From NerferWiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Summary 3 Stefan Darts 3.1 Generalized Construction Method 3.2 Variations 4 Dart Types 4.1 Stock Darts 4.1.1 Mega 4.1.2 Micro 4.2 Stefans 4.2.1 Nano 4.2.2 Micro 4.2.3 Mega 4.2.4 Jumbo 4.2.5 Mongo 5 Stefan Materials 5.1 Foam Backer Rod 5.1.1 Brands 5.2 Weights 5.3 Tips 6 Barrel Materials 6.1 PVC 6.2 CPVC 6.3 PETG 6.4 Copper 6.5 Brass 6.6 Aluminum

Introduction

What does everyone want out of their Nerf blaster? Well, that answer may vary from person to person, but the basic desire of your average Nerfer is a longer shooting, faster loading, and more accurate blaster.

While one can take many roads towards this goal, the most essential of these roads is to have a dart that is easy to produce, provides a good aerodynamic profile and hits hard enough to make your opponent cringe.

Nerf darts come in many varieties from Hasbro, but none of these are truly well suited for flight, Suction Cups are the reverse of good aerodynamics, Taggers are unbalanced by velcro, Sonics have a hole in the tip and thus fly everywhichway, something Streamlines also suffer from, and the Soft-Tip darts are simply not heavy enough to fly well.

So where is a Nerfer to turn?

The answer for most of us is the Stefan dart, named for its creator.

Summary

If you don't want to read the whole story of Stefans and etc, then here's your list of tasks:

• Go to your local hardware store (Lowes, Home Despot, ACE, Menards, whatever)
• Ask where the outdoor insulation or weatherstripping is
• Once you've found the correct isle, find 1/2" Foam Backer Rod or Caulk Saver and buy a bag, it usually comes in 20' increments, but buy whatever amount you feel comfortable with
• Bring it home and cut it into lengths to make into darts, Stefans are between 1.5" and 2" in length
• Put the cut foam in a pillow case and toss it in the dryer for 5-10 minutes to straighten it
• Take a couple of the blanks to the hardware store and test the fit in the available barrel material
• Test in Brass, CPVC, PETG, whatever you can find. The fit should be tight enough that the blank does not fall out but loose enough so that you can blow in the end of the pipe and the blank will fly out
• Buy some of the material that has the best fit for your foam
• Go home and decide what kind of weights you want on your stefans (BBs, 3/0 Fishing, 1/4" Steel Shot, etc)
• Go to a sporting goods store and purchase some weights, BBs are the cheapest per-unit weight available
• Get a hot glue gun, make a small hole in the tip of a blank with the tip of the gun, then put a weight in
• Cover the weight with a dome of hot glue and set the dart in something to hold it up until the hot glue cools
• Lather, rinse, repeat to make more stefans

There, that's the cliff notes version for those of you who want to get right to it.

Stefan Darts

Stefans come in many varieties, and can be made from a whole variety of materials, although there are some essentials that you have to remember.

First, the materials used to make and fire Stefan darts are NOT standardized to any fine degree. Nerf barrel material can vary wildly between brands and even between production runs, the same goes for the base material of the Stefan dart, Foam Backer Rod.

Second, the experience you have with a particular brand of foam, a particular barrel material, and a particular Nerf blaster will never be the same as someone else's. If you read a write-up and duplicate the work, you may not get the same ranges that the person who made the writeup, this is because of the variance between blaster construction, barrel materials and dart construction.

Stefan darts are made from Foam Backer Rod, or Caulk Saver as it's called in the USA. This material can be found in pretty much any hardware store, it is in the insulation section along with those cans of auto-expanding foam that have come in so useful to Maverick owners.

After you have purchased your FBR, you will notice that it comes in a coil and that it needs to be straightened before use. There are two schools of thought about what to do from this point. The first and by far most common (mainly because it's faster) is to cut the foam into appropriate lengths, toss it in a pillow case and then throw it in the Dryer on medium for about 10 minutes. The second and less common method is to cut the foam in lengths between 4 and 6 feet and then hang the lengths with a small weight (such as a 9V battery) attached to the end in order to straighten and stretch the foam for use.

If you choose the first method you will need to decide how long you want your Stefan darts to be. Most people use darts between 1.5" and 2" in length although some people use 1" and 2.5" darts for specialized applications. So decide if you want 1.5" or 2" and start making some cuts. You can either use a template made from PVC with a slot cut into it or you can just cut your foam a little longer than your darts and then trim the ends after straightening. Whichever method you chose, make your cuts and toss the blanks (the common term for an un-tipped stefan) into a pillow case. Toss the pillow case in the dryer for 10 minutes on medium, or 5 minutes on high (medium is better, nothing melts) and you're done. If you don't have a dryer easily accessible, you can also use a hair dryer, but this will take a long time and you will have to check often to see how your darts are doing.

If you choose the second method, you have a variety of options to choose from, but the basic idea is to hang the foam from a peg or nail with a weight on the end and wait until it's straight. This can take weeks with some types of foam, and while it supposedly gets you a perfectly straight blank, it is a dubious method due to the length of time needed. The one redeeming feature of this method of straightening is that if you need to stretch the foam so that it ends up being a smaller diameter, this is the perfect way to do it.

Now that you have some straight blanks to play with, tuck a few in your pocket and head for your local hardware store. Check out the plumbing section first, that's where you'll find PVC, CPVC, Copper, very rarely PETG and in the very rarest of cases, Brass. Take out one of your blanks and start testing the available materials. When you find a material that is tight on your blank, but not tight enough that it's hard to load with one finger, you know you've found your perfect barrel material.

As has been discussed above, the materials used by Nerfers for barrels are widely variable, so when you find a perfect material, or even something that just works well for you, buy as much as you think you'll need for a couple mods, because the next time you go to the store it might not be quite as perfect. Make sure you bring along a blank or some already made stefans to test materials every time you go out and buy just to make sure you don't get screwed.

After you have your barrel material, the time has come to make some stefans from your blanks. Now you must decide what kind of stefans you wish to make. Do you want to make the widely accepted and used Hot Glue Tipped stefans? Or do you want to make the easier and more skin friendly CaptainSlug Felt+Washer Stefans?

If you choose Felt Tip stefans, you're all set, read the linked thread above and buy your materials, the weights are standard and you can go to town with liquid nails or a little hot glue.

If you choose Hot Glue Tip stefans, you have to decide what kind of weight you'll be using for your stefans. Most of the time the type of weight you use will depend on what kind of gun will be shooting your darts. If you have a monster blaster like a +Bow that'll be flinging darts well over 100' then you're going to want to choose something heavy like 1/4" Steel Shot as a weight, if you're thinking more along the lines of a modded NiteFinder or an AT2K then you're looking at something closer to a BB or 3/0 fishing weight as a weight.

Homemade darts made with foam (Usually with a foam backer rod) , hot glue and some type of weights, common weights are ball bearings or fishing weights.

Generalized Construction Method

1. Cut foam to uniform lengths

2. Straighten foam with heat, either by using a Hair Dryer or Drying Machine.

3. Add weights (BBs, Fishing Weights, or Washers)

Dart Making Guides:

Mother Of All Dart Making Tutorials

NerfHaven Dartmaking Tutorial

Variations

Hot Glue Dome

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Traditional construction method used by most Nerfers involves burning a hole in the end of a length of foam backer rod, adhering a weight inside, then covering it with a dome of hot glue.

Concept originally proposed by Stefan Mohr

Matchstick Stefans

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Involves dipping the ends of the darts in Plasti-Dip as a substitute for Hot Glue. Either to create domes or to completely cover the ends of the darts. Reference

Felt + Washer Stefans

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Steel washers are used in place of the traditional BBs or fishing weights in an effort to reduce cost and effort required to make uniform darts. Felt discs are used to cover the exposed side of the washers and make it easier to make more consistently performing darts since there is no need to worry about creating uniform hot glue domes. Weights can alternatively be adhered using the "Liquid Nails" adhesive if access to Hot Glue is unavailable. Although darts made with that adhesive may have a shorter usable life.

Concept originally proposed by CaptainSlug

Write-up

Video

Dart Types

Stock Darts

Mega

• Suction Cup
• Sonic Mega

Micro

• Suction Cup
  • Glow In The Dark Suction Cup
• Tagger
• Sonic Micro
• Soft-Tip (Vulcan Rounds)
• Streamline

Stefans

NOTE: Keep in mind that Foam Backer Rod size are NOT fractionally precise and will require barrels that are .010 to .040 inches larger in diameter than the listed size of the foam. For a list of barrel materials see the Barrel Material page.

Nano

• 3/8" Foam Backer Rod

Micro

• 1/2" Foam Backer Rod

Mega

• 5/8" Foam Backer Rod

Jumbo

• 3/4" Foam Backer Rod

Mongo

• 1" Foam Backer Rod

Stefan Materials

Foam Backer Rod

Brands

• Frost King - Available at Lowes, ACE, Home Depot and other fine Hardware Stores
• Mile High - Available from Best Materials in 1' lengths or 800' and 2600' rolls, also available from HeretiCorp on NerfHaven
• D for Dennis - Available at Menards and through McMaster-Carr

Weights

• 3/0 Split Fishing Weights - Found anywhere fishing supplies are sold
• Standard BBs - Found anywhere BB guns are sold
• 1/4" Steel Slingshot Shot - Found anywhere Slingshots and BB guns are sold
• Steel Washers - Found at any hardware store or though McMaster-Carr

Tips

• Hot Glue
• Felt Disk

Barrel Materials

PVC

• Found at any hardware store that has a plumbing section

CPVC

• Found at most hardware stores in the same section as PVC, has a smaller ID than PVC and is better suited to barrels.Buy regular Genova instead of flowguard gold because flow guard gold has suck a small ID.

PETG

• Very rarely found in hardware stores, but you can purchase it online in bulk or from OMC on NerfHaven

Copper

• Found at any hardware store that has a plumbing section, not usually good for barrels, but fits some FBR well

Brass

• Found at hobby shops that deal in model airplane construction and model train construction, also available online from Brookstone Hobby and Tower Hobby

Aluminum

• The newcomer to the world of Nerf barrels, McMaster-Carr just recently began carrying Aluminum tubes in the appropriate sizes for micro stefans, it is still being explored as a potential barrel material by the finest minds of the NIC.