For anyone else who remembers this 1993 Nerf commercial, starring Devon Sawa *blush*, I think it’s safe to say that toy guns firing off foam ammunition was a big deal back then. What the commercials failed to tell you were that after using your gun for all of three minutes, your foam bullets would bend and crease, leaving you firing off bananas that never had a chance in hell of hitting any of your friends in their faces.
Well, apparently I should have grown up in New Zealand, like our friend Simon here. Simon, using just about anything and everything he could get his hands on, constructed his very own DIY Nerf gun that actually has the power to fire off some decent rounds of foam bullets. The gun also looks a hundred times cooler than anything florescent pink pouring out of the factory right now.
Simon explains:
“The pistol is made from 32mm ID PVC pipe, some aluminium [sic] extrusion and aluminium pipe, wood for the grip and various pieces of metal and plastic. The main spring is one I got from Bunnings warehouse. This gun should be able to take a cut down AR-15 spring as used in the Boltsniper weapons but these aren’t that easy to come by in New Zealand. I believe I am legally allowed to buy one but by the time I found that out I already had the Bunnings spring. I may still get one to play with. The idea of a toy gun using a part from a real one appeals to me for some odd reason…” [boingboing]
It’s at this time in the article that I’d like to be as immature as possible, pointing out that in New Zealand they call aluminum “Alan minium”, which in some unexplainable way, is much cooler than how we say it here in the states.
Video after the jump of Simon’s Nerf gun in action. You have to wait until around the 3:30 mark to actually see the gun fire (which is done so by shooting the DIY weapon at a five-foot-tall Bender statue from Futurama). Yeah, um, in case you haven’t already figured this out, Simon basically has a lot of cool sh*t laying around his apartment.
[via Technabob]