Nerf gun battles are as much a part of startup culture as putting stickers on your MacBook, crashing in the office after a hard night’s coding, and overusing the word “disrupt.” Well, if you get hold of Chaylo Laurino’s (aka YouTuber Captain Xavier) new Nerf minigun creation, you will never lose a battle again. Heck, you will probably be running the startup before things are over!
“What I have built is a high-capacity, high rate of fire, fully automatic Nerf Rival blaster that I call [Tyr], named after the Norse god of war, law, and heroic deeds,” Laurino told Digital Trends. “To build it, I took the functional internals from a Nerf Zeus MXV-1200 and used them to replace the internals of an Air Warriors Predator. I then connected that to a custom-built hopper in a backpack. The hopper has an agitator and a powerful fan that feed the balls from the backpack to the blaster. There is then an adjustable speed motor in the blaster that controls the rate of fire.”
The fearsome results are capable of firing 20 Nerf balls per second, with a magazine able to hold 2,000 rounds of soft artillery.
“I am not the first to build one of these,” Laurino continued. “My design is functionally based [on fellow YouTuber] OutofDarts‘ Proton Pack, and I got plenty of help from him in building this. In fact, he provided me with the agitator for the hopper. The only real difference between our designs is that mine has a higher capacity and is much cooler looking. Mine also has a built-in modular compressed air system that allows me to fire pretty much any type of ammo I want with the right attachment, including Nerf rockets. I took the extra time and effort to make mine so much more cosmetically impressive because I do a lot of theatrical Nerfing, where presentation makes all the difference.”
While Laurino has no plans to manufacture or sell his design, he said that OutofDarts is considering producing a kit with all the parts needed to build your own. After that, you just need to dedicate “an obscene amount of [time for] tinkering” in order to get it right.