My kids asked me, yet again, to fix busted Nerf darts. There’s a few sitting here beside me waiting for cyanoacrylate as I type this in fact. One or two have a plastic tip that is starting to separate, another has double splits down it’s shaft. This would be less of a big deal if we had more, but looking at the stores just walking around and Nerf replacements aren’t cheap!
This led me online and down the rabbit hole of DIY foam ammo, gun mods (dart post / air restrictor removals) and inevitably looking at DIY guns (which are very similar to the water guns). I collected the kid’s 3 Nerf guns, and started researching their hackability, to see if I could get the owner’s permission to upgrade their gun.
[Pictures coming soon, will edit the post and add them when I post them]
Our current arsenal of Foam guns:
- Nerf Mini Mischief (Rebelle Secrets & Spies)
- Nerf Triad EX-3 (N-Strike Elite)
- Nerf Jolt (N-Strike Elite)
- Nerf Blast Hammer
[Edited to add the Blast Hammer, an old Nerf I got when I was younger but couldn’t find. It was discovered today!]
The first thing I learned about was the ammo. It’s high density foam backer rod (aka caulk-saver), 1/2″ in diameter, and usually sold in hardware-esque stores in 20′ rolls.
The first note I want to make is that it’s easy to straighten the curved roll, just heat them up after cutting and the bend goes away. The easiest method seems to be to put your cut blank dart into a pillow case, then heat it up with a hair dryer or tumble in the clothes dryer. Times seem to vary between ~2 and 10 minutes.
Also, the stuff doesn’t come with the hole down the middle like the Nerf darts do, and like the nerf guns require because of their dart post. There are 2 solutions to this, both obvious. You can poke a hole into/through the dart blanks, or you can take out the dart post from your guns. I’ll talk about that later.
The foam isn’t all you need, you also need to somehow put mass on the tip. There are several ways of doing this. The most basic is gluing metal washers onto the end of the foam. That’s it, bam. Various upgrades involve things like soft foam coverings, or epoxy/hot glue/silicon (EGS) coverings. Other versions use the hot tip of a hot-glue gun to carefully burn a divet into the top of the foam, which is filled with ball bearings or BBs and then covered with EGS. There are many non-metal versions, most of which use nose-weights made with EGS that are then EGS’d into a divet similar to the one used for metal mass. There are even several versions that solve the “dart post” problem and front-mass problem simultaneously, by poking a hole in the center but not quite through the top. Then poking some BBs into the tip. This gives you nose-mass and a dart-post hole.
This gives you the basis for your ammo. Most people make up jigs or holding rigs and try to do it assembly-line style in batches. Searching online shows lots of different ways of doing it and many specifics. I haven’t done it yet, so I won’t be talking about what I think is best. I’ll make a post and setup a link-back, so check the comments to see if I’ve done one yet!
Poking a hole doesn’t require any gun modifications, the ammmo can work in any gun so they be gifted or sold easily and to the same people as Nerf. The hole-creation process could be automated with some investment, and a manual jig could be constructed fairly easily. But it’s an extra step and it will produce waste of little cores. But given the other benefits of gun mods, it’s probably not something I’ll do.
Taking out the dart post enables you to use many more different ammunitions. You can still use the Nerf darts or any off-brand replacement with the hole, or you can use solid foam and DIY/homemade versions. The fastest way to do it is just to reach down the hole with a set of good needlenose pliers as far as you can, grab as tight as you can and then pull and twist until the bugger comes out. Most reports say the same thing, that ‘most of the time’ it comes out straight and clean. I haven’t done it yet, so I can’t say either way, but it’s certainly quick and dirty.
However, there are many more things that can be done, once you figure out how the things work, to make them shoot much farther/harder. Always play safe, and remember the usual caveats about eye/face protection and gun safety. Even with unmodified Nerf guns!
The guns are similar to the water guns, in that they use simple air pressure, usually generated from a manual force or a spring acting on a piston. When the piston is pulled back or the spring primed, air is sucked into the empty chamber. The snug fit holds the dart in place until the air is forced from the chamber out the barrel when you push the trigger and release the spring, or push in the piston manually. In Nerf guns, this air is forced through an air restrictor (AR), which restricts the air flow to limit the speed/force of the dart.
The easiest mod for the 3 we have here isn’t even destructive, and involves only teflon tape and a philips screwdriver. All three of the guns have removable piston mechanisms and function with just an o-ring around the piston head. The Triad was volunteered by it’s owner for this upgrade, so we opened it up (carefully, springs remember!) and began the operation. The o-ring was removed, 3-4 layers of tape were wrapped, then the o-ring was replaced and everything put back together. It’s a little tougher to pull now, and fires better I’m told. Next time we’ll be doing more before/after tests, since the concept appears now to be proven.
All of the springs could potentially be upgraded too, although the Jolt will require a rivet be carefully removed/replaced, as it’s not held in by a screw in this version. I’m not sure where locally to source suitable springs, online they don’t appear to be exactly cheap.
I have also found various ways to remove the ARs for 2 of the models. With the Triad you don’t want to remove the ARs as they make the 3-shot feature work, but the dart post removal can be done very cleanly if the AR mechanism can be removed from the back, which requires a single drill hold above a hidden screw. For the Jolt, AR removal is pulling with pliers and breaking with a flat-head screwdriver, performed up the pressure chamber. For the Mini Mischief the single screw on the barrel end can be removed and the barrel carefully extracted… but this seems to have a high probability of breakage, so I’m not sure it’s worth it and neither is that gun’s owner.
So that’s the collected thoughts so far. I’ll glue up these darts. I also went onto ebay last night and found some bulk no-name darts. They’ll be fine for practice and shooting around the house, and they were only $8 for 200! I’m not sure I can DIY ones for that cheap anyway, but now the thought of modding the guns has overtaken the original need to for diy bullets…