Introduction: 120' Bazooka Powered Longshot

HEY ALL! 

For you Nerf Fans out there, this one's for you.

I recently acquired a Longshot, and decided that it wasn't powerful enough for my liking. It was fairly old, so the spring was a little weak, and i decided to remove the air restrictor. Wasn't my brightest idea ever. 

I tinkered around until it simply was too powerful to shoot anything and that left me scratching my head until I set my eyes on my Buzz Bee Berserker. I originally got that to use the bazooka portion to shoot regular darts about 120'. My friend modified his and turned it into a death-by-foam nightmare maker. 20 darts for normal shooting, and a killer sniper for those who were first to flee. 

So i figured why not swap internals? 

Take the bad from the Longshot and free the bazooka from the bulky Berserker. Combine the best of the best and you get a sweet sniper rifle in a sleek shell waiting for it's first victim!

I have taken the first of many to come test shots, and the results have been extremely promising. With 6 or 7 pumps and buzzbee darts, I can consistently hit 120' when fired from my shoulder. (I'm 6'4 so this is probably a little higher than your shoulder.) The farthest shot I have gotten was 7 pumps, Nerf tagger dart, which went over 200' fired from my shoulder. The wind might have carried it a little, but it WENT! Anything over 8 pumps and the darts are simply going to fast and fishtail all over the place.

When compared to my AR removed Recon, it's a night and day difference.


Please note that I am not responsible for any injuries you may inflict or incur while making or using this gun. Don't be stupid, and take appropriate safety measures at all times. You have been warned.

Step 1: Things to Know

In order to complete this project you should know how to do the following things.

1- safely operate a dremel with the proper protective equipment like glasses, gloves and hearing protection if it's too loud for you.

2- mix epoxy. I've had lots of practice between rocketry and mixing up epoxy paints for boat bottoms. Improperly mixed epoxy in the wrong places will turn this nerf gun into a bomb sitting next to your face. It is better to go through more epoxy and get it mixed well than to have a failure.

NOTE!!! pvc and most plastics do not explode nicely. They will shatter and fragment into slivers that can easily punch through soft tissue. They are more prone to failure after lots of use or being operated in extremely cold environments. look up some facts about pvc before doing this project if you have no experience with pressurized pvc or plastic. Look into water rocketry for some good safety tips.

3- use a saw. It seems like a no brainer, but it takes practice to get it right.

4- a drill. Like with a saw it seems like it should be easy, but it is important to carefully use a drill and line up your holes when drilling. 


Step 2: TOOLS!!!!

TOOLS!!!!

Tools are a must for this project. Either gather your own, or pilfer them from your friends' workshops. You may not have all of these things, so substitute what you need to. 

This is not a complete list, but will allow you to get most of the project done yourself and allow you to customize the gun to your needs.

1) A Dremel  -  It is going to be your best friend in this project. 75% of this project wouldn't work without it's glorious awesomeness.

2) A Hacksaw  -  Useful when cutting all the things you need to cut, and making sure you have plenty of cleanup to do.

3) A Shop Vac  -  Or a sacrificial vacuum from your upstairs closet. (It is not recommended that you 'borrow' your wife/parents')

4) A Drill  -  Not a sissy one. A manly one that can spin a 1/2" full bore drill bit through a good 1/2" of solid pvc and epoxy.
                     A fresh Battery is always useful.

5) Files  -  Good for the critical jobs that the glorious dremel would be overkill for.
               -  A flat metal file.
               -  A flat wood file  -  Useful for filing large portions of plastic away into tiny particles.
               -  A round file  -  For the insides of pipes and holes that you are cutting.

6) Screwdrivers  -  Both philips and flat head to open up your gun and mess with the internals.

7) A Hammer - You'll be bending some thick metal and this will be a vital tool for that part.

8) A Vice - Something you can clamp a piece of metal into to bend it. 

9) A Wood Saw  -  Something that will work better than a Hacksaw when you cut wood. (Not required)

10) A VERY  hot hair dryer, or a heat paint stripper.


Step 3: Materials

MATERIALS!!!

This is not a complete list, but will allow you to get most of the project done yourself and allow you to customize the gun to your needs.

1) Epoxy - It's God's gift to nerve modifiers and boaters World 'round. I'd get two of the side-by-side syringes that they usually come in.

2) 1/2" pvc pipe (2 feet if you only want one barrel, more if you want a couple barrel lengths)

3) 1-1/4" pvc pipe (not a lot 2' is more than enough.) NOT REQUIRED but it looks cool

4) 2x - 1/2" pvc coupler

5) 1" pvc thin-wall pipe. (only need an inch or so of this)

6) 1x - 1" pvc endcap

7) 1x - 1/4" to 1/4" brass hose barbs

8) 1x - 1/4" hose barb to threaded

9) 2 feet of 3/16" ID, 5/16" OD vinyl tubing.

10) A cheap hand held bike pump with bracket. I got mine at target for like $13

11) Some 5/8" wide aluminum no more than 3/16" thick. You'll need about 2 feet for both the trigger and practice.

12) A small piece of wood. I got a little 1" x 1" x 6" piece of corner molding from home depot.

13) 1/4" x 1/4" x 12" wood. I lifted it from the Set Fabrication shop from my school's theatre department




Step 4: Removing the Internals

Now that you have all the parts and tools that you'll need to make this awesome nerf gun, It's time to open up the longshot and berserker and remove the internals we need/ don't need.

Using your Phillips screwdriver, unscrew the longshot and pry apart the bolt. There are plenty of instructables on how to do this, so I won't bother with it here. 

Once everything is opened up, remove every piece of orange plastic from the gun, unscrewing what you need to, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE MAG RELEASE BUTTON!!! Seriously, don't do it. It's a pain to get back on correctly and won't be getting in the way of anything you'll be doing to the gun. Set all the parts to the side, some of these you'll need again, but most will just be spare parts for another gun you have.

Now unscrew the Berserker. Most of the screws are visible, but some are hidden under the big sticker. If you poke and prod the sticker, you'll find the hole and be able to unscrew and disassemble the whole gun. The second image is the only thing you'll want to remove from the berserker. The barrel is fairly long and the pump is also attached to this assembly. 

Step 5: The Pressure Chamber

So the part that you removed from the Berserker is the first thing to be modified and the most important as it is the heart of you gun. Cut the black barrel fairly close to the green plastic. (see first picture)

Take one of your 1/2" pvc pipe coupler and fit it over the barrel like in picture #2. You don't want the coupler to touch the light green part of the pressure chamber because if it is any further back, it will make the barrel a little harder to attach. Carefully remove the rest of the black barrel like in picture #3

Next step is to cut the white trigger off the assembly making sure that you don't cut into anything green.

Cut the green plastic tube down to about an inch as in picture #4.

Cut a small length of thin wall 1" pvc pipe that is the same length as the green tube and make sure that you can fit it over the green tube. (picture #5) Epoxy this into place. You'll only need a little bit of epoxy. Make sure you rough up the bonding surfaces with some sandpaper or a file.

This next step is a little tricky, but easy to do. Once your epoxy job has set and begun to cure, start to cut it down to the size where the 1" pvc end cap can almost touch the pressure chamber like in picture #6.

THIS IS AN OPTIONAL STEP!!!!
Before you epoxy the end cap onto the pressure chamber, you can drill out the one way valve you see looking in from the back. I don't have a picture of this, but there is a thin piece of rubber attached to it that you can clearly see from the back. Doing this will enlarge the pressure chamber volume, allowing more air to flow out of the barrel quicker. If you decide not to do this like i did, it shouldn't affect the range that much as the air will still get into the barrel, granted at a slower rate.

Now epoxy the end cap onto the thin wall pvc and the the green plastic lip next to it that you can see in picture #4. Make sure you mix your epoxy well and rough up the bonding surfaces.

You can put this to the side to cure over night.

Step 6: The Muzzle

The Muzzle

So i was tinkering around while waiting for some epoxy to dry and i thought about using the orange muzzle to make the gun more aesthetically pleasing. THe only problem i faced was that the 1/2" pvc barrel i was installing didn't fit through it. Solution: gut the thing.

It's a simple enough thing to do and it won't effect the barrel. 

Use the grinder tool for the dremel or the round file to core out the muzzle. Simply make sure that the barrel can easily slip through the muzzle when both are in the gun, i.e. put the muzzle and the barrel into the two halves of the gun and hold them closed to test it.

Pictures 1 and 2 are the before and #3 is the after

Step 7: Cleaning Out the Long Shot

If you've tried to put the berserker parts into the long shot by know, you've realized that there's no way for them to fit as the shell sits right now. It's a good thing we're going to do something about that right now.

Get out your dremel, attach the grinding wheel and put on your glasses. Yes, you need glasses. In order to not chew away the entire side of the longshot, you'll need to get in close and that means flying plastic. Good ventilation is always a good thing to have for this as the grinding might heat the plastic up enough to melt and produce toxic fumes that aren't the healthiest thing to breathe in.

Do not be afraid to grind a lot out, nor to grind completely through in some areas. In order to fit the bulky bazooka internals into the longshot a lot will have to be removed. Loot at the pictures to give yourself an idea of how much to take out, but make sure your own parts will fit in. Air on the side of grinding an area twice having tested it once to save some structural soundness of the gun.

I know there are a lot of pictures, but use them as a reference and good luck grinding.

Just a side note, you will need to cut through the top of the gun in order to fit the round band around the pressure reservoir into the gun. You can see an example on the right side of picture #2.

One thing to note is that you should only cut the hole for the hose to leave the gun after every other step is done. This should be one of the last things you do, so if you see it in the pictures, ignore it.

BE SURE TO VACUUM UP THE LITTLE BITS OF PLASTIC THAT WILL FLY EVERYWHERE FROM ALL THE GRINDING. I'M STILL FINDING PIECES OF BLUE PLASTIC ON THE OTHER SIDE OF MY HOUSE. IT MAKES A PAIN TO CLEAN UP LATER IF YOU AREN'T DILIGENT ABOUT PERIODICALLY CLEANING UP.

Step 8: Adding Some Wood

Now that your Longshot is pretty much empty, we need to add a little support for the internals to rest on so that they will line up with the barrel. I found that they needed to be raised by about a 1/4" and luckily had some 1/4" x 1/4" x 8" pieces of balsa wood lying around. 

I cut them into 1 to 1.5" lengths and ended up needing 6 pieces to fit all the way across the longshot. The first two pictures best show the places i put the wood segments, pretty much directly under the back rail support. The first picture is of the right side of the gun and there are four pieces there, the second picture is of the left side of the gun and there are two pieces there.

Note in the second picture that there is some space between the end of the wood and the end of the plastic towards the middle of the gun. This is to allow a little bit of overhang from the right side of the shell

The placement of the wood is important because if it is too far back, it can get in the way of the trigger, making it harder to mount the trigger and finish the gun. Look at picture #4 for the furthest back you should put it.  

Step 9: Preparing to Mount the Pump

When i was engineering up a solution to mounting my pump, i was hit with the preverbal Eureka moment and started to cut and grind. I sorta did it without thinking and ended up grinding a slot on the left side of the gun when I was trying to put the pump on the right. I guess it pays to think twice before cutting. In any event, I'll probably use slot to mount a bolt system later on down the road. It's not important for this instructable, but if you wish to make one, make an instructable and give me a holler.

ONWARDS TO CONSTRUCTION!!!!

THe first thing I did was cut my piece of molding in half length-wise in order to get it thinner so it wouldn't get in the way of the barrel. From there i shortened it so it was about as long as my pump's mounting bracket. from there i filed about an 1/8" off the bottom to make it fit in the gun. I was lucky and got it to have a good friction fit into it's place, which made epoxying it in easier.

Place the wood into the gun and put the mounting bracket through the side and mark where the screw wholes need to go. I used a generic set of screws, but you need to make sure that they are flat head screws. If they are phillips you'll strip them long before you get them into the wood.

Drill holes into the wood to make the screws go in easily. Before putting the wood into the gun, screw the screws into the wood to make the actual instillation easier. 

Epoxy the wood into position after roughing up the plastic on all sides. Make sure you get epoxy onto the most plastic that you can as long as it is in contact with the wood. This is probably one of the most important parts of the gun in terms of structural integrity. 

Review the pictures and their notes before epoxying anything into place.

Step 10: Making the Trigger

This is an IMPORTANT step. Pay close attention to the instrucitons.


Some of the things I considered when I was designing my trigger was how strong it needed to be to pull the valve open. I was thinking all along about using aluminum for the job, but wasn't sure about what thickness would have the strength to hold a 90 degree bend. 

So I went to my local metal supplier and talked with them. They recommended an aluminum alloy called Aluminum 5052 because it would be the least likely to crack when being bent (Yes metal cracks! My machine shop and material science classes have both made that abundantly clear to me.) 

3/16" thick aluminum 5/8" wide is what i ended up getting, and they even put the bend in for me. He tried bending with and without heat, and without heat made a smaller radius bend and a better fit to my space limitations. All he used was a vice clamp and a hammer to get the desired product.

DON'T USE HEAT WHEN BENDING THE TRIGGER!!!!

The two most critical parts of the metal trigger is the connection to the valve pin and the connection to the plastic trigger. 

The first step in making the metal trigger is to make the indentation under the pressure reservoir. I made this by filling away for about an hour, over and over and over again. You could speed this up with a grinder (not the dremel!!! It doesn't work i tried it.) but it might be too powerful to get the right size. I had to file in about a 1/16" down to get it to fit properly.

Then cut the upper portion of the trigger (the part you bent) so that it fits just inside the upper portion of the reservoir. (see picture #9)

Carefully measure where the pin lines up with the vertical piece of the trigger, and mark it with a pencil. This is best done with the reservoir and trigger fitted into the gun.

From there, drill a 17/64" or slightly larger (no smaller) hole part way through the trigger, about a 1/16" into the metal. Then drill a 9/64" hole through the center of the first hole and all the way thru the trigger. you might be able to get away with a 1/8" hole, but i didn't check to see if that would work.

Then use a hack saw and a file, or juts a file to make a vertical slot from the top of the vertical part of the trigger to the 9/64" hole. Using tape as a guideline might be a helpful thing to have. 

Use spare pieces of metal to get this technique down until you're ready to do it to the final product. (see picture #7)

The last step is getting the metal to plastic connection cut. What i did was cut the trigger so that it just barely fit into the gun when the front of it is in the right position, and lined it up against the plastic trigger, marking the forward and rear spots with tape. I drilled two 1/4" holes with only a sliver of metal between them and used the file to make the hole square. 

Use spare pieces of metal to get this technique down until you're ready to do it to the final product. (see picture #7)


Now that the metal is all cut, you simply need to make the plastic trigger a little taller to fit in properly. I used some masking tape to build a little mold, and poured epoxy into it to make what you see in picture #15. It's okay if the epoxy is taller than pictured, but you need to make sure it isn't any wider or longer than the original plastic.

Once done, spray some silicon spray onto the top and bottom of the trigger.

Step 11: The Hose

One of the last steps is to make the hose connection from the reservoir to the pump. In order to have enough space to move the pump handle back and forth, i had to make the hose enter the gun from the left side. 

The important hose connection is to the brass pipe fittings i got a home depot for $5 total. One is a 1/4" to 1/4" hose barb adaptor (picture #5). The other is a 1/4" hose barb to a 1/4" threaded male adaptor. 

Cut the hose so that you don't have a huge amount of excess, but not so tight that it really bends the tube see picture #5 for the tightest it should bend. It helps if you have already inserted the 1/4" to 1/4" barb into one end and fit into the pump so that you can get an accurate approximation.

Now i know that the hose ID is only 3/16" and the barbs are 1/4" OD, but that makes the seal between them all the stronger. I used the paint stripper to heat the hose up, and once it got a little more flexible, I was able to push it onto the barbs with out too much effort. I didn't use gloves for this and got burned, so all of you use gloves!

The connection to the pump doesn't need to be epoxied because of the rubber seal inside the pump. The other end, however requires more work.

For this you will need a 1/2" diameter solid drill bit. Not the sissy kind that have thin shafts and get wide at the cutting edge, but your normal looking drill bit on steroids.

Drill into the pvc end cap of the pressure reservoir. Be careful to not go through the other side, and to not break your drill when the bit gets caught. Once that is done, get the hole just barely large enough that with the help of a pair of pliers, you can screw the threaded end of the brass fitting into the pvc. If you can do this, it will help give the connection strength. If not, lather the whole thing up with epoxy and shove it it.

Once you have everything setup, glue it in with epoxy, and don't be skimpy. (picture #3) I have a ton of epoxy all around the connection, and that is what you want as well. Once you have this set and curing, cut a hole in the side of the gun for the hose to fit through.

Step 12: The Stock

Unfortunately with this project, you lose the ability to have a collapsible stock, and if it does collapse, you run the risk of severely damaging the hose to reservoir connection which isn't a good thing. In order to prevent the stock from collapsing, all you need to do is put something inside of it like wood or pipe. I used some leftover pipe from another project but the Epoxy isn't holding it well. I'd recommend  wood as it would give you better results.

Epoxy doesn't work well for this job because it's too runny and expensive to put a lot into the stock. Instead, I used hot melt glue to put the pipe into the stock and it works beautifully. With this in place It fits to my shoulder and cheek perfectly to aline my eye with the sights.

When cutting the pipe or wood, take a few measurements, and fit a half of the stock onto one side of the shell and see how much space needs to be taken up.

Step 13: The Barrel

The most important part of this gun is the barrel. It needs to be able to slide through the front part of the gun without too much friction, but at the same time there needs to be enough pressure so the barrel doesn't fall out. I've tried different 1/2" pvc pipes but some are tighter than others. It's just the way they are. 

At my local Home Depot, they conveniently cut approximately 2' segments of pvc pipe, so i grabbed a few to have a few different barrel lengths. the one that I have in the gun right now is a little longer at around 27". 

At the end of the barrel, I have a 1/2" pvc coupler which I cut 4 notches lengthwise to the center with the dremel's drill attachment. This is just for show.

The thicker piece of pvc is 1-1/4" pvc pipe that is friction fitted over the orange muzzle that we cored out earlier. It's about 5" long and purely ornamental. If i were to go into a nerf war, I'd probably take it off in order to open the breach quicker. I originally planned to drill holes into it line on a .50 cal US machine gun, but I kinda like it solid.

Step 14: The Works

Now that the gun is assembled, You've probably got an idea about how to load the gun, but for clarification, this last step is here to save the day.

The barrel slides forward, opening up the breach. Simply put a dart into the end of the barrel and then pull the barrel back into the 1/2" coupler glued to the pressure reservoir. 

Step 15:

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