Lock Blaster 10 Dart Cylinder

prusaprinters

After about a week of design iterations and constant re-printing, I'm proud to announce my 10 dart cylinder for the X-Shot Lock Blaster! It's not perfect, as it fails to rotate when priming around 10-15% of the time in my testing (n=100), however, it's still a decent proof of concept and sldprt files are available if you can see anything you can improve on. Installation is pretty simple, more or less just a drop in replacement for the default cylinder and indexing mechanism. The only major thing to be mindful of is the alignment between cylinder and indexing mechanism, as the holes between pegs on the indexer should line up the material between barrels as per the third photo. Otherwise, the barrel will be out of alignment with the plunger tube (and you'll have to open the blaster back up to get the correct alignment which is annoying) The cylinder has two options, a 12.7mm barrel diameter and a 13mm barrel diameter. The 12.7mm represents a really tight fit for darts, so some darts may not fit and those that do may wear out faster or perform a bit worse on a stock spring. The 13mm should be a more relaxed fit whilst also not sacrificing on performance too much. The cylinder can be printed pretty much however you want; 0.3mm layer height, 2 shells and 5% infill worked for me. The indexing mechanism is as much of a pain to print as it was to design but unfortunately, there's not a great deal that can be done. It's a bit of a retraction torture test so you're likely going to need to clean up stringing with a stanley knife. You'd want to print at a relatively fine layer height (ie: 0.15mm) to avoid friction, but even then lubricating the spaces between the rods is also a good idea. Additionally, the rods are really small and can break, so using something stronger than PLA is recommended. A lot of these issues could potentially be alleviated by printing the indexing mechanism in resin, however I don't have an SLA printer to test this with.