Silly Shells for Homemade Nerf Blasters

“What are Silly Shells?”:

Silly Shells are an ecosystem of 3D printed shotgun shells for homemade Nerf-style blasters! There are many, many different shells to use in each blaster, allowing one blaster to fire a wide variety of ammo types without reconfiguration or modding.

For example, you can fire 3 Elite darts out of one shell, eject it, and then load a MegaXL shell to fire a huge dart at your enemies! Then you can follow that up with a “buckshot” round of Rival balls. Then you can load a Sniper shell to hit a person completely across the field from you.

Silly Shells allow you to use multiple different types of foam ammo in one blaster, and they allow you to fire multiple darts with just one shot of the blaster!

The source files for Silly Shells are also available for free, for people to design their own shells, and design their own blasters that use Silly Shells. STEP and F3D files are both in this fileset.

Silly Shells are the culmination of almost 2 years of development. Now that they are released, I hope you guys (and gals) enjoy them as much as I do!

Note: Please print Silly Shells in bright colors, for safety reasons. Preferably orange!

Firing Demo:

Shell Overview: Editing the video, not up yet, sorry!

Please check the shell compatibility spreadsheet to see which Silly Shells work in which blasters.

Shell Descriptions

- Elite shell (1x, 2x, 3x, 4x): Shoots full length darts, such as Nerf Elite darts, or double the amount of half darts (so an Elite 3x shell fits 6x half darts). - Rival shell: Fits up to 3 Rival balls. - Mega shell: Fires Mega darts. - There is a rifled version too, for better accuracy. - MXL shell: Fires MegaXL darts. - There is a rifled version too, for better accuracy. - Ultra shell: Fires Ultra darts. - N1 N-Series shell: Fires N1 darts. - Hyper shell: Fires up to 3 Hyper balls. (It technically fits 5 Hyper balls, but Hyper is too sticky of a rubber. The friction ruins any load above 3 balls.) - Sniper shell: Uses an aluminum barrel for extra long range shots with half darts or full length darts. - There are two versions of the Sniper shell. - One uses a printed collet that squishes an o-ring to hold the barrel. ( Hardware: 2x 016 o-rings.) - The other uses two screws to hold in the barrel. ( Hardware: 2x m3x6 socket head screws, 2x m3 square nuts, 2x 016 o-rings.) - Bottlenose : Similar to the Sniper shell, but its fully printed (no aluminum barrel). Has a built in SCAR for dart stabilization. - There's several lengths of Bottlenose available, for different FPS ranges for each blaster you use it in. - Missile/Demolisher shell: Fires Demolisher missiles/rockets. This shell doesn't fit in breech-loaded blasters because the ammo is wider than the shell itself. It does work in Wildstyle. - Blank : A dummy shell with no airflow path, used for testing air seal of blasters where you can't really reach the breech to seal it with a finger.

There are also EXPERIMENTAL adapters to use other shell standards in a Silly Shell blaster. These are UNTESTED currently.

- Spring Thunder shell adapter - Flypoint shell adapter - Colonel Wasp Firefly shell adapter

Loading:

Blasters that use Silly Shells:

If you are designing a blaster or mod that uses Silly Shells, please comment a link to it so I can add it here! If its on Printables, please also mark it as a remix of this file listing.

- Sillybutts Wildstyle Shotgun Pistol - Spyr Yeethammer (WIP) - Je/ShoelessHistorian Booster (WIP)

Sellers

A full list of non-US sellers can be found here: https://www.stuffbysilly.com/wheretobuy

Printed Silly Shells are available from these sellers:

- OutOfDarts: https://outofdarts.com/products/silly-shells - SilverFoxIndustries: WIP

Performance:

Since Silly Shells are used in several different blasters, each with different springs, prime lengths, and air sealing methods, its difficult to provide FPS numbers for Silly Shells as a whole.

That being said, you can roughly expect (from a 65mm prime 1.5"OD PT blaster like Wildstyle):

- 3x Elite : 70 fps per dart. Roughly the same for 6x half darts. - 2x Elite : 85 fps per dart. 80 fps per 4x half dart. - 1x Elite : 120 fps - Bottlenose : 150 fps approximately. - Sniper : You can easily hit anywhere from 110 fps to 250+ fps, depending on barrel length and ID size, full length dart or half dart, SCAR/BCARs, what blaster it's in, etc etc. - Rival : 70 fps per 3x balls. 80 fps for 2x and 1x. AccuRival hits harder. - Hyper : Untested FPS. Its about the same as rival up to 3 hyper balls, but then FPS falls off as more balls are added. - Mega : 100 fps for full Mega, more for half length Mega. - MegaXL : 70 fps for full MXL. - Ultra : 120 fps approximately.

Silly Shells in Magazines

One of the main design goals of Silly Shells was to make them work well in both box magazines and tube magazines.

Silly Shells have a recessed rim, which means they can feed smoothly out of box magazines.

Silly Shells are also the correct OD to fit smoothly inside hobby-standard 1.5"OD polycarbonate plunger tube material, meaning that it is very easy to make a magazine tube that you can see through to count your ammo.

At the time of release, the box magazine for Silly Shells is still under development. I really don't want to release it before I'm sure I won't be changing it much in the future (specifically the feed lips and the location of the mag-release catch notch on the mag).

At the time of release, the geometry for Silly Shell tube magazines is done, but not currently used in a blaster design. The tube mag works, but I haven't finished the blaster that uses it! So, I will be making a separate listing just for the components of the tube magazine for other designers to build around. That listing can be found here: I'll add one when I upload it. its like midnight at time of writing and I don't wanna deal with it lol.

Please check the shell compatibility spreadsheet to see which Silly Shells work in which blasters.

Print Info

Each shell uses approximately 41 grams of PLA when printed at my recommended settings. 41 grams is a bit heavy for a shell, but in my opinion its worth it for the extra durability.

I recommend you print shells, at maximum, 3 at a time. Doing 4 or more at once has greater risk of them popping off the buildplate.

I don't use brims, but you decide if you need them on your printer.

You are free to print at whatever settings you want of course, but my recommended settings will be good for durability.

Recommended print settings:

- The first 13mm of the shell (from the back of the shell, up 13mm) should be printed at 100% infill, 5 walls. - Everything above 13mm should be printed at 10% infill, 5 walls. There's several ways to do this variable infill in each slicer.