Concept mini flywheel Vulcan
Posted: 17/02/2025
The N-Strike Vulcan is one of those quintessential Nerf blasters, the sort that Hasbro has long forgotten how to recreate without managing to screw it up (just look at the ICON series). It came from a time when Nerf still had the bandwidth to release gimmicky and yet pretty well functioning blasters. Unfortunately, the Vulcan also came at a time when 50 feet per second was the standard muzzle velocity for a blaster.
They don't make them like they used to.
Nowadays the Vulcan is well, well outclassed in performance, but the only thing that comes close today to recreating its magic is the X-Shot Rage Fire. Actually, the Rage Fire looks to be a very solid blaster, seeing as it's flywheel powered and comes with chains that can be extended and bought. There's two important bits to me, though: one is that I don't own a Rage Fire; two is that there's something about the late N-Strike, early Elite aesthetic that is just so emblematic of what Nerf feels like... well, to me anyway. X-Shot doesn't quite hit the mark for me.
What I'd do with a Rage Fire, if I had one. Credit to Creative_Run_9964 on /r/Nerf.
So I have a Vulcan; I even have a couple chains for it, and I'd like to get some more whenever I can put aside the money to do something like that. When I got the Vulcan, however, its battery housing was all corroded, so I've never actually managed to use the Vulcan in its fully automatic state. The only option therefore is to modify it :)
What many people who mod the Vulcan do is to put a flywheel cage "afterburner" into the Vulcan, using the original motorized, spring-powered firing system as a way to feed the darts into the flywheel cage. But although this solution has become easier over time with 3D-printed mounting brackets, they still involve a degree of shell cutting that I am uncomfortable with.
What I'd like to do instead is to use smaller sizes of flywheels, which should lessen the amount of shell cutting I would have to do. The flywheels I have the best access to would probably be the Nightingale flywheels from BlasterTech. I'd combine this with Honey Badgers overvolted to 3S and a modification of this cage for the Mayfly blaster into hopefully something that fits easily into a Vulcan. If there is enough room, I could even add a second stage, though I have very little experience on multi-stage flywheel modding... but it would push the FPS further, hopefully.
The downsides of using mini flywheels are that they very quickly hit a ceiling to their potential FPS, and that they have reliability issues on both the motors and the darts put through them (See this discussion for some details). Although standard Elite-size flywheels would be preferable to a modder more adept at shell cutting, I would like to see whether I can make Vulcan afterburner modding easier with mini flywheels. The goal is not necessarily amazing performance - the blaster is impractical anyway - rather, I want to find a new way to just bring up to par a seriously cool-looking blaster with a relatively unique method of firing and loading.