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As soon as Eli and I (Aaron) saw the NERF chaingun pop
up on tech blogs, we couldn't wait to hack it. We bought 2 for the
office as soon as they were available, and as long as we throw the Mana
Energy Potion tag on the video, buying guns is totally tax deductible!
Cool, huh?
Cranking it Up
The first modification was to increase the voltage to
the motor. More voltage with available amperage means a faster spinning
motor. Faster motor means more rounds down range, or into Eli's face, as
the case may be.
The Nerf Vulcan EBF-25 starts with a requirement for 6
D-Cell batteries. That's an expensive number of big cells. I thought
they were all wired in series to yield about 9 volts, but I later
found out that they were wired with two parallel groups of 3 in series.
That means the Nerf gun runs at about 4.5 volts. (Update: Thanks to
Nick, I checked the original pack with a multimeter and, sure enough, it
is 9v. 6 D-Cells in series it is. Thanks Nick!)
Things you need for this step:
To connect the battery packs to the gun, we actually
had to make a little tool. The power terminals are too deep inside the
gun to clip on the alligator clips, so I took apart a ball point pen,
slit up the side, put a compressed alligator clip in it with the lead
hanging out the slit. I put the alligator clip on the battery terminal
and then pushed a tie-wrap (or chopstick) through the back of the pen,
slipping the alligator clip out and hooking it on to the power
terminals. it worked like a charm.
Hook the battery packs together like in the photo. *WARNING:
If you hook this up wrong, you could dead short the battery packs
together which could make them explode or do other scary/injurious
things.* Hook the negative power terminal from the gun to the
black lead on pack A, hook the red lead from pack A to the black lead on
pack B, and then hook the red lead from pack B to the positive power
terminal on the Nerf gun. Voila. It's done. Now separate the alligator
clips with a piece of cardboard to keep them from shorting. Stuff
everything back into the gun and close the door. Now you have a 500
round per minute cube warfare weapon of mass destruction.
5 darts in the air simultaneously! And yes,
that's a Donkey Kong machine we got off Craigslist
Adding a Round Counter
The second major mod was an LED round counter like the
one in Aliens or on pretty much every FPS gun out there, as well as a
cool paint job.
1 x Lever/Roller microswitch
1 x LED
3 x Momentary pushbutton switches
1 x 12v miniature battery
1 x Coil of wire
1 x Various paints
It took me about a half hour to solder together the
counter from QKit. A big part of that time was trying to figure out
which resistors were which, so make sure you have a guide before you
start. Instead of using the microswitches from QKit, I soldered leads
from their locations on the circuit board to pushbutton switches mounted
on the gun. The three switches are Set, Program, and Reset. The LED
comes on when you run out of ammo, which was accomplished by just
hooking it to the "out" pin on the counter.
We took the top of the ammo box off and used it to
house the counter. Jon Dremeled the spot for the LED counter out. We
Dremeled part of the chain-gripping assembly to mount the roller
switch. This way the links would hit the switch each time the belt
advanced. The leads from that switch go to the counter through holes
Dremeled in the top of the chain guide.
Thanks to his experience painting figurines, Jon did
an awesome job of painting the gun to look like it was a well-used gun
from the future. This was accomplished with a base matte black primer
coat, and then metallic silver paints mixed with various levels of black
to give variety to the metal pieces. Then Jon went in and put metallic
silver on black parts that would show wear, like behind the charging
bolt or near buttons. He said it wasn't that hard, but I was pretty
impressed.
The third mod has been done a million times before,
but it's worth mentioning. We just clipped two of the 25 round belts
together to make a 50 round belt. You can see me wearing this stylish
bandolier in parts of the video, and then we actually used the 50 round
belt in the drive-by shooting. As a side note, strangers got into the
elevator with us when we were videotaping and it was very awkward.
Bandolier? Not so stylish.
Shooting Your Coworker
I definitely enjoyed this hack WAY too much.
The total cost on this hack was about $79
Disclaimers:
1) We're not affiliated with Nerf, Radio Shack, QKits,
Dremel, or anything else you saw us use to build this. Mana Energy
Potion is the exception, because that's who we are.
2) There's a very real danger to doing this mod.
Dead-shorting battery packs like these can cause them to explode and
injure you. Nerf even has a "Do not modify this dart blaster" warning on
the gun itself. That's where we used the Dremel to cut out the panel
for the LED counter.
3) You will probably ruin your Nerf dart blaster. We
could smell the motor burning when we fired it with 4x the voltage.
Eventually, the motor coil will probably melt. Also, the gears will
probably strip out.
4) Don't paint over your orange tip. That's illegal
as far as we know. Fortunately, the orange tip is separate, so you can
paint your gun and then attach the orange tip.
Questions? Comments? Email me at
[email protected]. For
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