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There’s a reason the word “nerfing” means to weaken something - Nerf blasters were supposed to be safe for kids - but kids got wise. You’d be lucky if you could afford a blaster that could shoot a single dart more than 50 feet, and that was only if you fired up at an angle praying it would land on target. In the ’90s, Nerf was a simple game of tag you could play at a distance with your siblings, friends, maybe the neighbor kid down the street. Out of Darts runs 97 3D printers to produce their original blasters and modification parts. A 3D printer produces original parts at Out of Darts. But he’s far from the only one reshaping what a Nerf blaster can be.īlaster barrels produced in-house with 3D printers are organized by size and color at the Out of Darts warehouse and factory. He’s the first person I’d heard of to make a comfortable living from the Nerf cottage industry. He now makes more money than he ever did behind the camera enough to pay his shop employees an average of $20 an hour, too. It’s gotten to the point that they needed to build a custom inventory picking program just to keep it all organized and let workers box up multiple orders at once. They ship nearly 100 orders a day to an army of hobbyists eager to build epic blasters of their own, customers who can now select from 1,500 different products including individual batteries, motors, and original 3D-printed parts. But today, he’s the proud proprietor of a 3,800-square-foot warehouse with eight employees, running a 97-printer factory that consumes over 300 pounds of filament each month. Originally, Luke took the cottage industry part literally, selling blasters and parts out of his own house with just a few 3D printers to start. And while Hasbro is clearly taking some notes from the upstart maker community, 3D printers in particular are giving makers an edge they’ve never had before. It’s almost something of an arms race, where the Nerf internet community one-ups each other by making their toy blasters shoot more foam faster, farther, and more accurately, whether to show off or to perform that much better in an actual game of Nerf. Joe, and Magic: The Gathering giant Hasbro) in the dust. Now, Out of Darts is at the forefront of a cottage industry selling original blasters and parts that can leave the official Nerf brand (owned by Transformers, G.I. But even at $160 per kit or $325 for an assembled blaster - an “absurd price” he set to see if it was worth his time - he still couldn’t keep up with the demand. He whipped up a quick Etsy shop and got to work. Hundreds of people had tracked him down, asking to buy his “HIRricane” blaster. When he saw the YouTube numbers, he couldn’t believe his eyes. “I put a piece of it in there, pulled the trigger and just cackled,” he tells me. He wasn’t yet out to build a better Nerf blaster Luke was simply doing some irrigation work in his backyard when he realized the pipe he was holding might fit inside the Zeus. As many as 15 million people have watched PDK Films blow away an entire wall of Solo cups with Luke’s creation, after it got featured at Gizmodo and by popular Nerf YouTube star Drac (aka LordDraconical).

#ALTERNATIVES TO CONTRAPTION MAKER HOW TO#

Luke, better known as Out of Darts, went viral in 2015 when he figured out how to turn Nerf’s 12-round Zeus blaster into a 108-round ball-blasting contraption a little more worthy of the Greek god’s name.

I certainly didn’t know Luke Goodman was about to quit his day job to become the foam-slinging equivalent of James Bond’s gadget armorer Q. It turned out the guy who sold him the cylinder, Luke, was mostly just there to say his goodbyes to the local Nerf group, before leaving the Bay Area for good. My brother was particularly proud: he’d already been getting some great tags with his Nerf revolver, and now some guy had sold him a nifty 3D-printed cylinder so it could hold seven darts instead of five. It was a beautiful summer day in San Jose, California, perfect for pegging people with foam.

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