Sunday, October 3, 2010

Maintaining your Nerf..

It's important to get in between the cracks. 

My general take is to store your blasters in manner similar to how they arrived in the box- ie dart, clips and any blaster attachments removed. It just makes sense to me, but some people have actually given thought to this and given rationales as to why this is good practice:) 

Recently, I've heard you shouldn't load your clips until you're actually going to play with them. This NEVER occurred to me until I thought about it and realised that it made a whole lot of sense. They clips are spring loaded, and therefore having darts in them means the spring is compressed.. and the longer they are kept in that state, the less "spring" they'd have when the spring is released. In theory this would affect the 35 round drums more than a 6 round clip.. but either way.. it makes sense to empty them.

The spring issue is also with the blasters themselves. It probably makes sense to ensure your blasters are unprimed when storing them- priming the blaster means compressing the spring.. and there's probably no reason to actually DO that if you're not playing with your Nerf blasters. (that being said, I've read multiple times that some people stand by keeping them primed for months on end to increase distance- I can't understand HOW this would work but.. everyone's got their opinions)

Air pressure blasters should also be unprimed, as the air pressure bladder would be similar to the principle of a blown up balloon- the longer the air stays in there and the more you pump it up, the less "stretchy" the balloon/bladder would be and thus resulting in decreases in performance. This goes for Super Soakers as well.

Putting your darts in a pillow case and blowing hot air via a hairdryer into it is supposed to restore the darts from being squished and bent. I actually have never tried this but I GUESS it makes sense?

Keep your darts away from pets:)


  1. Phew... Sexy ladies there... Checking those blasters... Clean them all...

  2. How did you get those fine ladies in that photoshoot? Does your girlfriend know about it? If so, is she going to kill you anytime soon?

  3. kill me? She invited them! Who else is going to clean my Nerf? :)

  4. send them over to my place so they can clean my vulcan and stampede

  5. Here's a little trick I've been using for about the last year, when you have bent or damaged streamlines put them in a maverick for a week or two, the center post and time seem to do wonders for my darts. The only time I throw away darts is when the cats find em before I do.

  6. pillocase and hairdryer work, be careful not to blow hot air on the darts directly and keep them moving. watch out for micro darts they tend to stick together. I always unprime my guns and empy my clips i tend to do it by habit thinking that the plastic would be under pressure from the springs. Also as many know, do NOT ever DRY FIRE. If you have a clip in there cock it back take out the clip and inset a dart into the gun manually.