we know you love the One Day Builds and so do we

and here comes one right now.

But we also promised that more One Day Builds will be coming more frequently starting now,

and today's is really really cool

Still very popular is the secret santa NERF mod I did last Christmas

and today is another NERF mod.

This is without a doubt my favorite NERF gun I have ever seen.

It is the "NERF Rival"

and it fires a hundred shots in a row out of this hopper.

This is what it fires these little yellow foam balls.

Ooo perfect!

But a hundred shots in a row is...

...nifty

but maybe improvable,

so I want to modify the NERF Rival so it fires...

[thunk]

... a thousand shots in a row.

Uh-huh. I'm gonna make a much bigger hopper

and I will also aestheticize this.

Here comes today's One Day Build: NERF Mod.

[techy intro music]

Now the folks at NERF are geniuses at firing

safe projectiles in innovative ways and the mechanism of the Rival is

actually worth going into some detail about because I'm really impressed with it

The basic mechanism for firing these balls operates like a pitching machine

right on the other side of these two panels are

Two spinning wheels that when the ball gets to them, "Fook!" It shoves them out just like a pitching machine

But how it gets the balls to those spinning wheels is even cooler

So there's a couple of parts to it on the left side here

You see these little gear wheels and then on the right side, you see that little black belt

So what happens is when you fill this hopper full of balls

You pull the first trigger, which is down here,

[mechanical whirring]

and you hear that

That's the wheels spinning up.

Then you pull the second trigger and that activates these agitating wheels and the conveyor belt

[thumping]

[delighted laughter]

[thumping]

[whirring stops]

Oh?

[whirring and thumping]

Oop! [laughter]

Sorry Joey

So here is my overall plan for the mechanical aspect of this.

The hopper that fires the balls...

There it is.

That's the whole thing. This holds a hundred balls.

I'm gonna add a magazine onto this that holds a thousand balls

In addition, I have some other mods I want to do

I've got some Picatinny Rails, Red Dot Scope and some other aesthetic details that I've drawn out.

But first and foremost, I need to figure out how big these magazines should be

and so I need to do some volumetric testing with a thous- Wow, that feels really cool

First I need to work out the volume of how big these magazines need to be to hold 1000 shots

I have a couple of pristine pieces of foam core here

Let's say... that...

ok so...

[drawing]

[slicing]

[slicing]

[snap]

[sticky tape sound]

[sticky tape sound]

[slicing]

Well this gonna be great

Whoa, okay.

[astonished laughter] That's heavy!

All right that just comes up to here

Yeah, I like the dimensions of that better.

Let's see what I got here.

Ooo!

Wow, I got it kind of exactly right so by my volumetric estimation this size for a magazine

Is awesome, but it is only holds 900 balls. So

It needs to be a little longer so 3.3 inches taller, so it needs to be

34 inches. Let's say 34 inches 34 inches

I am NOT doing a single magazine. Oh, no, I'm not doing a single magazine

I'm doing a double magaz- a double magazine

which means that half of 34 is

17. [laughs] that took me longer than it should have

Yeah, so now we're getting into the design because I'm not gonna make these straight magazines

Oh, no, I have bigger plans. I'm gonna make these curved magazines

Cuz come on that's gotta look

It's got to look the part

one more sheet of foam core to figure out the exact curve and then and then and then

I'm gonna start cutting this out of acrylic. Yeah

so here's what we're gonna have is we're gonna have one magazine on this side

and one magazine on this side. Right?

Like that, like a like a Flying V

I thought they might be upright. But no no now I think they're gonna be like this

That's gonna be frikken fantastic.

That's... I'm really excited about that.

I also noticed that with the completely parallel sides when I tried to dump this out

the, uh

The balls got stuck in there.

So that tells me that actually I want my magazine

To be thinner at the top and wider at the bottom, uh-huh

I'm gonna cut out four pieces of eighth inch acrylic that are gonna be the main body of the magazine

[whispers] wow, that is a big gun.

[whispers] What is this? Yeah.

"NERF RIVAL MAGAZINE"

"GUN"

"TOP"

This is a fascinating mathematical problem.

My question is... I'm going to cut out a strip here that's 17 inches long

and I'm gonna cut out a strip here that's 29 and a quarter inches long

and they both taper from the bottom to the top

but [stammering]

Actually, I can just choose.

It's a gradual taper

I just need to cut two strips 29 and a quarter a long,

and two strips 17 long and then figure out

what this end distance is and what THIS end distance is

and then draw a straight taper between those that's pretty straightforward. Okay.

Since the sides of my magazines are curved, uh

I need a bend in my

acrylic and

It just resists that a little too much for me

So I have a lab oven that we bought for the shop that will heat this plastic up to a nice gentle

150 degrees Fahrenheit and soften it so I can get it to make a curve.

Okay, so there's...

...those two pieces, let's just let those sit for a few minutes and see how they do

There are a lot of different approaches I could have taken to making this curved box.

I'm taking, like, the fastest, kind of sloppiest way

because these will be in a V so you won't be able to necessarily see if they don't perfectly match each other

the edges I'm gonna clean up, And they will be a little bit rough around the edges,

but I'll hide those crimes with some other techniques.

So I'm basically moving for speed rather than perfection.

I can make this box a lot nicer if I had to

but I don't have to.

I only have a day to build this so we're moving quickly

Alright, well my first magazine is mostly glued up and I'm quite happy with it.

Again, it's sloppy, but we'll clean it up. I've done a basic

Weld-On thin weld bond number three here. I am now going to pull this out

[boop]

of its

holder, and I'm gonna add some Weld-On 16 on the inside up here for structural strength before I-

For structural strength? For structure before I pull off all the tape

meanwhile

I'm gonna throw the other two pieces of plastic that are the curved sides of the magazine

into my lab oven and we'll get the second one going.

This is all going really well. I'm very pleased with how this looks.

Weld-On 16 is a thick weld bond.

"Weld bond" means that it melts both sides of the material it's gluing.

And Weld-On 16 is effectively model airplane glue

They're pretty much the same thing and it's the same thing as Weld-On three.

It just happens to be thicker.

It's got more plastic in it. I believe it's got plastic in it or..?

We've actually reached the limit of my knowledge of Weld-On 16, but

it will set up and provide some genuine structure here in the corners

and we should be able to pull it out after lunch.

Lunch?

Yeah, we actually do take lunch here.

The other thing that Weld-On 16 does is it bridges gaps. Like the thin weld bond does not bridge gaps very well

Whereas the thick stuff does and I do have some gaps in here because I did not build it incredibly perfectly.

Alright

I have cut one magazine out and it is

We talked about this before it's not pretty but it will do the job for what I need it to do

But I also just want to see how many balls this actually holds

Ack! Ack.

[gentle thunder of NERF balls cascading into magazine]

That's a very comforting sound isn't it?

[gentle thunder of NERF balls]

It's like distant NERF thunder

Holy crap, I seem to have overestimated

[laughs]

Well, so the plan was that each magazine held 500 balls

But this is a thousand

[stammers]

I kind of knew it was gonna hold more than 500, I made it a little bit wider

But because this material is thinner than the foam core that I was using clearly I way way missed my mark

But this is not a bad thing. It's actually a really good thing.

I've been thinking about a Flying V of

magazines and the problem I have with it is that I've got

the two volumes meeting above the hopper and I'm worried that they'll get clogged up with each other and at the agitator

inside the hopper won't

be agitating enough to actually cause a free flow of balls down into the hopper

so the fact that one magazine holds

all thousand is actually really good.

So I'm gonna go with a single magazine. I'm gonna modify my design a little bit.

I'm gonna go with a single magazine and the other thing that's really nice about it

Is this first magazine that I made is really sloppy and the second one is much cleaner

I've often said in the past that whenever I make something I usually make two or three of it so I can screw things up

That's what happened right here. This is not the pretty magaz-

This is not the pretty magazine. This is the pretty magazine

That's the one I'm going to use. So the next stage is to pull this out of its clamps, trim it,

and then attach it to my hopper. All right, here we go. Want to hear the sound again?

[whispers] It's a lovely sound.

[gentle thunder of Nerf balls cascading into bucket]

I hear you're asking "What is that thing? What is that?" This is a plexiglass scoring tool

Specifically for working with acrylic or "Perspex" for our friends over the pond

Yeah, it just allows me to round out this edge and this is uh really looking pretty gorgeous

So number one I can glue this down

Yeah, I can totally glue that down and then it's always going to

Yeah, okay. So there's that

One. Two is...

There that's that's what we gotta do. That's that's that's what we have to do here. So

Hotoobuh hubah [laughs]

Can you tell I'm in the excited part?

So I want that to be glued down there

I'm just bypassing one of the safety mechanisms here

Well, that could be the title of my autobiography

[laughs]

[mechanical whirring]

Hey fires with an open hopper

[whirring]

Haha, alright so cool now

This is yeah. This is the exciting part. And now I get to cut this thing up so that it fits all this.

I can't make it offset like this cuz I can't build that much structure.

You know, what?

So I had this beautiful Red Dot Scope that I was very excited about

But I may have to make it a parallax scope

So sorry, I haven't filled you in on all of my thought process

I went from a double magazine system to a single magazine system

So originally it was gonna be a Flying V one here one here

Now I thought "Since they both fit a thousand I'm just gonna use one

and maybe I'll just do a single side of the V so that I can still see past this

with my red dot scope"

But I'm gonna be running around in a skirmish,

a theoretical skirmish,

with like this much weight hanging off of this thing?

That's a recipe for disaster.

I want my weight up-right and center.

So I am going to

Do it like this

Yeah, yeah. Yep

let's say down to about there and

This one too, and I got to keep this upright