Hi, I'm Luke with Out of Darts.
Do you love the Dart Zone Pro Mark-II but don't love the six-round ammo capacity?
Well, I think I've got something cool to show you today.
Let's get going!
I love the Dart Zone Pro Mark-II.
I think it is a game-changer in the sidearm space, and while there are a lot of 3d-printed
options out there, none of them are as small or as holsterable as the Mark-II.
I've had a lot of fun playing with this at our recent games now that
we're getting back to a few private events, and it has performed very well.
My only real complaint about it is that because it doesn't take magazines,
it's only six round ammo capacity, and ultimately that's fine if it's just as a sidearm,
But, if you have to drop your primary and play with this for the rest of the
round (which I have definitely done), it leaves a little bit to be desired.
Now recently, a YouTuber by the name of Chicken -- I will link him down below, came up with this mod.
This is an extension he reached out to me, and this is his blaster,
his mod, his design (just to be super transparent there), and he sent me this.
It's still a bit of a prototype. You can see it's kind of a little blocky on the sides here.
But ultimately, what happens is
you make a single cut down here at the bottom, remove your side plates
and reinstall the new part, so it's a relatively simple way to extend the capacity of the blaster.
Chicken has been working on this design for some months now, trying to figure out the best way to
integrate the existing blaster with the extended magazine, making the cut as simple as possible,
and of course, making it feed as reliably as possible.
He's been sort of keeping me updated on his progress, and it's been really fun to watch
because this wasn't a design I had thought to do myself though it is a very cool idea.
The design takes the capacity of the stock blaster for from six rounds all the way up to ten.
It is a bit of a tight squeeze at ten, so I might put nine in.
So, you're gaining three to four shots which is not massive,
but it is a pretty good improvement overall.
He's also done a few other mods to this blaster,
including removing the actual lock, which I think is nice.
I find that in a holster, this safety tends to get activated by itself in the holster that I use,
or it frequently gets stuck dead middle, which is not useful at all.
The mod is
again very simple. It's pretty much just hack off the bottom and attach the 3d printed parts.
And to make the extended spring work, he's using a foam blast drum spring.
It's a curled-up spring a little bit like Thanh's magazines did in the past.
When you remove the bottom here, we can take a look at what's actually inside.
I'll try to show this in b-roll, but he's essentially got both of the
drum spring inside there, and there's the original spring.
I assume that's intentional; maybe he's trying to get a little bit of extra push
when the follower gets to the bottom of the magazine, but I'm not entirely sure about that.
Pretty interesting overall.
The follower is fairly chunky because it is holding that coil spring.
Just to show you what one of those springs looks like,
this isn't actually the foam blast drum spring, but it's a constant force spring.
Very fun. They're used in music boxes; they're,
of course, used in old drum magazines in nerf, and they are super cool.
The reason we sell them for the drum mags is actually because these stock springs
are a little bit too soft. They don't feed very fast, and they're not very reliable,
so upgrading that spring solves that problem.
Overall, I think it's a really cool mod. It definitely needs some more polish. I would
love to see these edges rounded out, maybe add some stylistic details to the side,
and if I were to get really picky, I might try at the suggestion of my print tech here,
potentially printing this upwards like this and maybe even in one piece if it's possible.
I might thicken out these edges here to actually get a sort of rounded grip,
but again, these are just some feedback nitpicks that I'm making, nothing too specific.
The follower itself is tilted what seems slightly forward;
it's not perfectly level, so I have had a few feed issues here and there with the dart
hitting the base of the barrel entrance instead of the dead center, and I think
that could be solved with just reorienting and changing the feel and angle of that follower.
Now Chicken is a complete unknown to me, so you can check out his YouTube channel below.
He does not have very many followers yet, so do go check him out.
He's done some other cool stuff; I have this six-round,
five-shot shotgun cylinder for the Boom Dozer in hand, and I'm dying to put this in the Boom Dozer.
So, I need to get myself a Boom Dozer,
but apparently, they're showing up in Canada on Walmart shelves before they hit the US.
He's also got a full-length version of this,
and it sounds like he's working on some other ammo types as well.
I'm hesitant to even say this, but I think
Mega XL is going to be a home run hit as far as the modding community goes because
re-barreling that massive plunger tube means that even five shots or sniper rounds or all
kinds of other mods could be done just because we've got a massive plunger tube to work with.
So, I'm talking with him about potentially licensing this design, and I think that's going
to probably work out pretty well, assuming that it works for as well as it does in his videos.
So, again, do go check out Chicken below. Let me know what you think of this mod.
I don't think we're going to sell this on the shop, mostly because I think the
complexity of the install is a little bit above a lot of users; it narrows it down to about 10%
of the people in our shop might be willing to take their $80
blaster and hack the bottom off with a band saw or a handsaw.
And since it is a permanent mod, I think more people might be hesitant to jump on the mod.
But let me know if I'm wrong!
If you'd like to see this on the shop and you think you're interested in this,
do leave me a comment down below.
Obviously, we would do our normal polishing, testing,
and all that stuff to make sure that it functions as well as we want it to.
Thanks so much for watching, as always.
Until next time I'm out of darts.