Board Thread:General Nerf discussion/@comment-27306930-20160925150208/@comment-27306930-20160926044606

So, I decided to butterly this beauty and see what was going on inside. Some good news, some bad news. She is quite old, but the gray ABS plastic is still very soft and pliable, so she's in good shape. Clearly I'm the first to remove the screws. Cosmetically, it's in great shape too. BTW, the green is painted on.

As I suspected, in this early variant the plunger tube, AR, dart post, and barrel are held in place by a simple pressure fitting. However, there was a 1/8" gap between the dart post and the barrel that could easily have lead to a 20% decrease in performance, or more. But the most obvious issue is the size of the vent holes in the AR itself. Miniscule. The small amount of air that got through the AR openings, and didn't leak out the gap, propelled the actual dart. No wonder I was getting 15 foot shots. And the plunger tube was dry as a bone, the one lonely O-ring was flopping around on the plunger head. It was sad.

The good news is that because nothing is glued together in these old Nite-Finders, I can easily tear it down. The other good news is the AR stage is quite thick, almost 1/2 an inch, giving me an opportunity to create a substantial Venturi choke. Maybe even better than the FireStrike mod. So I'm quite optimistic that I can get Elite XD ranges out of this old blaster, with little more than a VE mod, air restrictectomy, and some TLC on the plunger seal. Maybe call it a "Modulus NF"

I'll let you know.