In the time between my first attempt at painting a Nerf blaster and when the second Maverick arrived, I hit up the internet. First thing I did was find a more reliable source of information for how to paint blasters. The result was my discovery of several nerf-related sites, of which nerfhaven.com (a message board) had the best posts. It gave me the information I was looking for about which paints worked best, as well as how to modify blasters for better power and range.
As a quick refresher, here's the blaster I'm talking about.
Right off the bat, my process was different. This time, I took the blaster apart 100% of the way, and removed the air restrictors in the turret that restrict the power and range pretty drastically.
Another change I had made was to mount the blaster parts I was painting, rather than placing them flat upon a surface. This would allow me to give better paint coverage while not having to worry about the blaster pieces getting stuck as the paint dried.
The other two big changes I had made were the location of my painting and the spray paint I was using. I changed my paint location because painting outside was troublesome due to weather unpredictability, and there was also no way to keep objects in the wind away from lodging themselves in the wet paint. Fortunately, my dad allowed me to take over about half of the storage shed in the backyard, move in a table, and cover the area with plastic drop cloths to try to keep things clean, as seem above. This worked far, far better.
My first attempt used some Rustoleum paint that I thought would look cool (which it did). However, thanks to nerfhaven I discovered that the best paints to use were plastic-specific paints, such as Krylon's Fusion line. However, for the best of the best, what ought to be used is a product called Vinyl Dye. The appeal of this product is that unlike spray paint, Vinyl Dye actually seeps into the plastic and re-colors the material itself. The appeal of this for blasters is obvious, as using paints that build layers can inhibit moving parts and create rub marks of paint where pieces meet.
Anyway, at this point I was ready to begin the painting process. Vinyl Dye requires very light coats with about 20-30 minutes between applications, so I had already resigned myself to the reality of not being able to get this project done in a single day, or even a single weekend. So, I set about with the painting process and kept adding light coats of Vinyl Dye until each piece was thoroughly colored the way I desired.
So, at this point the exterior of the blaster have been thoroughly covered with a base coat of vinyl dye. The main frame will ultimately need a different color applied, but first I took the pieces that were "done" and moved them indoors, so that I could do some hand-painting of the finer details. I decided to use Testor's Enamel paint for the finer details, the same stuff you'd use for model painting.
So, at this point I took the main frame of the blaster back outside, and after liberally applying blue painter's tape and newspaper, ended up with something looking a lot like this:
And now at this stage, I painted those two exposed areas gray. The same gray I used on the turret pieces, if you were wondering. Once that part was done, I took the main frame back inside for any touch-ups that needed to be done.
At this point, the blaster is 99% finished. The only thing remaining on the to-do list was to apply a light layer of clearcoat spray paint, to help prevent rubbing off and chipping. Which, as you might imagine, involves another trip back to the shed.
Sure does make it look shiny though, when the flash fires off. In any event, everything has now been completed. Basic modification has been finished, and the paint job is done along with a clearcoat chaser. So now all I had to was re-assemble the whole thing and marvel at my own handiwork.
And that wraps up my finished Nerf Maverick v2. Unfortuanately, despite looking awesome, due to internal issues with the blaster itself (and a common problem with the model as a whole) after taking it apart and putting it back together it doesn't fire like it should. It works, but not very well. But I'm okay with that because it looks great, taught me a lot, and was fun to do.
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