As time goes on and our collections grow, each Nerfer ultimately hits that ever-present conundrum: We want to continue playing with our beloved “retro” blasters, but we’re running out of ammo and places to find it. That leads many of us to rebarrel, as we might a current-gen blaster, but sometimes that can be tricky and more involved than it needs to be. As such, we’d like to share with you some options we’ve used (primarily Derp One) that might help with the process. Keep in mind these are not new ideas. They’ve been around forever. However, not everyone has seen them and clearly Googling things for oneself is not a strength in the average Nerfer’s wheelhouse.

Complete Rebuilds

First up is the idea of building the blaster back up from scratch, slapping in new parts to build all-new assemblies. This can be time-consuming and more costly than other options, but sometimes it’s worth it.

As you can kind of tell, Derp One went this way with his Defender. He took the barrel out entirely, and put in a *new* barrel that has been glued to the plunger assembly and then sealed with electrical tape. The barrel itself is half-inch schedule 40 CPVC, a ground-down male thread adapter (our local hardware stores are useless, and don’t have a good supply of reducers), and a small bit of 17/32″ brass (about an inch). The result is a well-sealed beast of a blaster that can now fire modern darts. However, it is not reversible, thus ruining a bit of the “retro integrity” of the piece.

The “Duh” Solution: Taped Brass

Seeking to not have to “ruin” any more of his blasters, Derp One looked around and found a method – which we wish to share with you – that is so simple he feels retarded for not thinking it up first. Rather than building a new barrel assembly, instead just wrap a few layers of electrical tape (or teflon tape) around your brass tubing and jam that sucker in the pre-existing barrel.

It took a few tries to get the wrapping just right so it fit super-snug but still had enough play to jam in, but Derp One got about 3.7ish inches of brass in to his Sneak Shot with e-tape down near the rear of the tube. This creates a decent enough fit with a mildly good seal, but it’s not great. Every ten shots or so, the barrel inches forward just ever so slightly (1mm or so), and this can harm the seal. Also, because the wrap isn’t evenly smooth on all sides, it’s not well-centered. Still, it’s a start. After all, this allows for modern ammo types to be fired from the blaster with decent ranges (for its generation), and a bit of elbow grease can yank the barrel out and restore it to the older specs.

A similar method was tried with the Big Bad Bow, but as you can see on the image to the left there are now two areas for tape (dark spots in image). This made it much harder to get in – though you can still take it out with some brute force – but improved the seal greatly. It of course called for the removal of the AR assembly entirely, but now it’s “singled” to fire whatever you might wanna jam in it, and the brass (about 3 inches of it) doesn’t hamper putting on an arrow to fire off as an alternative.

To wrap up, rebarreling isn’t as scary as you might think it is. If you’re worried about “harming” your older blasters, you don’t really have to go too crazy with your tools. Just grab a roll of tape and some brass, and jam things in there. Then, once you’ve changed your mind, yank the barrel back out and kick it old school (if you so choose). This way, no blaster collects dust unless you want it to.

Thanks for reading.