Matthew Yuan designs a magazine-fed attachment for his homemade Nerf blaster, testing four 3D-printed prototypes to fix dart base tears during loading. His final design adds an intermediary tube to smooth the transition into the barrel. A rate-of-fire test compares single-dart loading against a 5-dart magazine system.
This is my homemade Nerf blaster that loads from the muzzle using suction. I made it in my previous video and I think it's pretty great, but you guys in the comments kept telling me something was missing. Would be cool if you found a way to make it mag fed. Make it magazine fed, it would be wonderful. If you make it mag fed, I will attach a magazine. So I did a little more work and created this thing. Call it an ammo bayonet, a reverse bullpup, a repeating musket, whatever you want. Now it can fire off multiple shots without reloading. In this video, I'll show you how this attachment works, how I built it, and if you stick around to the end, I'll run a rate of fire comparison to see if it really helps me shoot faster than loading darts one at a time. So as a first attempt, I made this simple 3D model. And sent it off to be made by my printer. Wait a second. Ah, that's much better. This tube had a flared end that fits onto the barrel, and I designed it so that darts can slide freely inside. It was encouraging that the blaster was able to load from the tube, but shooting all the darts at once wasn't exactly what I was going for. What I really needed was a Y-shaped tube with one branch that's bent off to the side to hold darts, and another branch that's straight to give a path for darts to fly through. The Y tube worked surprisingly well, but there's still a big flaw. To better contain the darts, I printed another version which comes with this additional piece that shuts the loading end of the magazine tube. I felt pretty good about this version, and I was almost about to use it to do my shooting comparison. But when I gathered up the ammo I fired, I noticed a concerning pattern. Many of the darts suffered the same kind of damage: a small tear at the base. I hypothesized that this damage was happening at the moment a dart turns the corner between the mag and the barrel. Because it needs to scrape past the front edge of the barrel. So in order to make this transition as smooth as possible, I designed a fourth version which has this intermediary tube with the same inner diameter as the barrel, which then allows the darts to straighten out before encountering the barrel at all. With my final version complete, the only thing left to do is to see if it actually improves my rate of fire. So I set up a simple test. As a control, I would shoot at a target 15 times, loading darts one at a time. Then I would do the same thing using my new magazine. Since it holds 5 darts, I'd need to complete 3 reloads. Whichever method works faster wins. If you're enjoying the video, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on future content. And if you want to support me directly, you can become a channel member. And in return, you'll get early video access and you'll see your name in member shoutouts just like this one. Thank you so much for watching. And now let's finish out the video. Oh, I missed! Did I miss again? Jeez. Alright, we'll count it. One of the darts went straight through, and the head blew off. I'm such a good marksman, I hit the same spot twice and knocked the step dart out.
