Review: Nerf Hornet AS-6 AND semi-auto fix

Many people have called this blaster, the Nerf Hornet AS-6, a lot of things, not a lot of them good. from what I've heard, they are rubbish, terrible, a waste of time, useless, and even the worst Nerf blaster ever made. This made me pretty reluctant to hunt one down, however I was given one to have a look at, and I did kind of want to find out for myself. Plus, I actually have not found a decent write up of these either.

The Hornet comes as a part of the Nerf Unity Power System, and clips on the the bottom of the Titan. Because of this, it does not feature a rail for attachments where one probably would be. Size is quite short in length but fairly wide. 6 darts can be loaded in the front of the blaster manually, and after sliding the front piece forward and back once and about 20 pumps they can be fired all at once by pressing the big orange side buttons or they can be fired one at a time in semi auto mode via the trigger. This is where most people have troubles. From factory, most of these don't work properly and seem to have a faulty semi auto mode which doesn't work at all. The fix for this is tricky, but simple in theory. I'll get to that later.

Range is actually quite good when the darts are all launched at once, probably about 35 feet, a little more with some angle. Semi auto, even when fixed is a bit dismal though, but there is a reason for that. have a look at the internals picture. When I first opened the hornet up, I was pretty astounded by the complexity. But, it can be explained.

The six whit parts behind the dart barrels, are some form of piloted dump valve. How these work, is they store pressurised air when filled up, and when the air pressure on the fill side of the valve drops, the valve releases it's stored air upon the dart. Well, that's the simplest explanation I can give. Just try asking about piloted piston valves on the Spudfiles pneumatic forums, your brain might melt. Ok, so that's how it fire,s right? the way it fills is either via the pump on the bottom or through the the little orange inlet port when it's connected to the bottom of the Titan, so it can be filled by pumping the back of the Titan. The air fills the system, up to where the orange plunger is.

This plunger is actually the most important part of the semi auto function. The reason the top slide has to be cocked forward and back before pumping is to slide the plunger all the way out, allowing the air to access the tubes that fill the valves behind the barrels. The way this system is piloted (or the way the valves are triggered) all at once, is by the release valve that looks like a plus sign. That's what the big orange buttons press. When pressed, the air escapes around the valve and BAM, the valves lose their pilot pressure from the fill side and are triggered to release their stored pressure. Semi auto is achieved by the trigger pulling on a catch which makes the orange piston progress back a little at a time, releasing the pilot air pressure from one of the 6 valves at a time. Of course, there is pressure still in the system from the 5 remaining valves, which tries to push the orange piston forward again. Pointed out by the arrow, there is a catch above the plunger that  is supposed to stop the plunger from being pushed forward again under pressure. BUT, something has obviously gone wrong during production with these blasters and the catch is not in the correct position, stopping it from doing it's job, allowing the plunger to move forward under pressure so that the the lower catch won't pick up the next notch on the plunger, so the blaster can never fire more than just the first dart.

THE FIX! The picture below shows the position it needs to go back in to (with the the cocking slide back), to allow it to do it's job. The tricky part is getting the shell back together without that little part popping out of place again, bending the top of the spring in helps a bit, but no matter what it's going to test your patience.

So now, all going well, semi auto mode works on your Nerf Hornet AS-6, and you now hopefully understand how it all works inside. If you plan on opening up this blaster, print off these pictures and use them for reference. Hope this helps!

-Rolley