Nerf Gun Moding

So, I definitely spent the entire first day of fall break moding my Maverick and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was super fun.

I'm gonna talk about how moding went, and I don't really care if it's interesting to anyone but me.

So, I did four mods: spring stretch, barrel drop, air restrictor and penny.

The first step was to take the gun apart. This involved unscrewing a fair amount of screws, removing the sliding top and then using a flathead to pry the two pieces of the body apart. Inside, the design is pretty straight forward. On one side of the body casing is all of the internal mechanisms including the barrel. The other piece of the body there isn't anything special except for a gap where the barrel fits when the whole thing is put together.

For the spring stretch mod all I had to do was remove the spring that pull back the air pump when the gun is cocked, and then stretch it out a few times. This creates more tension in the spring when it is put back in the casing thus resulting in a more powerful shot.

Both the barrel drop and air restrictor mods required taking the gun even further apart by removing the barrel. To do this I had to press the release button on the outside and then slide the barrel out without sending everything else flying.

I sort of did these two mods intermittently, because I kept getting frustrated with one and switching to the other. As they both involved the barrel this was pretty easy.

So, for the air restrictor mod I had to remove the metal rod running through the barrel and then remove the casing covering the back of the barrel. Then, for each of the 6 bullet tubes, I took apart the spring mechanism, threw away the spring and one of the plastic pieces. This left me with a single plastic piece that was basically a small circle of plastic with a small long piece sticking up in the middle and 5 small holes around it. The holes prevent maximum air passage reaching the bullets so I had to cut through the holes with a knife and then tear out the little pole piece. Doing this for all 6 took a while and gave me a couple nicks.

The barrel drop mod was a bit tricky. This one involved cutting two pieces off. One was on one of the sliding parts attached to the rod running through the barrel and the other was on the body casing. Both were just small, rectangular pieces meant to prevent the barrel from sliding out all the way when re-loading. But this also makes is harder and slower to re-load. I had to cut these two pieces off, but I had to be careful not to cut off any more than necessary. I did it eventually, though it required a fair amount of jiggling the knife in awkward positions.

The penny mod was super easy. I just took three pennies and put them behind the spring that I first stretched. This once again increased tension and removed empty space that is there as a safety to prevent the gun from shooting too hard.

After all this was done, I spray painted the outside of the gun with spray paints my friend AD lended me.

I used blue and black. I painted most of the body blue and the barrel black.

Overall, today was a very good day.