TOY FAIR: Brand Name Chronographs Enter the Market

Well, warriors. Just after we released our review of a new option for nerf chronographs, two of our favorite companies came back at us with their own brand-name chrony merchandise.

Nerf came out with a chronograph and ammo counter combined. You can see it in the foreground of this pic from Foam From Above. He was all over the showroom early on at the Toy Fair in New York this past weekend.

It looks like their product attaches as a barrel accessory with all the compatible streamline/elite firing blasters. Plus, there is a tac rail on the underside. The release is pasted at the bottom of this post. Check out Foam From Above's first-hand write-ups for more on this new release. I am pretty excited about the price-point.

Rapidstrike Stands Still - Write-up On Flywheel Activator Problem

So I ran into a little problem the other day at work. I took the Rapidstrike, among other blasters, to our company picnic. A lot of the folks got a kick out of them, but somewhere along the line, the Rapidstrike quit working. Sad day!

Found a fix though: Turns out there's a little tab inside where the magazine (what NERF calls a clip) feeds in. That tab is meant to be depressed by the magazine when its inserted into the blaster so that the circuit is closed and the Rapidstrike flywheel activator will work. I'm sure that those of you who love to take the blasters apart will already know that part.

It took me a bit to figure this one out, mostly because I was busy with work, etc. First I just dumped in for more batteries, just to see. But that didn't get me anywhere except poorer. The jam access door was closed, the magazine was seated in the blaster and there were no darts stuck on the flywheel -check, check and check. This may not be a common problem, but it turns out that if you slam the magazine into my blaster, that tab I mentioned will get shoved behind its plastic housing and the blaster will not work.

I took the smallest precision flathead screwdriver I have and wedged the tab out from behind the housing again. Luckily, there is no damage from that operation. I was able to recreate the problem by slamming the magazine in or pushing the tab in manually. I also took a phillips-head precision driver and made sure all of the screws in that area of the housing were tight. They are.

NERF is awesome to send us these products to test out early. We'll probably be grabbing another one on our own to see if we can recreate some problems with it too. If this turns out to be a repeat problem, it may be one of the few downsides I have found for this particular model.

After this fix, there haven't been any other problems! ~Chris