Long time no see/what I’ve been up to

Hey kids!

So… it’s been a while…

I am still Nerfing but my involvement in the modding and internet community has taken a massive step back obviously. A lot has changed in my life over the past few years and this blog was unfortunately one of the things that got cut back. I honestly haven’t modified a blaster in well over a year. My attention surrounding blasters has instead been focused on rebuilding my local community and getting consistent local games happening. We’re getting consistent numbers again with a lot of new people so that’s really good to see.

However, for a non-blaster project I’ve been working on recently. I couldn’t help but give you al a heads up at least once. It’s called The Light Clock and it went up on Kickstarter last night. If you’re interested in techy things, or clocks, or design, or really even if you’ve just got two minutes on your hand, do go check it out.

Cheers!

Joe

Mod Shop – Nerf Centurion – Streamline breech conversion – Part Two

Continuing on from where we left off yesterday, lets talk about the newly modded Nerf Centurion.

As is said yesterday, the clip well adapter is beautifully simple.

Place it into the stock clip well and you’re done.

Here I’ve removed the jam door to better show you how it sits in the blaster.

With a 6-clip.

With an 18-clip

Then pops out using the standard clip release button.

And again, the smaller clips are held in place by this little nub. To release a clip, simply pull down.

 

OK, enough photos, how does it actually perform? Not as well as I had hoped. I really wanted this to be at least on par with an AR’d Longshot, but it really isn’t. It’s a lot better than the stock Mega firing Centurion in that you’ll be able to use all of your existing darts and clips, but only a metre or two increase in range.

All told, I still think this is a massive step in the right direction towards making the Centurion game relevant, but there’s still quite some work to be done. My next mod on this blaster will be an attempt to improve the stock plunger tube by plugging the slits that run down the side, then I’ll have a go at replacing the spring or maybe even a complete plunger replacement. I like giant blasters and I want it’s performance to match it’s size.

Mod Shop – Nerf Centurion – Streamline breech conversion – Part One

Well this was somewhat of a surprise. Earlier this week I got a message from Pocket of Urban Taggers saying that he had a package from Blaster Parts, their “BCC – Blasterparts-Caliber-Converter for NERF Mega Centurion”. As I’m sure you all know, Pocket isn’t one for modding so I gladly offered to help.

Sooo… about those updates hey?

Good evening boys and girls! Let me kick off by saying sorry.

I’ve been super slack for over two months now and the worst part is the I didn’t even have the guts to show my face again (well, my internets face at least) and explain where I’ve been. I’d like to be able to tell you that I had some amazing excuse like work has been really busy or I had some personal reasons that kept me from posting, but the truth is that I was just unmotivated and slack. I honestly haven’t touched a modification since the Speedswarm and the only reason I got back into it tonight is because I had to fix a Stampede for someone else ahead of a game on Saturday. This then got me thinking about FDG and the guilt built up enough until I ended up in front of my keyboard, as I type this now.

So again, sorry for both the lack of posts and the lack of explanation.

 

That doesn’t meant that I haven’t been thinking about the blog and the direction it’s gone over these last 18+ months though. What was originally intended to be a resource for new modders has slowly transformed more into my own personal game log, and not a very good one at that. Partially I’ll blame my own lazy-ness here, photo dumps from games are significantly easier to prepare than full mod posts when there’s a deadline looming, but a big part of it is that I simply ran out of blasters to mod. With that in mind I’m going to be dropping the weekly posting schedule and instead posting whenever I have something worth posting, rather than posting for the sake of posting. With a bunch of new blasters soon to be released this should still mean fairly regular posts, but dropping the deadline should result in better quality and more consistent mod guides. My rants will still appear from time to time, but the mod posts will make up a larger proportion of the site.

 

I’ve also got a few other projects I’m working on that I’m pretty excited to show everyone, but they can wait until everything is completely ready to go public before we need to talk about them.

 

Thanks to everyone out there though. You’ll all be seeing more on here soon enough.

Blaster Theory – The Difference Between Knowledge and Understanding

Alright, forewarning, I’m going to be getting a little philosophical today so please bear with me. If you’re a regular reader of the Mod Shop posts but don’t stick around for much else, hang around today and you might walk away with a new lease on modding. A lot of what I’m talking about today is more important than the basics of drilling out an air restrictor or the specifics on disassembling your RoughCut. Instead try to think about today’s topics as one of the very fundamentals of blaster modding, but also something you could apply to almost any aspect of your life. Specifically, don’t just remember how to do something, try to understand how it works.

See? I told you we’d be getting philosophical!

Mod Shop – Nerf Speedswarm – Air Restrictor Removal

I’m perhaps a little late to the party on this one, but I only picked up my first Speedswarm the other week. Completely forgot about it even existing until I saw it on sale for $10. At that price I figured it was worth it, even if it was only to have a poke around inside.

With that in mind, today we’ll be running through an Air Restrictor (AR) removal.

Game – Urban Combat 2: Electric Boogaloo – 25/5/13

Another month, another game here in Sunny Canberra.

Mod Shop – Elite Alpha Trooper – Spring replacement and supporting mods

Blue Alpha Trooper!

Honestly, I never got the obsession with the Alpha Trooper. It’s a solid blaster, but I always preferred the Raider myself. Therefore I wasn’t super excited about the release of the Elite Alpha Trooper (EAT) as I already had a few Rampages to call my own. I am however apparently in the minority on this front so I grabbed an EAT to see what we could do with it. Today we’ll run through a basic air restrictor (AR) removal and replace the spring. Specifically we’ll be using a Black Tactical V2 spring which is quite a bit shorter than the stock spring, which means we’ll also need to do a few lock removals as supporting mods as well.

Mod Shop – Nerf Roughcut – Air Restrictor Removal

Today’s post will be a little different to my standard mod shop posts in that this will not be presented as a full walk-through. This is not a mod I’d recommend for first timers and will therefore only show you enough to do the mod if you were already relatively confident in your abilities.

Got it? Good 🙂

Today we’ll be going through an air restrictor (AR) removal on the recently released Nerf Roughcut.

Mod Shop – Nerf Big Bad Bow – Air Restrictor Removal

The Nerf Big Bad Bow, or BBB for short, has been released in a number of guises over the years. Back when I first started playing with blasters, I remember hearing tales about modified BBB’s that would shoot standard darts hard enough to leave welts. A giant plunger and massive draw resulted in a lot of power when you put that behind a regular old streamline. This seemed so incredibly cool that I just had to have one; only catch was, they weren’t sold in Australia at the time.

However while searching one day, my then housemate Chris came across an online stockist willing to ship. Huzzah! We instantly bought a couple and waited patiently for our order. Some weeks passed but the blasters never showed. Eventually the stockist offered us a full refund, but what we really wanted of course was the blasters. Jump ahead a few years and I bought a whole collection of blasters from a friend wanting to get out of it, including the red beast you see below.