Why Did The Chicken Cross the Road?

Well, the second piece of advice for amping up my Nerf Rapid Fire 20 (RF-20) was also a failure.

The advice was to open the barrel assembly and dump out the air restrictors. This actually rendered the gun inoperable. Yes, I assembled it correctly again, the barrel spins, air is pumping out of the barrels. But I think what people are calling air restrictors on the RF-20 are in fact displacing air inside of the dart in order to reduce the amount of air needed to launch the dart from the barrel:



UPDATE: I suspect this mod (removing the "restrictor") is really only good if you have Stefan darts, which are home-made from Foam Backer Rod which is solid. There is no air chamber inside the darts so it wouldn't take much to launch one.

Most likely, after seeing the instructions to remove the dart spikes on the Maverick, people automatically assume that all dart spikes are bad. But in the case of the RF-20, it appears they serve to not restrict the airflow but concentrate it. Which is good. So now I have to take that damn thing apart again and put all the spikes back in. P.I.T.A. factor.

UPDATE: Got the gun back together and sure enough, it fires again with the "restrictors" in place. The gun also gets a lot more shots per fill because its using less air per shot.

This brings me back to the Maverick mod from my last post. I never tried this, but I wonder if you could improve performance on the gun by just dumping those 3-prong spring loaded plates and leaving the spike assembly intact? My guess is you would get the same (if not better) performance by doing this and saving even more time messing around with a dremel tool. If I get another Maverick I'll try it out and post my findings here.

P.S. another note on the Rapid Fire 20 - on this forum post, the poster advised to cut apart that black thing above the piston with a hacksaw. You DON'T need to do that. The part is just sticky because the plastic interlocks and the whole black thing is attached to the right-side silver piece - it doesn't split in half like I expected. This diagram might be better at explaining it (I would have taken a photo but my phone is dead right now):



Anyway, to separate it, pull open the silver piece from the bottom until a bit of a gap appears in the area below the black piece, get a flat-head screwdriver in there, and gently twist it until it pries apart. It will come apart, just be patient and careful. See this diar

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I recently acquired a small arsenal of Nerf weapons for the office and being both male and nerd in nature, my first desire was to make them shoot further, faster and better. So I spent some time browsing various Nerf modding sites to see what kinds of things people were doing. There is some pretty creative stuff out there!

I decided for a first project to mod my Mavericks (I have a set of 2). This is the first nerf maverick mod I tried. And what did I learn from this? The whole bit with adding straws and filling in the hole is a total waste of time. After 2 hours of tedious labor, cutting, gluing, etc... the results were mediocre - if not worse in most barrels. In fact one barrel didn't even fire. I read the mod page more carefully and realized the guy who posted this mod had the same problem!

What I realized is if you shave off that lip on the top of the orange caps while removing the air restrictors, you break the factory air seal (which is excellent). You can verify this yourself: Take the stock barrel assembly (before taking it apart), and blow air through the hole while plugging the dart end with your finger. You'll notice there is a pretty good seal there (although the air is being slowed significantly by the restrictor assembly, which you will notice when you take your finger off). I tried the same air test after the straw mod and just as I suspected, air was leaking out from between the damaged restrictor cap and the barrel assembly. This diagram hopefully explains it a bit better:





So in the second Maverick, all I did was remove the air restrictors, but was careful to not damage the outer lip. I just Dremel-tooled the spikes out and left a rough hole in the middle - no need to waste time making it fancy. Air just needs to get through freely.

Adding the straws to narrow the diameter of the chamber (I'm guessing this is supposed to concentrate the output) is a waste of time. Having a good air seal and free flow of air is more important than doing this. The results? My 5 minute mod gun performs much better and didn't take nearly as much fiddling.

The other mod I did, which I think is the most useful of all of them, was remove the tabs keeping the barrel in for reloading so it slides out the full 90 degrees. Makes loading way easier and twisting the gun to close the chamber adds dramatic effect.

I am going to get the Vulcan soon and see what I can do with that too... until then, happy modding.

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A lot of people customize their bikes and often need to source out non-OEM and custom-fit parts. A gas tank is definitely one of those parts, and sometimes an OEM tank from a different year, make or model may work well ... unless you don't know if it fits.

My advice for suppliers putting OEM fuel tanks on E-Bay for sale is to post full dimensions for every tank you sell (a diagram would give you real bonus points but even a text description is a good start). Most OEM sellers don't do this because they assume their customers need the tank as a replacement for their own bike, and simply need to know the model and year. But if you post the specifications for the tank size, you may open up your doors to a market full of bike builders and sell more products!

In particular:
Tunnel Width (most important) - how wide is the gap under the tank?
Tunnel Depth (pretty important) - how deep is the gap under the tank?
Tunnel Variation/etc - if the tunnel is tapered, what are the front & back measurements
Overall Width (at widest and narrowest points is handy)
Overall Height
Overall Length (tip-to-tip)

And for bonus points...
Gas cap mount size / type (if cap is not included)
Petcock thread size / mount type (if petcock is not included)

And last but not least... include photos of:
The usual (3/4 views, side view, etc)
The front of the tank (showing tunnel)
The underside of the tank
Inside the cap opening (for rust)

I know it may seem pointless to post such specs on an OEM part, but believe me when you are hunting for a tank to fit a '78 CB 400 that needs a tank with a 4" wide gap, you will really appreciate a poster who takes the time to map out the specs.

P.S. About 4 potential sellers lost a sale today because I couldn't get the information I need

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I'm really loving this game, it has great graphics, gameplay and some really neat features in spawn and server management.

One of the coolest features of the game is the spawn manager. In most multiplayer FPS games, each team has a definite side of the map that they start on. As they die, they spawn from these same locations to re-enter the battle.

The positive aspect of this is it makes a map easier to learn because there is a definite flow of direction in the map. You always start from a consistent place so it's easier to recognize where you are, where you need to go, and where the enemy will likely be coming from.

However, on the downside, this also means in a game with very unbalanced teams, the stronger team can pin down the other side to their spawn points and kill them before they can even really get back in the game. You appear, and 2 seconds later a grenade rolls around the corner and your dead. This can be really frustrating and ruin an otherwise great game.

Some games have tried to eliminate this by making several predetermined spawn points that you can randomly appear in. This does help in that it's hard for an enemy to predict the exact location of a spawn, however because it is usually still within a confined map area, you will eventually have to run through an area that will have enemies waiting.

What COD:MW2 does is quite interesting. If I am correct (I deduced this just by gameplay), the computer will try to spawn you as close to the location that you died without putting you in harm's way. So you may end up very close to where you died or a little further if there is too much enemy movement surrounding the area.

The interesting result of this is that during the course of the game, the map "sides" can change dynamically. If one team pushes through to the other "side" (where the enemy was coming from at first), and starts dying there, eventually that team will start spawning from that side and the enemy will start spawning from the other side, reversing the map.

This can make it somewhat confusing the first time you play the game, because your spawn point is constantly changing and it's hard to tell which direction an enemy can come from. They are coming from all directions! But the beauty is you will never have to deal with spawn camping again. It makes it virtually impossible to predict where the enemy will come from, which is more challenging and helps balance the game for all players involved.

The other thing I noticed which was interesting was the server manager. In most games I've played to date, you download a list of servers, filtering out the ones you don't want (e.g. too slow, maps you don't like, game types, etc.), and play on the server you select for a while. In COD:MW2 it appears the server system is fully load balancing and managed. It will automatically find the right server for you, balancing teams and selecting the fastest server with the game type you prefer. If your server becomes too slow, the player group is kept together and the server manager will transfer the game - intact - to another server. It's like the group of people and the game are an object or package that can be transported to any server in the network on the fly to provide the best experience possible. I also noticed that when your group loses too many players to stay on a server (e.g. half the people leave the game after a round is finished), it will either try to find a server with the right player limits, find other players to join the game, or even try to find another straggler group like yours and merge them together for a new game.

The entire thing is very fluid and fully managed by the network, likely allowing the server administrators to balance their server loads evenly and prevent bottlenecks in performance. So far from what I've seen it works very well, I've always been able to find a server and game quickly and easily, with none of the connection and lag problems that were so common in other multiplayer FPS's I've played.

Boo-ya to great server tech and innovative ideas!

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The (semi) finished bike

This is the first bike I've ever owned. I was on my way to a fundraising event and saw it in a garage sale on the way. The moment I looked at it, I knew this was going to be my first bike. Funny how that works - I had been thinking about getting a bike for a while before that, and voila, it appears.

The bike was fairly weathered (spent one year outside) and needed some maintenance, but otherwise it was in excellent shape with only 16K on it. Except for the seat cover, all of the original parts were there. The chrome was in great shape and it started up without any problems. It looked like it was dropped once at low speed (or while parked), as there was some damage on the right side. All pretty minor damage - broken choke control, torn rubber boot on the shifter, dent in the front fender - nothing that couldn't be fixed with a few parts and a bit of work.

I bought it in the fall and fixed some of the immediate and easy things on it. Replaced the choke cable, emptied and replaced the gas, plugs, etc. I rode it for that month as-is, basically just learning. This year I spent a lot more time on it cleaning, polishing, fixing and restoring it. I decided against a strict restoration, as this was my first bike and I wanted to have a bit of my own personality in it. I painted it a custom metallic orange instead of the original dark metallic red with stripes. Other than that, I've let it stay pretty true to the original and for the time being, I'm not planning on adding any aftermarket parts or customizations. This way if I wanted to go back to a restoration I basically need a seat and the original paint.

Throughout the process I found that I really, really love riding. I also really love fixing, restoring and working on bikes. I think this is something that I will enjoy a lot of! So I am already on the lookout for my next project... :)

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