Nerf Alpha Trooper custom rebuild: part 1

I know I haven't done a review on the Nerf Alpha Trooper, but I haven't been able to get my hands on a completely stock blaster. I do know, however, that they don't come with any attachments, nor a stock, and aren't compatible with barrel extensions. So originally, they look like this:

They do, however, come with an 18 dart drum magazine, the ability to accept stocks from other blasters, have a rail on top for an attachment, and best of all, SLAMFIRE. Which means they can shoot darts as fast as you can pump the priming handle.

I didn't actually own one of these until the other day, when I started scrounging around the spare parts the one of my friends and his brothers has quite a stack of. I managed to find pretty much everything I needed to rebuild an Alpha Trooper. I was only missing an inner barrel, barrel tip, jam door, stock mount and the main spring. So after more scrounging I found a barrel from a Longshot front gun, a spring from either a Recon or Raider, and a stock mount. No jam door or barrel tip however. Improvisation came in to play. I cut down the inner barrel piece so that it would fit inside and leave the end bit poking out to mimic a barrel tip. so I reconstructed my Alpha Trooper to it's former glory, went to test fire and ran in to a problem. the piston was getting stuck in the stock mount. I have no idea why, I think the piston in these is slightly larger than the older Recon and Raider. So I simply cut the back of it off, problem solved but now I had a jamming issue, where the blaster wouldn't prime.

My solution? get rid of the clip lock safety that only allows you to take a clip out if the blaster is in the bolt open position, and one of the spring loaded safety mechanisms, of which I still don't know what it's function is, other than to cause headaches. I reassembled once more, and test fired. 6 shots, beautifully quick, at about 35 feet. Next step, more range! So I drilled out the air restrictor and rebuilt again, and this time tried using an 18 dart drum. I would say that once you get pumping with this thing, It's hard to deny that it's an incredible blaster, especially when all I did in terms of performance was drill out the restrictor and suddenly I was hitting 45-50 feet.

Needless to say I was over the moon, but, I wanted it to look a little different, so I took it home and got to work. Since i had no jam door, I decided that the extra space could make room for fingers if there was a carry handle on top. I cut off the handle/rail from a Nerf Deploy, and split my Alpha Trooper and handle into 2 halves. i lined up some marks of where to file down to be able to stick the handle/rail on top and still get maximum surface area to glue to. I filed the halves of each separately then put them together so I could line up the handle/rail as good as possible, then applied hot glue on the outside of the joins, taking care not to glue the halves together. After that had set hard, i took the shells apart again and glued the inside of where the handle joins the main blaster for a strong connection. Add some Triflow lube, Reassembled and with a Stock from a Nerf Recon and an 18 dart clip instead of a drum, it looks alright in my opinion.

There is still a ton more that I want to do with this blaster, I plan to use a stronger spring, add a rail on the right hand side for a light, paint and add an acog scope (mainly for looks really). I can't wait to have this all done, it's not much right now but by the time I'm finished i hope it will be one awesome Alpha Trooper!

-Rolley