Board Thread:General Nerf discussion/@comment-37595644-20190407175257/@comment-38863250-20190408034900

Elliottw wrote: Hmmm, maybe there ARE some variants. To be honest, I have exactly two yellow N-Strike Mavericks. There were literally hundreds of thousands manufactured during its lifetime. Some variation is inevitable.

That being said, I've seen this exact "half rotation" priming behavior in many off-brand blasters. Virtually all of the World Tech Warrior blasters work exactly that way. And many older Buzz Bee, Air Zone, and Dart Zone blasters exhibit the same behavior.

I've always assumed the priming mech was derived from cloning early Nerf blasters like the Mav. Maybe I've been wrong. Maybe all those off-brand manufacturers developed the half-prime style independently. But as they say, simplicity is often simpler 😉 There's no variation on the rotation mech between Mavs; differences are mainly in the small details of the cylinder. Older Mavs (the blue ones, especially) have heavier barrels and they don't like to hold together if you try to skelotonize the cylinder.

If you take apart the Mav, you'll see that the priming handle is in no way connected to the rotation mech; rather, there's a little bar off the trigger to the clutch. If you look at a Spectre, you'll find essentially the same design, but the rotator is connected directly to the priming handle; it advances the cylinder completely on the rearward motion. This is actually a really stupid thing because if you prime it too fast it spins the cylinder too far. The SA, as you'll know, is even more complex; and I'm not completely sure even how it works. It advances and aligns the cylinder on the rearward motion of the priming handle. When you pull the trigger, it fires, and then a split second later, rotates the cylinder halfway to the next chamber. It's a really ingenious mechanism, but rather fragile and it really hurts accuracy. The Disruptor also uses all the same internals.

If there are pre-2010 off brand blasters with rotators connected to the priming handle, I'm pretty sure that's an original design. As far as I know, the Spectre (2010) was the first to use that type of rotator.