I'm Luke. Today Captain Slug is at it again(!) The madman himself never
stops making new blasters and this is easily the most bizarre one yet. Let's get going.
For anybody that's been in the hobby for any amount of time, you've certainly heard
of Captain Slug. He predates me to the hobby by years and years, and he is the original
first 3D-printed nerf blaster person, as far as I know anyway (or the first designer).
He makes a wide variety of blasters, from the Caliburn (which is not on the wall so I'm pointing
at nothing), to the TalonClaw, to the TalonClaw-U which is similar to this blaster in some ways, but
this is the FLAK. FLAK is a multi-ammo blaster. It can be configured in a variety of ways,
to shoot long darts, short darts, trilogy shells, sledgefire shells, and I believe mega, and...
I might be wrong about mega, but essentially you can fire all kinds of different ammo with this
blaster. Now, with all the blasters that captain slug already has, that did leave me asking why?
Because I see the how. I see the blaster. But the why is the better question, because he's already
got all the ammo types covered with his numerous other blasters, in a wide variety of form factors,
but this one's just all about the lever action. It's just for fun. So at its basic core, it's a
lever-action, giant plunger tube blaster. Now that giant plunger tube is important,
because that's how we're still getting decent performance in a wide variety of ammo types,
and that's how we're able to prime with this lever prime. And not only that but then
still have it work with a variety of ammo types and whatnot.
So he's got a rather ingenious little slide mechanism here for the actual prime,
which is very easy to prime. This specific version is set up for sledgefire shells now sledgefire
shells are the older style shell that came with the sledgefire. The newer blasters coming out now
are using trilogy shells, and those come from this blaster. It does seem like Hasbro has
abandoned these original shells. now I am working on 3D-printed versions of both of these shells,
but I was a little sad to find out that the base receiver here didn't take my initial design.
I filled in some edges here that are not filled in in the stock shell, so my current 3D design won't
fit here. These aren't for sale or anything like that yet, it's still just a prototype. And we're
going to do versions for the trilogy as well, because they're a little bit hard to find,
and they're a little overpriced, I think. So it's something that we can overcome, and do some cool
colors, and whatnot. That said, you can buy this blaster as a kit or as a completed blaster for all
these different ammo types, but it's worth noting that you're pretty much setting it up for one ammo
type or one magazine type. So there's everything from a short dart mag well, to a long mag well,
trilogy shells, and sledgefire. Now Captain Slug sent me this to review with the sledgefire
variant. I think ultimately the trilogy version might be superior because i'm pretty sure that
he's got this working in a way where these shells come out a little easier than with the
current setup. But that being said, I may reprint this part to try to do trilogy later, but for now,
we're going to just talk about the standard sledgefire shells. The blaster is as bare-bones
as you can imagine. It's got a kind of simple grip up here. It's got this U-channel design so it uses
extruded U-shaped aluminum, which gives it a lot of rigidity front to back, and it also simplifies
the assembly. Because you've got metal-on-plastic instead of plastic-on-plastic, it makes for a nice
feel in the actual prime itself. Loading the blaster is fairly straightforward you're going to
load your shells themselves, which I think would be suitable to carry around in a dump pouch. Slap
that shell in here, prime it back, and fire. And this is clearly a specialty blaster, I don't think
that you're going to compete with somebody with a magazine-fed blaster that's in a little bit
more comfortable form factor, but that's not what this blaster is about. And ultimately, the point I
want to make here is that, that's not what this hobby is about. I love seeing people make stuff
just for the sake of making something different. That's one of the best parts about this hobby,
for me, is the amount of ingenuity, and creativity, and dedication that's out there.
I got sent this insane magazine which is probably the most over-engineered thing I've ever seen,
and I love it because I think it's just crazy to see people come up with things like this.
This is a future video, but I reference it because this is very much similar.
You're not buying this to compete with a nexus pro, or even a Caliburn or a TalonClaw,
because those people are going to have more ammo. You're buying this because it's different. It kind
of has an almost sci-fi feel to it and it just looks and feels very different. I think this would
be a very fun blaster for me to play around with my neighborhood kids or with my cousins, where
I'm not trying to be so competitive or "win;" where I'm just playing for fun. Possibly playing
against stock blasters, because uh with a single shell with three of the three darts in here,
and if you add the extra band you're still getting about stock performance out of those,
which is pretty spectacular because a sledgefire or trilogy doesn't get anywhere near that kind of
performance. The blaster doesn't use springs, and I assume that's to help cut down in cost and else
also make this design more feasible to fit in the space. Because otherwise, we'd have
to have presumably a spring in here, which would get in the way of the actual priming mechanism,
and it's really got just a fun function, very simple. I've shot it probably a couple hundred
times now and I've not been very careful with it and it seems to be just fine.
One thing I did notice, and I'm pretty sure this is actually just a defect,
I think there's supposed to be holes here for these two because it's machined for it
but there were no holes to thread it into. So I think I'll drill some little pilot holes there,
toss some screws in, and that'll make the front even more rock-solid. For me the grip is a
little bit small, but your mileage will vary, depending on the size of your hands. I seem to
be complaining about grips every other review, so maybe there's just something wrong with my hands.
That said another feature it does have is a U-channel down here with some additional locking
points so you can add a stock. So he makes a stock so that you could actually probably a
little more effectively use this. I think with this not floating freehand, it's going to be
even easier to prime. Overall the performance is pretty decent, especially considering it's
shooting sledgefire -- stock sledgefire shells. I was getting about 65-70 FPS on three shots. And if
you were to single this, you're going to get much higher. I've heard that the half dart version can
get up to 145-150 and the full length is somewhere in that range as well. When you're playing out
in actual practice, playing with this outside it feels very good in the hand. I do need to learn
to reload these more and I probably do need to buy some more sledgefire shells or modify mine
for trilogy shells since I now have a few of those. This comes in at about a hundred dollar
price point fully-built from Slug, and that's just as you see it here that would be if he builds it
for you, and assembles it for you, You can buy the hardware kits, I believe, for about 45 dollars if
you've got your own 3D printer you can of course print your own. One of the great things about this
blaster is that none of the pieces are very big. I think, judging by looking at this right now, the
largest piece is this prime. So if you can print this diagonally this actual prime handle you can
print that on just about anything. I mean I wouldn't even be surprised like a Monoprice
Select Mini could do this, a Prusa Mini could certainly print all of this, so
I think that's a great option especially if you've got kids or kids you want to encourage
to get into, whether it's computer science or just learning more about tools and use, I think this is
a simple enough one to put together that it would make a really good project. I'm going to give
this a 4 out of 5 stars, mostly for novelty. It's not a perfect blaster, but it is a very very fun
addition to the collection. I'd love to hear what you think about this blaster, and what other funky
blasters I should check out because not everything has to be the heaviest hitting, you know, highest
performance, highest capacity blaster. I like everything in between, and I think this one is
a good example of something that falls in-between everything else. Until next time, I'm out of darts
It's
such a funky blaster!