Hi, I’m Luke.
Today on Out of Darts, we are checking out one of the coolest blasters I have seen in years.
This is the PewTech PewPew.
The PewPew is designed by an Instagram user that goes by @Pewte.ch.
Putting that up on the screen and down in the description.
When I first saw this blaster, I was absolutely blown away by how tiny it was.
It's the first thing you notice when you pick it up.
This is a talon magwell blaster.
It is full auto. It is select-fire. It has a variable rate of fire and a variable velocity.
It is essentially all of the features that are pumped into
an FDL or equivalent smart blaster down into an itty-bitty little blaster.
One really amazing thing is that this blaster
only weighs 368 grams, and that's including a 550 milliamp 3s battery.
To give you a sense of scale because I think that's really where this blaster shines.
Here's a previous video we did: the concept pistol from DevilZ’ Nerfworks.
You can see that it is pretty comparable in size, except the mag is not through the grip.
It's actually a little bit shorter.
The closest blaster I can compare this to, however, is my Kestrel.
The Kestrel is a really neat little blaster, and I thought when this came out,
it was pretty tiny, but when you compare these, it is just mind-blowingly small.
The amount of attention to detail and the engineering and programming that went into this
are nothing short of monumental in our hobby.
And I can say that with all confidence because we're working on our own boards, we're working
on a variety of different mods, and this is really a lot of tech packed into a really small package.
Anytime you're making something small,
there's a lot of additional design challenges and problems you'll face.
One of the more interesting things about buying this blaster is that I
essentially sent money sight-unseen to a complete stranger who I don't know in the nerf community
who I have never met and never heard of prior to this little amazing blaster coming out.
Now that said, two of my friends, WalcomS7 and LuchaThor, both had purchased one of
these as well, so I did see one of these in person before actually pulling the trigger.
He's located in Switzerland, and I believe taking some orders here and there.
We’ll have any pertinent ordering information or how you get one or contact down below,
but as far as I know, right now, there's no storefront or anything like that.
I just did this by email, he sent over a PayPal invoice,
and the blaster was in my hands a few weeks later.
This blaster is very unique in the space for a couple of reasons.
First of all, we have tiny little brushless flywheels up front with custom flywheels.
These are the smallest motors I’ve ever seen someone put inside of a blaster… period.
That includes brushed or brushless.
You'll see here in the close-ups, but the entire motor and housing and mount are all contained
inside the size of these tiny little flywheels.
The flywheels are a somewhat similar size to the flywheel the world flywheels.
However, the entire motor is housed inside because it's a brushless outrunner motor.
Up front, we've got a passive heatsink.
This entire cage in the front here is actually venting a lot of heat from the motors.
It also produces a really solid rock-solid mount for those motors. I can only imagine
that this generates a ton of heat just due to how fast and high they are spinning.
Drone motors themselves (or outrunners like these) are generally used in quadcopters,
and a lot of those quadcopter motors have a lot of airflow going through them.
So, it's pretty important to
cool them properly, or you will damage them or at least lose performance at best case.
Couple other nice features I want to mention are first that the battery door in the bottom is neat.
It's actually a little magnet inside there;
it’s two opposing magnets that actually give that tension to hold that open.
There's also a low voltage alarm and a low voltage shut-off along with
an inactivity alarm which is pretty cool.
As far as batteries, you've got quite a bit of room in here. You can fit up to
an 850-milliamp pack, maybe a little bit larger.
But, in reality, a 450 or a 550 is tons of available current and tons of available capacity.
This smaller 1106 (I believe) motor size is not as energy-hungry as our larger 2205 brushless motors
or even our brushed motors, so you're going to see pretty good battery performance on here.
I have literally shot over a hundred Tachis out of this, and I’m still on the same battery, so
I think it's pretty safe to say that a 550-milliamp battery is going to
last you an entire day of play quite easily.
One other fabulous feature is this mag release.
At first, I was like, that's a funky mag release.
You pull on it with this finger.
I find I can reach it ambidextrous really easily on both sides.
But the other fun thing is that it is also a push mag release,
so it works in that direction, and it works in that direction.
So, in both directions, it rocks and pulls the center core out.
Even better -- if you just slam your thumb up there, it activates that mag release.
So, if I just push my finger anywhere up in there, I get the magazine released,
and if I just slide my finger up, it makes it just a breeze to pull that mag out.
Even though there is a true mag release (which is rock solid, by the way).
So that was pretty darn cool.
I am overall just blown away by this blaster.
On the left side, you'll notice two little threaded heat-set inserts, and that immediately
I just think is the best idea.
It allows someone to pick up these magnets like we have for the HOLDster
style system and basically screw them on and use this as a mounted sidearm.
Which is I think how I will try to play with it when I first get out to the field.
On the left side of the blaster, we've got what looks to me like a 0.9-inch OLED.
There's a variety of different sizes out there,
but this looks to be a pretty common black and white one.
It's got a really nice little jog dial.
And I have to say that the menu you did here is just awesome.
It's really simple, but it took me zero time to figure out and dial in.
It is one of the more intuitive, very limited menus.
You have no button; you’re just using this…
You have four directions on a D-pad; that's all it is.
The menu itself also has a sort of advanced secret menu.
It's a little hidden menu that you can get to, and I thought that was pretty fun.
You can get in and customize all of the parameters,
and it's pretty extensive what you can actually do.
But I like that the base UI doesn't have all that complexity.
It just has the three or four lines of options
keeping the operation of this blaster really simple.
From this, you can set your modes, of course, and you've got full-auto single and burst.
Next, you can also set your speed, which is the actual speed of the flywheels,
which gives you your velocity.
You can dial this up and down in five percent increments which will
presumably get you a pretty good range of FPS.
Lastly, you can adjust your rate of fire in five dart increments.
The wild thing is it goes to 35 (40).
In case you're curious what 35 sounds like…
It's insane; it's crazy.
It does seem like there is a shutoff period. I think this is probably to reduce wear and heat,
but they've got a certain number of cycles that
it will cycle before it will cut off even on full auto.
I'm going to guess that's heat-related to reduce consumption.
Or it might be it's just 15 shots for a 15-shot talon, but I’ve got Tachis, obviously.
So, we can dump this in right now.
I've got it on 35. That’s the full rate of fire at 70% speed.
They're firing so fast as far as rate of fire that it's like a wall of darts
you can't even discern the line of darts coming out of the blaster.
It's just it is really fun, and I think this just looks half ridiculous and half amazing.
PewTech, whatever your real name is, this is a fabulous little blaster. I don't think
anything's made me giggle this much in a while as far as a new community project.
Since this is a smart blaster, you don't have to stick at that 35 rounds a second.
That's a pretty absurd fire rate.
The only thing I can think of out there that compares to it is the Lepus.
Though the Lepus, in my experience,
has been a little hit or miss on the feeding, so far, this thing seems solid.
While we're on the subject of feeding, I am still not sure what's inside here.
Obviously, it's a solenoid; I can feel it when I pull the trigger.
It is clearly a very small soil solenoid with a decent travel. I’m going to guess
15 millimeters, but hopefully, I’ll get some more information on this in the future.
When you're comparing that to something like this, Kestrel:
The Kestrel has a flywheel the world solenoid, and just for size comparison,
I’ve got my Hummingbird open here.
This is a 35-millimeter stroke solenoid.
It is a huge can; it's a little over two inches long and about
an inch and a quarter in each direction -- just to compare.
That's bigger than the body at the widest point of this blaster.
It is amazing that someone hasn't done this sooner and figured out
a small solenoid that will reliably work.
I can't wait to get this open and actually check out the insides to see how that functions.
In addition to setting the three modes when you are in burst mode,
you can also choose the actual burst size.
So, I’m going to put this into burst mode, and we are going to bump down to I’ll keep it at 70%
speed, and we're going to bump the burst size. Let's do a burst size of 5.
It looks like I can set between 2 and 5.
Obviously, if you're setting it to 1, that's called semi-auto.
So, I’ll set we're at a burst setting of five here, and I’m at a speed of 70%.
Now it's worth noting that these wheels are spinning up crazy fast, and when you're
cycling that many darts through there, you are going to get some dart wear and some dart dust.
I think that's pretty much unavoidable.
The crush on the actual flywheels there seems pretty high, comparable to perhaps daybreak,
but there's definitely a lot of torque going on in there and a lot of dart movements.
So, I am noticing some dart wear and some build-up there.
It doesn't seem like it's anything to be concerning.
The nice thing is I can see the cage entirely.
And what I’m calling cage is really cage/heatsink, which is a great concept.
It's something I did really want to try on a previous blaster but never got around to
finalizing the blaster itself.
Now I’ve got the PewPew back in single fire mode.
We’re again at 70%.
Maybe I’ll bump up our power.
We’re going to put our speed up to 100%, so these would be maximum velocity shots.
But the cool thing about the blaster single trigger tiny flywheels they fly up insanely fast.
It's the most responsive trigger pull on a flywheel blaster I have ever felt,
bar none. There’s nothing else that feels this snappy, and I can pretty much just.
Just crank through them, and that alone makes this blaster extremely usable as a sidearm.
I would love to think I get to EndWar and play with this blaster.
When it comes to performance, this tiny PewPew is no slouch.
I'm getting nearly 140 FPS average, single fire,
on the max velocity, and that I think (in this package) is absolutely spectacular.
I can't say I’d run it that high all the time because I think
you're pretty much guaranteed to have more wear on the blaster and motors.
Obviously depends on whether using it as a primary or secondary,
but it's just snappy and responsive and really fun.
I would love to run this at EndWar, but it does bring me to one important point.
This blaster is not cheap.
The blaster with shipping ended up being a little over $500.
I bought it because I was absolutely fascinated to see how it worked, check it out,
and because I’m really interested to see if he'd be open to a license.
So do let me know in the comments if this is something you'd like to see on the shop.
I will be talking with the creator about that, but it could be that we open this up and find
its way more complicated than we want to deal with.
There are a lot of pinouts in and out, and depending on what board and screen and everything
we used, it's probably a considerable amount of work to put these together.
Regardless the time, dedication and engineering,
and programming that went into building this little guy are nothing short of impressive.
Ergonomically the blaster is very comfortable.
There's a nice thumb rest on the left side here.
If you were left-handed, I don't think you'll have any problem other than the
mounting plate being on the wrong side.
I don't know if that's an option you can flip when you order with him, but
that's something you'd have to check with the creator.
The grip is actually quite good. It feels nice in my hand.
The distance for my finger is a little awkward,
but it is a very specific point to keep the blaster as tiny as possible.
My finger naturally would probably want to pull
the trigger a little farther forward somewhere up in here.
But again, that's not the purpose of the blaster.
If you did that, you'd make it quite a bit larger, and I think that would be a negative.
So, at the end of the day, the ergonomics feel great.
I can't imagine another way to holster this beyond the magnetic plates.
You could probably come up with some other system to slot this into a holster,
but I think the magnetic mount plates are probably going to be the ideal setup for me.
In terms of build quality, the prints are very clean; they look very nice.
These aren't my specific colors.
I'd actually love to print that in some of our actual
colors here, but maybe some time down the road.
However, this looks like galactic black or galaxy black, one of the similar colors that we've got.
The print quality is very good.
It feels very nice in hand and…
“Getting sleepy!”
There's a little -- it says getting sleepy with Zs.
And then, of course, if I pull the trigger, presumably that'll go away.
That's a pretty cute little add-on there.
PewTech used a special bed that's got a really cool texture.
It's a little hard to see on camera, but the top of this has got a really neat square textured
bed on it, which is a neat effect; I like that quite a bit.
At the end of the day, I feel the PewPew is a masterpiece of a community design.
I am really envious of all the effort that went into this,
and I think it's just a really cool platform.
I would give it 5 out of 5 stars.
The only disclaimer there is obviously it's not an affordable blaster.
It's a one-off crafted just for me just for -- I think there's been 10 of them sold so far.
So, if you're not factoring the price in, I’d say it's five out of five.
You can factor in your own rating after you take the price into consideration.
I'd love to hear what you think of this little blaster and if you'd
like to see any other video content on it or have any questions about it.
We'll try to do some follow-up content on Instagram just to see what the internals look like
and some other things like that because I’m pretty anxious to crack it open and take a look myself.
Thanks again for watching!
Do hit that like and subscribe button.
Until next time, I’m out of darts.