It's Nerf, or a cheaper, less satisfying foam dart gun.

I've been going a little overboard lately with the Nerf guns. I wasn't allowed to play with them when I was a kid and have thus far denied my own kids the pleasure, but my wife and I recently decided that it might be a good idea to let our son burn away some aggression by shooting stuff with foam darts.

A few months ago I bought a Wii game based on the Nerf concept. It came with a Nerf Switchshot EX-3, which I tucked away out of reach. It looks like this:
The air chamber (basically the entire top half of the gun) comes out and you can fit a Wii remote in its place. This makes shooting things in video games nearly impossible.

In order to turn shootin' time into bondin' time, I bought a second gun, the Nerf Nite Finder EX-3, basically the same as the one I already had, but with a little more power and a cool laser pointer. It looks like this:

I wasn't completely happy with my... our... nifty little blaster. So I went online to see if anything could be done to enhance it. I learned something interesting. Inside each and every Nerf gun is an irritating little bit of plastic called an air restrictor. What the air restrictor does, in the interest of safety... which is kind of ironic when you're talking about guns, but whatever... is to interrupt the air flow from the air chamber to the dart, thus giving the projectile significantly less oomph. The Nerf Nite Finder EX-3 will fire a foam dart between 15 and 20-odd feet out of the box. With the air restrictor removed, it will hit the clock hanging over the fireplace in my living-room when fired from near the toaster in my kitchen.

Well, today my wife found a coupon on line. A Nerf coupon. For $5 off a Nerf purchase of $25 or more. Now I have this:

This is the Nerf Recon CS-6. It has several very cool features. It has a laser sight which can be switched over to a flashlight. It has flip-up cross-hairs. It has a removable stock and removable barrel. It has a magazine which holds six rounds, just pump and fire... and then spend the next two to four minutes collecting your spent darts and reloading them.

I've looked into modifying the Recon, but the most promising tutorial involved a drill-press and a second tutorial "How to make a new air chamber if the above goes terribly wrong." I'll pass.

And just to see how cool Nerf can make you, check this out.



Thank you,
Matt Beers