Hi, I'm Luke with Out of Darts.
Today we are checking out a very unique product in the HPA World:
A 3D-Printed Blaster built around their MiniBox, which is sort of a custom DIY platform.
Kind of exciting; let's get going
HPA or high pressure air or if you're in the southern hemisphere HPA like my brother-in-law
says has been a hot topic for quite a while now here in our hobby HPA is commonly used of course
in paintball and in airsoft and there's not a whole lot of crossover in those two sports to
our Nerf hobby one of the main reasons for this is that most The Blasters on my wall look like
toys they can be used in public spaces they're bright colors with orange tip generally and they
are comfortable and safe to be playing at in you know a public environment which is really really
important because safety especially these days is really really Paramount to the success and growth
of our hobby before I go any further I do want to say that this was sent to me at no cost from
MilSig I have had an ongoing relationship with them talking about carrying different various
products but I have not pulled the trigger on carrying any of those I purchased the m79 myself
however they did send the replacement parts for for that at no cost and they did send the
MiniBox so keep that in mind with this review milstig released the m79 sometime last year and
apparently they've already come out with a sort of 2.0 or a new version of it this has the upgraded
replacement lower for lack of a better term because this basically looks like an actual ...
I'm not really that interested in this type of blaster for a variety of reasons personally if
I was going to go this far I would probably just go play Airsoft instead because it's sort of a
different game type but I do see that everybody can play their own way and I think there are
a lot of different ways to play Nerf so for people that are interested in this is fine if
you're going to go play at a private course like the airsoft field we recently played at or some
other piece of private property now I've had my hands on this since long before they came
out and mine never worked well and then it stopped working altogether within one hour
of opening the Blaster so we opted not to carry these on the shop not to to sell them or promote
them and I didn't want to do the video because I just had nothing good to say and honestly never
got around to figuring out what was going on I could not get the bolt unstuck on the initial
one still a little unsure as to what actually happened there but this is sort of the origin
story of mil Sig in our hobby now MilSig is a paintball manufacturer that has sort of pivoted
over to our Hobby and they clearly do have some things to learn this Blaster when it was working
was the least accurate Blaster I've used out of the box there's too much turbulence happening
at the barrel and it seems to greatly affect the accuracy to the point where I couldn't hit
someone 30 feet away from me more than about half the time which is worse than a stock Nerf blaster
that being said if you get the right combination of Scar and Barrel you can apparently get these
to be very accurate I have no doubt about that but out of the box they are not now MilSig has
kept in touch with other products that after I decided not to sell that and the latest offering
they've got is what they're calling their MiniBox this 3D printed Blaster is not MiniBox
MiniBox is simply the core of this Blaster which is essentially all of the action it's
got the spring the piston and the fire modes on the other side as well as the trigger and the
concept here is that anybody in the community could design their own Blaster around this
existing core which has its own regulator and is all set up for HPA I like this concept because
unlike doing your own air tank or doing something very DIY there's a lot to be
said about a manufactured Precision component and engine running the whole thing now you will
notice this got damaged in transit I don't think the wall thickness on this handle was good enough
but again we're not really here to talk about the 3D printed part so ignore that for the most part I
it's just a kind of sample Blaster they I believe this one's modeled someone's gonna
have to correct me in the comments but I believe it's modeled after approximately
a Star Wars one of the Star Wars blasters that I'm not familiar with for some reason but the
the core concept here is that you as long as you accommodate for the select fire switch
because yes this is full auto or semi-automatic or safe of course you've also got a sling point
on the side which is I believe a QD and then you've got of course the trigger and the top
slide and the idea here is that you can get the geometry of this like the cad file and build any
Blaster you want around this now this interests me a lot more than this does primarily just due
to being able to make it look a little different I can make this look like a Nerf blaster I can
make this core fit into existing Nerf blasters and I think there's a lot of opportunity there
to use this core inside a wide range of blaster projects whether it's designing and 3D printing
your own shell like this or perhaps shoving it into some other Blaster that it can fit into and
I think realistically there are probably quite a few blasters that you could cram this core into
this core is came with a an adapter for a hose line so you could run to a regular tank
which I've now thrown on the floor or as you can see here this has got a small HPA tank and
a stock now this is really not a setup this is just leftover parts from the mil Sig I wouldn't
run this because this isn't set up stabilized in any way I would definitely need to print a
component to actually make this finalize but let's get down to the actual function
of this it's worth noting HPA is serious stuff you definitely need to treat these tanks with
care just like you do your LiPO batteries exploding tanks and Regulators are no joke
you do not want to drop them you do not want to physically damage them this one's aluminum
so it's pretty durable but a lot of the tanks are of course carbon fiber wrap and those uh
can be or fiberglass wrap and they can be I've seen two go up in my paintball career so they
are no no joke when they are flying around a field with a puncture but this Blaster right
now we are in safe if we go to semi we get of course single shots I do not like how that uh
sling pin there is a little bit into the firing into the firing position and I'm actually going
to before I fire this I'm going to put glasses on and we're going to start by firing darts and then
we're going to talk about the other included magazines that came with the MiniBox but I'm
going to put a standard Talon magazine because that's what this is designed for I'm going to
switch from safe to semi and we're just going to go ahead and send some shots into the catch here
as you can see I can basically fire as fast as I can pull the trigger
it's got a very Snappy good trigger full it definitely makes quite a bit of noise
especially with this long short barrel that's on here right now I think that's
going to be about the loudest configuration uh next I'm going to bump over to full auto
and we'll see I've just got four shots left so I'll just go through those four
what I think that's what's causing our problem I've jammed I've squibbed one in here
right inside the breach all right so if I can get that cleared out
and we will go again here get a MAG going back to full auto now
the select fire switch is ambidextrous so it works on both sides which I think is great and
actually the design of this Blaster is quite comfortable this grip is nice and oversized
feels good it's a pretty classic layout but I think if you made this all nice bright colors
I'd probably lose this little goofy guy in the carry handle but uh I do like the option here
to make it look considerably less realistic now I don't think I would keep these components back
here I would probably put this make some sort of regular stock and then actually put this on
a belt pack to make it a little more comfortable now there are two ammo options for this Blaster
that function right out of the box or rather for the core itself or slash these 3D printed Parts
I'm not entirely sure how mil Sig is going to roll out this launch as far as are they going
to give people these files to print their own and then sell them the core or is this just a one-off
we're not entirely sure but you can of course fire Talons right out but you can also fire 50
millimeter round projectiles now these that were sent to me are something I would would never like
to see on a field unless you are all playing with the same type of ammo and it's a private field
these balls are 50 mils but they are insanely hard they're just like solid rubber so these
uh are definitely you know pseudo dangerous if not handled correctly or with care rather
so keep that in mind however I do know that some of the other shops online such as monkey mods do
have these 50 millimeter soft foam balls so we loaded up some of those as well to test so I'm
going to first fire some of the included round from MilSig and this is definitely like Arena
play where you're not anywhere where you can break stuff this I mean I'm literally worried
about this putting holes through my catch here because it's such a solid projectile
in comparison so I'm going to load I assume I'm going that way yeah I'm gonna switch back to semi
and those fire just as expected really really work well this is a very cool magazine in that
it is a built-in flip clip so you've got two holes and one side of the magazine is for one side and
the other is for other side so you're essentially getting 15 about 16 rounds on each side which is
kind of cool built into a nice small package but let's give a shot on actually firing the
soft 50 round 50 cal amp because ammo because these I would definitely allow
at our games they're no worse than hyper as far as squishiness or maybe even I'd say a little bit
softer than hyper so there are definitely a good type of ammo to play with foreign
just fine they seem to work just fine I kind of want to fire them down range so
we'll definitely show some footage here of firing everything outdoors
check this out
you couldn't hit people if you wanted to do you see these yeah yeah Wacky Ball
oh my gosh they're just not
so the balls are horribly accurate this is probably one of the least accurate blasters I've
ever used given there is a pretty short barrel here and you can swap that out for a longer one
but clearly there are some major issues when we were firing darts we noticed that on Full Auto
it pretty much does not work full auto as the the Ram comes back and goes forward it pinches
the darts in the chamber so you essentially can't use this in full auto with darts from our testing
and that's with worker jars which to us are the most common darts at this point overall this is
kind of a weird system to review because I'm not really reviewing the Blaster so I'm really trying
to give you my thoughts more on the HPA core we for a long time have had the super core and that
was a great system but it was pretty DIY and you definitely needed a lot of extra components to
get it going this would certainly simplify that though maybe not be quite as versatile versatile
because you are required to use their of course trigger in specific locations for for screws and
whatnot but I do think this is a step in the right direction as far as having this more in the Nerf
hobby but it is very much going to depend on the field you play at the types of games you
play and what those places allow uh certainly I know that end War for example the largest hpz
event in the U.S does not allow HPA so this just right out of the gate wouldn't be allowed there
but I bet some of our local games where we have a private field might allow it so I think that's a
place where we would I'll probably give it a give it a shot playing this MiniBox doesn't come cheap
either I believe the final retail price on this is going to be between 250 and 300 I actually
don't know the official price because it's not available and this was a pre-production unit
sent to me so definitely keep this with a grain of salt if we have the actual price we'll put it
on screen I can't say that I really endorsed this whole thing in its current form because
I'm not seeing a real good performance I mean any caliber and out of the box beats this in accuracy
just plain and simple and I think it's due to the high pressure low volume system that
they're using to fire we've simply got too much turbulence coming out of that Barrel
and that needs to be corrected or re-centered with hopefully a bearing SCAR or scar of some
sort but without being able to test that further I don't have any you know real direct knowledge but
what I'd like to hear from you in the comments and let's please keep this civil because there's lots
of ways to play Nerf and I am fine with everybody should do their own thing as long as everybody's
being safe at the end of the day that's the most important part but let me know what you think of
this idea of MiniBox of a modular customizable Blaster where you could make anything you want
you know you could make turn it into a Halo ma40 maybe or turn it into any Star Wars Blaster you
can think of or some sort of like crazy futuristic looking Blaster you could pretty much do anything
you want because there's only a couple components that need to be in specific locations to function
we currently have really shied away from HPA because it almost feels like a different hobby
to me it's a little less DIY you know when we're talking this type of type of blaster
and ultimately at the end of the day it changes the gameplay a little bit I think if you bring
blasters like this if this was allowed at every game and it it kind of becomes the new meta it's
like there's not a flywheeler that can compete with a HPA system at the end of the day and a
well-tuned HPA system should be just as accurate as a good Springer however I again haven't quite
seen that here yet I know there are blasters out there like the neutrino that are certainly very
very accurate I fired one of those a couple months back and it was very good Blaster but
um I'd love to hear your thoughts and until next time I'm out of darts