Board Thread:General Nerf discussion/@comment-3362895-20160111132249

1. About a month ago I got a working Rampage (basic blue), part of yet another used bundle off Kijiji. The only thing wrong with it initially was a rattling noise somewhere in the front near the muzzle. This was so annoying I couldn't just leave it alone, so I opened the blaster up. Turns out I could only go partway, as the bottom part of the shells would not separate. Finding a pebble, I closed the Rampage again. Unfortunately, afterwards the priming grip would not move! So this morning I tried to open it up a second time, but despite my best efforts the shell still refused to part fully. Things go so bad that I permanently tore up the shell edges along the bottom seam, and still got nowhere except for various pieces falling out during the scuffle. In the process another pebble fell out, and then upon closer examination I found a fair bit of dirt along the breech, so it's quite possible the previous owner had been through a few ditches and some stray particles wreaked some havoc.

Since I was already planning to donate some lesser pieces to Value Village, this poor thing will probably go there too.

2. Also this morning, I opened a used/modded Retaliator which weeks ago stopped holding in primed position. This one took some fiddling to figure out and close, but finally I got it working again. However, four of the screws wouldn't firmly stop rotating, so I figured their sockets had gotten stripped. I won't accept full responsibility for this, since the spring is compressed by glue spacer and so obviously someone else had already opened it up. But that doesn't really make me feel any better. Can anybody here say if this can be fixed? Some sort of plastic filler or soft Loctite?

3. Finally, a few nights ago I tried to install an OMW Stage 1 Unleashed kit for my ZS Longshot. All the screws came out fine except for the three closest to the muzzle, which are longer and were very stubborn. One came out with brute force; another came out only after I hammered a Philips screwdriver into the screw head and then forced it with a slot-blade driver. The last one flatly refused to cooperate at all, so I took the Longshot to a friend who wasted three screwdrivers trying to file and Dremel the tips to fit the situation. He finally drilled out the screw head with three different bits... Henceforth I will have to leave two screw holes untouched, but at least the kit is in and the improvement is measurable.

Sigh. Nothing's perfect. 