Game – HvZ + Nerf War – 26/5/2012

Good evening everyone!

Just last weekend I attended a game with the Canberra and Southern NSW Dart Tag group. This game in particular was Game of Thrones themed, so people were encouraged to bring along their melee weapons in addition to their blasters. We don’t normally use melee so it was an interesting addition. There were also a bunch of people who took the theme to heart and really dressed up for it. Throughout the day we played an assortment of blaster/melee on blaster/melee games, and a few HvZ based games.

This round had been organised months in advance and well advertised so we were expecting a turn out better then usual. Unfortunately the preceding week had been stupidly cold and raining and based on the predictions for Saturday on the Friday night, things weren’t looking any better. To my surprise however, I awoke to shining blue skies. Packing the car was then a different story yet again. Holy crap was it cold; windy, wet and miserable. My housemate and I made out way out the park fully expecting to find practically nobody there. Boy were we surprised to see a sizable group of people.

We normally get 25 people to a game, maybe 35 if the stars all align. Our first game today, even in the miserable weather, saw a turnout of 40+. To say we were happy with that would be an understatement.

To kick things off we ran a few short games; melee vs blaster and melee/blaster vs melee/blaster. Here’s the initial briefing.

Throughout the day we transitioned into a number of different games. Capture the flag, straight elimination, HvZ, HvZ + juggernauts, tug of war, etc.

Unfortunately for all of you, I was playing most of those games and didn’t really get a chance to take photos. Therefore you’re basically stuck with photos from the last tug of war.

Homemade Mod Shop – FDG:B1

Hello boys and girls!

Today makes somewhat of an interesting occasion. Next weekend the Canberra and Southern NSW Dart Tag group is running a Game of Thrones themed game and the lord has called for archers. I’d been thinking about it for a while but I really should get around to making some form of homemade and what better excuse than to kick off with a bow. They’re easier than most other homemades as they don’t require a catch and are therefore comparatively simple.

Props should also go to Asianassassin325′s RSCB bow on OzNerf at this stage. It’s funny how things work out but I didn’t actually intend to build something so similar. I started off by simply picking out PVC joiners at Bunnings and figuring it out in my mind as I went along. Once I got home I decided to have a quick browse around the forums to see if anything similar had been done. Turns out that not only had it been done, but that I’d actually read the thread only a few months prior. I’m guessing I’d taken some ‘inspiration’ from Asianassassins’s build by this point.

One last thing before we kick off that I’d like to add; please don’t build this bow. It’s actually kinda bad. You’ll notice that the title of this post is the FDG:B1. Curious as to what that means? It stands for FoamDartGoodness:Bow version 1. The implication there is that there will be further revisions based off what I learned on this one. And by that, I mean I’ve already made the FDG:B2 and it’s both cheaper to buy the materials for and more robust. I’ll be doing a write up on that relatively soon, but for the time being please just think of this post as ‘inspiration’ for your own works.

Ok, enough talk, lets get to it!

Tools/materials required…

~2m 15mm PVC pipe
15mm PVC fittings; 2xTee, 1xRight angle, 2xEnd cap
~500mm of 40mm PVC pipe
40mm PVC end cap
40mm-20mm PVC reducer
20mm-15mm PVC reducer
~100mm of 16mm conduit
~100mm of 20mm conduit
32mm bath plug
Small bolt, nut and two washers
PVC solvent
Strong glue
Hot glue + gun
Electrical tape
Modelling putty
Knife
Heat gun
Dremel with cutting + grinding attachments
Drill + assortment of bits
Mallet/hammer
Needle nose pliers
~2m of some variety of wire (something to use as the bow string)

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Most of the components.

All right, lets start by making the plunger head.

Pry the pull ring off with a pair of pliers.

Push the centre button out.

Grab a 15mm PVC end cap.

Drill a hole in the centre of it, the same diameter as your bolt.

Grab the plug, end cap, nut, nut bolt and washers and assemble them in this order.

Like so. Make sure the nut/bolt is done up tight.

Same thing, different angle.

Fill this space with hot glue for additional support.

Now set it aside to dry. We’ll finish this part later.

At this point some of you may realise that I in fact bought the wrong reducer. Pressure rated pipe is different to non-pressure rated. Dang.

Oh well, can’t be bothered going back to Bunnings so lets make this work.

I cut off the 32mm side of the reducer.

Got a rough idea of how it would fit with the 20-15mm reducer.

Attacked it with a heat gun and mallet and made it fit.

Then did the same to one end of the 40mm PVC to flare it out a little.

Allowing the cut up reducer to fit.

See, fits…

Aplly some solvent to all three pieces and hammer together.

Same thing, different view.

Work out how much of a draw you want your bow to have and cut the 40mm PVC to be a little longer than that. I my case I went with ~700mm.

Cut three ~40mm lengths of 15mm PVC.

Glue one in to the front of the plunger tube.

Another to the front of a tee piece.

The third to the top of the same piece.

This is then what we’re aiming for.

Grab a small piece of something. Could be pretty well anything provided it fits inside 15mm PVC.

We’ll need to to sit roughly here, except inside the fitting.

Like so. You want it to act as a blocking point for air continuing forward, but not to impede airflow upwards.

View from the front of the tee piece.

Grab some modeling putty and seal off around the forward part of the tee. We’re ideally looking for a nice smooth transition for the air coming from the back of the tee, through the top.

Make sure that no air can escape forward, it all has to go up. Test this by covering one hole and blowing in the other; if air escapes, find the leak and plug it.

Now got back to the front and fill the PVC with hot glue. This both helps secure the blockage we place before and makes absolutely certain that there’s no forward leakage.

Now glue the adapted tee piece to the front of the plunger tube.

Like so.

Then add another tee to the front.

Like so. Make sure that this one is perpendicular to the last.

Back to the now presumably dry plunger head. Glue the end cap to a length of 15mm PVC.

Insert it in the plunger tube and measure ~70mm past the end of the plunger tube. Take the plunger head/rod out and cut here.

Cut a piece of 16mm conduit a little longer than the width of your fist.

Drill a hole right the way through the plunger rod, ~25mm in from the end.

Dremel out the hole until you can fit the 16mm conduit through it.

Like so.

Glue on a 15mm end cap.

Reinsert the plunger head/rod and we’re most of the way there.

Cut two pieces of 15mm PVC to an equal length for the arms. The length here will play a part in determining the strength of the bow. I ran with 700mm.

Cut two pieces of 20mm conduit, ~40mm long.

Heat up the end of each of the arms enough to force the piece of 200mm conduit.

This will help with strengthening the bow string mounting points.

Drill two small holes right the way through the PVC and conduit.

Do the same to both arms obviously.

Ok, so I may have skipped a photo or two here but you should be able to figure out what went on. Glue the arms to the tee piece at the front of the blaster. Then run your chosen bow string from one arm, through the conduit handle, to the other arm.

Tada! One bow.

You’ll then need to sort out some variety of barrel. I did all of my testing on this bow with a simple right angle bend into nested 16mm conduit, but the long term plan was to run a RSBC or possibly a hopper. We’ll see how that pans out.

Here’s how the wiring ended up. I used an insulated copper wire as it was lying around, but turns out to be a decent choice as it’s still enough not to pull through just like this.

With the excess simply wrapped around until I figure out where it needs to go.

That’s about it folks. My first functional homemade with many more to come.

Mod Shop – Conduit Breech

Good evening everyone!

Aight, so I’ve been a little lazy on the blaster front recently and haven’t actually done any modding for a good few weeks. This has unfortunately meant that I’ve eaten up pretty well all of my pre-prepared content and have had to go out and actually do something. Today’s post is something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time but never really got around to doing. Given that I objectively needed something this week, I decided to give it a crack.

The idea here it that it’s a slide action breech that accepts standard Nerf streamlines in standard Nerf clips. In my case it was intended for a blaster that already had a 20mm conduit coupler on it, so the end on this breech is therefore 20mm conduit. However, if you were to permanently attach it to a blaster or aim to use a different coupler, I’m sure you can figure out how to do that.

Also I need to give a should out to Acerised’s thread on OzNerf that came up with a really easy way to get it back to a 20mm end.

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Tools/Materials needed

16mm conduit
20mm conduit
15mm PCV
15mm PVC coupler
Hot glue + gun
Electrical tape
Knife
Dremel with cutting and grinding attachments
Hammer/mallet
Heat gun
Drill with coat-hanger sized bit
Coat-hanger
Permanent marker
PVC solvent

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Start by cutting a 5cm length of both 16 and 20mm conduit.

Grind down a little of the outer edge of the 16mm conduit.

So you can start to insert it in the 20mm conduit.

Then hammer it in as far as you can.

Like so.

Then cut the exposed 16mm conduit flush.

So it looks like this.

Grab some 15mm PVC, warm it up with a heat gun and insert your nested 16/20mm conduit, 16mm end first. Once the PVC cools, pull the conduit out, cover it in solvent and reinsert.

Drill a small hole right the way through all three sections of pipe.

Cut a section of a coat-hanger and insert it through the hole.

This will act as our dart stopper.

Bend the coat-hanger around the outside and trim it to length.

Fill the outside with hot glue to seal the holes.

Grab a 6 clip and press it over the PVC pipe, a little forward of the dart stopper. Draw around where it touches.

Remove the clip and you should end up with something like this.

Then fill in the middle.

Cut a piece of 16mm conduit to be your barrel. The length of which is entirely dependent on the blaster you intend on using it on. In this case I ran with 300mm.

Move to one end of the conduit, grab a knife and gradually carve out the inside to make a funnel.

Like so.

Place the barrel piece next to the outer breech we cut earlier. Mark a spot on the outer breech, with enough length still infront of it to allow a decent chunk of the barrel to be exposed.

Cut the outer breech at said mark,

Slide the barrel in as far as it goes.

Measure up another piece of PVC so that it’s a little longer than the exposed barrel.

Cut again at said mark.

Ok, now that all the parts are here, lets test it before we go any further. Grab a 6 clip again and fill it with darts.

Slide the barrel all the way in and insert the clip.

Slide the barrel far enough forward that a dart gets pushed up by the clip.

Slide the barrel all the way back.

Now, pull the barrel out and check to see if the dart loaded. Success!

Remove the dart and try again.

Slide the barrel all the way back.

Pull it out and hopefully it’s grabbed another dart. In this case the dart was actually far enough in that you couldn’t see it, so I pulled it out a little so you could see.

If it’s not loading correctly, try smoothing out the funnel on the end of the barrel or check the dart stopper.

All right, now that we’re satisfied that it works, lets continue. Grab a 15mm coupler.

Glue it to the end of the outer breech.

Run a bead of hot glue near the outer end of the barrel.

Then push the piece of PVC we cut earlier over the top of it. The barrel needs to be as far back as it can go, and the new PVC should be nesting neatly in the coupler.

Let it dry, then remove the barrel.

Run another bead of hot glue, this time around the back end of the barrel outer and the barrel.

Reinsert the barrel and check your clearances.

Pulling it in and out of the coupler should be relatively easy.

Works? Good.

Pull the barrel right the way out.

Wrap a few layers of electrical tape around the back end of the barrel.

Test that it fits in the breech. This part will be incredibly particular. You need to get the seal as tight as possible, but still allowing movement. Easiest way to do this is to stick a finger down the end of the barrel to jam it, then blow down the end of the conduit. If there’s lots of air escaping, the seal isn’t good enough. Trial and error here people.

There we have it. One homemade, N-strike clip accepting breech. You can now but this on anything from a Triple Shot, through to a Titan; whatever floats your boat. The seal will never be perfect so ranges will never be as good as a singled barrel, but reloading sure is a hell of a lot easier.

Mod Shop – AS4 – BBUMB/Rapidfire intergration

Good evening ladies and gents. Another advanced mod today and not so much of a walk though. First up I want to give credit to Bakabill on OzNerf for his semi auto Magstrike that provided the original inspiration to have a go at this (and in a round about way, I should probably mention Banshee’s Blast-Strike on NH and Lefty’s Mega-Strike too).

Basically my situation was that I’d seen Bakabill’s Magstrike write up and thought it was worth a crack, then realised I had a only somewhat reliable Rapidfire AS-20 sitting at the bottom of my Nerf cupboard. Thought about it for a day or two and decided bugger it, I’ll just pick up another BBUMB and give this a go.

I’m not going to go into any real detail with this as it should be fairly self explanatory for those who know what they’re doing, but I am happy to answer any questions.

So to kick off with, we have an AS-20.

I started by removing the outer black shell.

Then the inner yellow shell.

This valve here is what we will use for the BBUMB tank refill button.

Strip the shell and Dremel away until the tank fits.

Move to the bottom of the blaster and cut a slot for the refill button.

Put the back bladder/pump assembly back in and test fit the fill button.

Like so.

Test fitting the main tank and the T-piece for the RSBC.

Cut the smaller tube to an acceptable length and re-attach the check valve.

OK, I kinda skipped a few steps here but you’ll get the idea.

The tube from the fill valve at the bottom now leads to the stock BBUMB check valve.

The AS20 trigger is now attached to stock lever from the BBUMB.

It’s then sprung to pull the trigger back and to close the tank.

I took the whole post that originally held the lever in the BBUMB too. Made things much easier.

Trigger in it’s natural position.

Trigger pulled.

The trigger has been removed in this photo so you can see the slot I had to cut in the bladder tank.

This random orange thing was glued in the bottom of the shell as a stopper for the bladder.

See! Here it is with the bladder fully expanded, hard up against the stopper.

I had to do this so that it didn’t interfere with the trigger mechanism.

That’s about it in a nutshell. The barrel is 300mm of 17/32 brass, the back half of the RSBC holds 4 darts, there’s a screw on end cap on the end.

So how does it all work? From the top;

Unscrew the end cap, insert 4 darts, screw it back on.
Pump 10-15 times.
Press the fill button at the bottom (fills the BBUMB tank from the AS20 bladder).
Flick the front of the blaster towards the ground (gets another dart jammed in the barrel).
Pump 10-15 times.
Pull the trigger to fire (opens the BBUMB tank).
Press the fill button, flick the front of the blaster towards the ground, pull the trigger to fire.
Press the fill button, flick the front of the blaster towards the ground, pull the trigger to fire.
Press the fill button, flick the front of the blaster towards the ground, pull the trigger to fire.

Tada! Start at step 6 and you can fire 4 darts in 3 seconds, each hitting ~30m flat. Check the video below for an example (albeit nice and slow so you can see what’s going on).

FB Video – Canberra and Southern NSW Dart Tag

(I tried so many times to get that to embed, nuts to that you’re getting stuck with a link)
PS: ‘Like’ the page!

Cheers all,
Joe

Modshop – RSCB

Right, a somewhat continuation of the last post in that this RSCB was originally intended to go on the TripleShot we did last week. The RSCB is an amazingly simple device that doesn’t get anywhere near as much credit as it deserves. A sort of inline clip if you will, it allows you to fire darts relatively quickly, yet still retain impressive power. It’s easy to make, easy to use, reliable, efficient and effective. Today’s post will walk us through not only the construction of one, but also the theory behind it.

Here’s one I prepared earlier attached to a BuzzBee Ultimate Missile Blast (BBUMB). In TLDR form, the RSCB works by recirculating air up from the blaster nozzle, through the T-piece, bouncing off the end cap at the cap and pushing a dart through the barrel and out the front. After re-priming the blaster simply flick it downwards quickly, forcing the next dart line into a funnel just in front of the T-piece and reloading the blaster. In this case I chose to use 30cm of 17/32 brass tubing protected by an outer covering of PVC pipe. You can use practically any barrel material you like in an RSCB, but it’s effectiveness heavily dependent on the blaster that’s powering it.

Ok, now on to the construction! To make an RSCB you will need the following tools/materials….

15mm PVC pipe (50cm would probably do you but 100cm would be better)
15mm PVC T-piece, right angle bend and ball valve
Dremel, complete with cutting and grinding tools
PVC solvent
Hot glue
Electrical tape
Some variety of barrel material, depending on the blaster in question

The one I’ve made here was specifically designed to be able to go on a number of different blasters, so I’ve left the end as 15mm PVC so it can connect to a coupler. You can however attach it directly to the output of the blaster if you never intend to change it.

Here are the parts as mentioned.

Start by cutting three lengths, each roughly 40mm long. They don’t have to be exact but they should be better than what I’ve pictured. I didn’t realise how short the one on the left was until I took this photo. That one was thrown back in the parts bag and another one cut.

Apply a liberal coat of PVC solvent to both the inside of the right angle bend and one section of pipe, leave it for about 30 seconds or so, then join them together.

Do the same with the t-piece on top of the right angle bend. Be careful to make sure that the two backwards facing openings are perfectly aligned. If you’re lucky, your fittings will have mold lines that make it easier to line up.

Grab another small section of pipe we cut earlier and glue it in the other end of the right angle fitting. This is what we will use to connect to the coupler on the blaster, so feel free to skip this step if attaching directly to the blaster.

Cut another section of 15mm PVC, the length of which will depend on how many darts you want to be able to load at once. The downside being that the longer the ‘clip’ is, the more power that will be robbed by the RSCB. In this instance I was aiming for an RSCB that could be used on an assortment of blasters so I went with a length of 400mm, allowing for 6 darts to be loaded.

Glue it into the back of the t-piece.

Grab the 15mm ball valve and mark the point where the pipe mounting point ends.

Then make a cut. We want to get relatively close to the ball itself, but make sure you don’t hit the ball.

Glue it to the back of the assembly. Come back once it’s dry, close off the ball valve, cover up the bottom entry and blow into the front. If it’s air tight, we’re good! If there’s a leak, plug it with hot glue!

Pick your chosen barrel material and nest it within some 15mm PVC, with roughly 5mm extending past the barrel. Grab the grinding attachment on your Dremel and grind a funnel into the end of the PVC. We need to end up with a gradual funnel that forces darts into the smaller barrel. Catch is, no photos yet sorry as I haven’t actually figured out which barrel material I want to run on this one yet. Tried a bunch but can’t seem to make my mind up

This is where I’m unfortunately going to leave it for the moment.

So instead we’ll jump back to one we prepared earlier!