Today in DIY

I did a lot today... Er... Yesterday... Its 12:40am...

I finished painting the controller, adding some red accents to the top. I'm terrible at acrylic hand painting as you can see but I think for a first effort ever it's not too bad. Maybe someday I will come back to it and make it better.

I also completed my first Nerf Gun mod. I recently got a Nerf disk blaster pistol, and today I increased the tension in the spring, causing the disks to fly faster, further and straighter. After I was done that I made a little device that would use the momentum of the disks to essentially launch ping pong balls from the gun (the gun would fire the disk as usual into a pingpong ball resting on the stand in front of it). I literally made it out of the first 3 things I saw laying around; duct tape, a plastic tape roll and a dental floss box.
Yes, a dental floss box.
Maybe Ill add some more mods to that gun... I'm thinking lights, and an LED display to show how many disks are left in the Magazine! I'll draw that up and post it sometime :)

Painting

Today after realising I had spray paint, I decided to customize my Datel XBox 360 controller. Another thrift store score ($5), this controller is a rapid fire trigger controller. This means you can set how many times the trigger button actives per second while you hold it down.

How useful! Though too bad I don't have an XBox and it doesn't connect to my PC, which was the real reason I bought it.

Anyway, because its relatively easy to disassemble and reassemble and I don't really mind if I mess it up, I decided to paint it. I have never painted anything before so it is definitely a learning experience.

The color scheme I wanted just so happened to be the paint colors I had around, which for now is a simple gunmetal body with reflective(ish) silver triggers and buttons. The body is solid gray for now but ill leave it as another exercise to hand paint on it later.

It was such a nice day out so I decided to do it outside and ended up eating lunch and writing this post while waiting for the paint to dry.

Ill post a picture when it has finished drying and is back together. But for now here are some things I did wrong!
- I Sanded too hard. There are some pretty bad scrapes I thought the paint would fill, but didn't.
- I didn't tape off the sides of the button holes. These will have to be sanded later so the buttons can fit and move freely.

But its all a learning experience like I said!