  I received it. For that reason, it is not quite my painting style (you can see my style in later projects), although this blaster much defined my loadout paint scheme in later builds.

The first thing I did was print off a 42mm OFP cage. I already had easy access to a 3D printer then, (now it’s two) so I cranked one out and dropped it in. The second thing I did to this weapon is drop in some meishel 2.0 motors. They had just been released when I was doing this, so I had decided to try them out in this blaster. The final thing I did to this blaster was give it a complete rewire. Stock wires are hair-thin and don’t cut the standards for almost any sort of modification, so I replaced them with some nice, thick wire.  The result is what you now see here. 

You can see the 3D printed battery door I have added onto the front to the blaster. That is because I lost the original quite some time ago.
Edit: oops! I also seemed to have lost the 3D printed one as well! How ironic.

 

I will have chronograph data on these two builds soon.