This Nerf pistol terrifies me

When I was in high school, I built a Nerf pistol that was so strong that I could stand in my front yard and shoot it over my house into the backyard. And no, this was not my actual house. My parents weren't the Flintstones. I have long since lost that original pistol, but the other day I was shopping around for used blasters and I found the same exact one. So of course I bought it, and today we are going to recreate what I did back in high school and try and get that amazing backyard to front yard shot again. And let's see what other fun things we can do too. Ooh, I can kind of see it. This is the pistol splat. Originally, this was a very weak paintball gun, but I was able to turn it into a very powerful Nerf gun. This is a spring-powered blaster, and the way to prime it is with this top lever. That should give you a hint as to how strong of a spring is inside this thing. Because it doesn't shoot Nerf darts right now, I can't show you its stock performance, so let's just go ahead and take it apart to see how it works. To take apart the blaster, I just ran it through my Unscrewinator. The screws smell pretty good too. Now let's take a look inside of this guy to see what kind of mod potential it might have. From a high level, this is very similar to a spring-powered Nerf blaster. You've got a plunger and a plunger tube, and spring pressure causes the plunger to fly forward and push air to force a projectile out through a barrel. It's in the details where this is very different. To start with, the spring on this blaster is perhaps the strongest spring that I've ever seen in any stock or even modified Nerf blaster. Let's do some drop tests with this stock Nerf spring, a spring that I've been using in my mods, and the pistol splat spring. I dropped the same weight from the same height onto all three of these springs, and then I looked back on the slow-mo footage and found the frame at which the springs were compressed by the most. And you can see that the pistol splat spring clearly is the strongest out of the three because it compressed by the least. Another thing that's weird about this blaster is that there is nothing in the plunger tube or the barrel that is restricting the air. Normally in a Nerf blaster, there would be a piece in there which sort of slows down the air so that you can dry fire safely, but there isn't anything like that here. And the reason is that this blaster has dry fire protection in the form of another spring. This one actually goes inside the plunger tube to act as sort of a shock absorber so that when the plunger flies forward, it's not slamming into the plastic all the time. And it just goes to show you how powerful this is that they needed another spring to counteract this one. It's like when you go to a bar and you get in a fight with someone and you tell your friends, "Hold me back, bro!" You know? Not that I ever do that. With the spring and plunger tube out of the way, you can see how this lever system works. When you prime, it pulls the plunger tube back like this until it catches. Then when you pull the trigger, the catch releases, and the plunger can fly forward again. Because there was actually nothing in the barrel, I think we can put this back together and fire some darts from it unmodified. We're going to be using these half-length darts, and they just fit into the barrel like this. A little push gets them fully seated. So let's see how fast it shoots. 100 FPS unmodified is already quite impressive, considering most Nerf blasters shoot around 70 FPS stock. But there is a big room for improvement, and that is because this barrel is very not optimal. For one, it's pretty short. I think this plunger volume is bigger than the volume of this barrel. And two, it's very, very loose on the darts. You can see that they kind of just fall in and out. That means that there's air leaking past the dart when we fire. So by making this longer and the correct fit, I think we'll get a lot more than 100 FPS. So I went to work designing, measuring, and mapping out a coupler system that I could glue onto the front of the plunger tube that a new barrel could slide into to form an airtight but removable seal. Just kidding! I didn't do any of that stuff. All I did was go to the hardware store and pick up this copper pipe fitting, and I found a scrap piece of tubing that fits the coupler perfectly, and this has a much snugger fit on my darts. So let's try it out now with this improved barrel. Does that barrel look like it's a little bit tilted? Ah, it's fine. A little bit of tilt is natural, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. Let's see what happens if we remove the buffer spring. I really think we can get more out of this, and something that I noticed just now is that there's a lot of slop in the plunger now that the buffer spring is gone. So that can easily be fixed just by adding a spacer in there of some kind, that way the spring is actually pushing the plunger for its entire travel. I rummaged around my tool drawer and I found this socket adapter which perfectly fits inside the plunger head. So with that extra bit of space now filled up, hopefully there's no more slop. Oh good, now instead of having slop, there's a little bit of pre-compression. That's perfect. I think that'll get the job done. Ooh! Shooting this blaster was low-key terrifying. Not only was it twice as fast as a normal Nerf gun, but every time I pulled the trigger, I could actually feel recoil. I learned firsthand why they had to put a buffer spring in the plunger tube in this next shot, where I accidentally fired the blaster without the barrel attached. Oh no, I dry fired it and the coupler just flew out because the spring was so strong. But that's nothing a little super glue can't fix. Now I think we're finally ready to see if this blaster is as good as the one that I made in high school. After all my efforts, was the Pistol Splat finally strong enough to fly a dart all the way from backyard to front yard? There was only one way to find out. We're back here in the backyard. Here's the house. Have this loaded. We have our camera person on the other side. Let's see if this works. Ready? 3, 2, 1. Oh, that arc was beautiful! Oh, did you see it? It fell over here. It came to like the right. Filming the perfect shot proved to be quite a challenge. Oh, that one went more to the left. My left. Oh, I definitely didn't see them. But I kept trying, shot after shot after shot. I didn't even see that one. That one almost hit me. A lot of them have disappeared, I think. Until finally— 3, 2, 1. Okay, definitely got that one. Let's go! All right, I'm coming to the front. Oh my goodness, they're everywhere! Can you believe it? This really went all the way over to here. Oh, I feel like a kid again. Okay, well, that's it. That's all for this video. Thanks for watching.