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The Dart Shark: Nerf Magazine Loader

So, it's a "shark" that eats Nerf darts? ... Yeah, pretty much.


The Dart Shark is a mechanized Nerf dart chomper which has the sole purpose of making it easier to reload Nerf magazines. When a dart is inserted, it uses 3 lithium batteries to power a motor & crank to actuate the head which loads the dart into the magazine. The fact that it looks like a shark started by happenstance. The shark specific features I added seemed cool, so I stuck with them. It helped make the design more fun. In case you're wondering, this has nothing to do with 'Baby Shark' The Musical... Although I did find the timing of this release comical.



Obviously this can be perceived as a bit much for the task. Loading magazine upon magazine is not particularly difficult although it will get quite boring and then annoying. The motivating aspect here, beyond reducing frustration, is that this presents a good design challenge! This is always something I am up for, especially when it gives me the opportunity to try my hand at productionizing a motorized contraption.

The reality is that this does make loading magazines much easier as it allows you to only focus on pushing the dart into The Dart Shark and not about aligning the dart or pushing the rest of the dart stack down. Due to this, loading can be now be done one handed or while walking around. With the 3 lithium batteries pushing 12v to the motor it will cycle quite fast and make you feel like you're doing half the work you're used to.


As for the design, it took a while for me to come up with something simple enough that I would be able to sell. I had many ideas but most were too complicated and tried to allow the user to throw a handful of darts into a box and have them automatically come out loaded into magazines. I eventually settled on making a simpler design in order to set a more achievable goal for myself. I know it sounds like cheaping out but at some point you need to downshift in order to actually get somewhere.


I settled on a simple lever & crank design for this version of The Dart Shark. The lever has a "tongue" that holds the dart stack down before the next dart is inserted. Once a new dart is inserted it pushes the tongue out of the way until it hits a switch that cycles the mechanism. The mechanism angles the lever up so that the tongue can spring forward and push the darts down again when the lever comes to rest. The mechanism even has an overload spring that prevents it from getting stuck if the magazine is full.

Most of the parts in the Dart Shark are single color 3D prints made from PLA. I use steel screws to hold everything together and try to make efficient use of the fasteners where possible. Several parts are inherently captured by the installation of other components. I used 14500 lithium cells, switches, and a brushed motor to control the mechanism. It is wired up in such a way that the motor is in a brake state when not being powered. This reduces the overshoot of the mechanism, due to momentum, and makes the movement very consistent over the voltage range of the battery.



Designing something like this was a pet project of mine for a while. I was trying to address an area of play that I think gets neglected. Everyone is familiar with the fun part - shooting darts - and designs new products around that. I tried to focus on improving an annoying part - the slow reloading process. I figured that making this task a little less annoying would greatly improve the overall fun of game play. It really just comes down to this: If you have 10 mags all loaded up, would you shoot all the darts out of them? Answer: yes. So, let's try to make it easier to get those 10 mags all loaded up. I think there are definitely different designs and improvements that can be made but for now this is one item to offer some help.


--- Update 1/27/19:

After some feedback from the community I made a small change to the body of the Dart Shark to allow it to work with a MOLLE attachment system I designed. This allows the Dart Shark to be worn on a vest or belt during battle to enable one handed loading of magazines. It also allows for mounting at many different angles so the fit can be tailored to the mounting location on your gear. This is especially useful when reloading in vulnerable situations where you don't want to put down your blaster. During my testing I found it to be awesome and by far the best use of this reloader. I plan to run this as part of my load out going forward.


Check out my Etsy Shop AM34 Designs for more information.

Design files available for free on Thingiverse.

BlasterHub review of the Dart Shark.

Comments

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