The beginning of it all, Nerf Maverick v1

As an FYI, I've decided to make a bunch of posts to this blog in the chronological order that I actually did my projects over the past year, so that everything forms a cohesive pattern of improvement and progress.


Almost a year ago, I stumbled across a picture online.

This picture, in fact:

Obviously, the young lady in the photo is lovely. However, I also took note of the weapon she's holding. At the time, I had no idea what it was, but quickly learned through the comments that it was a nerf blaster called the "Maverick." With this information in hand, I decided upon two things immediately, and set out to a) buy one of my own, and b) paint it into bad-assery. Because Nerf blaster are cool, that's why.

I discovered that the Maverick was readily available online (and for only $10 or so!) and thanks to amazon, ordered myself one. A few days later, it arrived, and looks like this right out of the box.

The first thing I did after taking a few pictures of the body was to take the blaster apart, and see what the internals looked like in order to successfully put it back together again.

From here, I had looked up a few basic tutorials on painting nerf blasters and plastic in general online, and set about sanding off the "shine" on the plastic, so that the paint would have a surface to stick to. Also, I focused especially on the areas of the gun that had upraised lettering on it, such as the safety warnings and messages not to modify the blaster in any way. This is what the cocking mechanism looked like after I did some sanding on it. I don't have any pictures of the body, but it received similar treatment.

At this point I thought I was ready to begin painting. Since I live in an apartment, there wasn't anywhere I could use of my own to do some painting, and my dad graciously allowed me to do some painting out in his backyard, beyond the fence. I also picked up some spray paint that I thought would look cool.

At this point all I had to do was select some time to hang out at the house and do some spraypainting. A few days later I had the time, and set out to give it a try. The results....well, let's just say there's a reason I call this one my prototype.

Basically, the end result was a disaster. It might not look too bad, but because I didn't disassemble the turret mechanism, the blaster didn't work at all (I later fixed it to rotate properly, but it still doesn't work quite right). In addition, I had no idea what I was doing and tried to do all the painting in a single day. The paint I had chosen had a one-hour wait time between coats, and in order to make the process go faster I used the spray paint extremely liberally. You should be able to see the bubbling that occured in some of the pictures, a clear indication of massive over-application. In any event, shortly after I finished this project I ordered myself a second Maverick in order to try again with my failures in mind, along with a multitude of improvements to my process.

As a final note, this is what the blaster looks like at present, totally assembled, but totally non-functional as a blaster. I have grand ideas to someday see if I can't sand a lot of the excess paint off and make it functional again, but that's a ways off.