Maintaining your Nerf..

It's important to get in between the cracks. 

While Nerf blasters are pretty robust and made for outdoors use, there are things that can affect the longevity of your investment. To an extent it's a little frustrating; given they are toys aimed for ages 6 and above and should be able to take a beating, but then toys in general aren't designed to last forever and if you think back to when you were a kid, you would probably not have been as careful with them as you would be..say now:) I've heard a LOT of opinions on this and I'm still on the fence with some- but what are the little things you do to keep your Nerf in tip top shape?

My general take is to store your blasters in manner similar to how they arrived in the box- ie dart, clips and any blaster attachments removed. It just makes sense to me, but some people have actually given thought to this and given rationales as to why this is good practice:) 

Recently, I've heard you shouldn't load your clips until you're actually going to play with them. This NEVER occurred to me until I thought about it and realised that it made a whole lot of sense. They clips are spring loaded, and therefore having darts in them means the spring is compressed.. and the longer they are kept in that state, the less "spring" they'd have when the spring is released. In theory this would affect the 35 round drums more than a 6 round clip.. but either way.. it makes sense to empty them.

The spring issue is also with the blasters themselves. It probably makes sense to ensure your blasters are unprimed when storing them- priming the blaster means compressing the spring.. and there's probably no reason to actually DO that if you're not playing with your Nerf blasters. (that being said, I've read multiple times that some people stand by keeping them primed for months on end to increase distance- I can't understand HOW this would work but.. everyone's got their opinions)

Air pressure blasters should also be unprimed, as the air pressure bladder would be similar to the principle of a blown up balloon- the longer the air stays in there and the more you pump it up, the less "stretchy" the balloon/bladder would be and thus resulting in decreases in performance. This goes for Super Soakers as well.

Putting your darts in a pillow case and blowing hot air via a hairdryer into it is supposed to restore the darts from being squished and bent. I actually have never tried this but I GUESS it makes sense?

Keep your darts away from pets:)