Silly Shells for Homemade Nerf Blasters

“What are Silly Shells?”:

Silly Shells are an ecosystem of 3D printed shotgun shells for homemade Nerf-style blasters! There are many, many different shells to use in each blaster, allowing one blaster to fire a wide variety of ammo types without reconfiguration or modding.

For example, you can fire 3 Elite darts out of one shell, eject it, and then load a MegaXL shell to fire a huge dart at your enemies! Then you can follow that up with a “buckshot” round of Rival balls. Then you can load a Sniper shell to hit a person completely across the field from you.

Silly Shells allow you to use multiple different types of foam ammo in one blaster, and they allow you to fire multiple darts with just one shot of the blaster!

The source files for Silly Shells are also available for free, for people to design their own shells, and design their own blasters that use Silly Shells. STEP and F3D files are both in this fileset.

Silly Shells are the culmination of almost 2 years of development. Now that they are released, I hope you guys (and gals) enjoy them as much as I do!

Note: Please print Silly Shells in bright colors, for safety reasons. Preferably orange! 

Firing Demo: 

Shell Overview: Editing the video, not up yet, sorry!

Please check the shell compatibility spreadsheet to see which Silly Shells work in which blasters.

Shell Descriptions

• Elite shell (1x, 2x, 3x, 4x): Shoots full length darts, such as Nerf Elite darts, or double the amount of half darts (so an Elite 3x shell fits 6x half darts).
• Rival shell: Fits up to 3 Rival balls.
• Mega shell: Fires Mega darts.
  • There is a rifled version too, for better accuracy.
• MXL shell: Fires MegaXL darts.
  • There is a rifled version too, for better accuracy.
• Ultra shell: Fires Ultra darts.
• N1 N-Series shell: Fires N1 darts.
• Hyper shell: Fires up to 3 Hyper balls. (It technically fits 5 Hyper balls, but Hyper is too sticky of a rubber. The friction ruins any load above 3 balls.)
• Sniper shell: Uses an aluminum barrel for extra long range shots with half darts or full length darts.
  • There are two versions of the Sniper shell. 
  • One uses a printed collet that squishes an o-ring to hold the barrel. (Hardware: 2x 016 o-rings.)
  • The other uses two screws to hold in the barrel. (Hardware: 2x m3x6 socket head screws, 2x m3 square nuts, 2x 016 o-rings.)
• Bottlenose: Similar to the Sniper shell, but its fully printed (no aluminum barrel). Has a built in SCAR for dart stabilization. 
  • There's several lengths of Bottlenose available, for different FPS ranges for each blaster you use it in.
• Missile/Demolisher shell: Fires Demolisher missiles/rockets. This shell doesn't fit in breech-loaded blasters because the ammo is wider than the shell itself. It does work in Wildstyle.
• Blank: A dummy shell with no airflow path, used for testing air seal of blasters where you can't really reach the breech to seal it with a finger.

There are also EXPERIMENTAL adapters to use other shell standards in a Silly Shell blaster. These are UNTESTED currently.

• Spring Thunder shell adapter
• Flypoint shell adapter
• Colonel Wasp Firefly shell adapter

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Blasters that use Silly Shells:

If you are designing a blaster or mod that uses Silly Shells, please comment a link to it so I can add it here! If its on Printables, please also mark it as a remix of this file listing. 

• Sillybutts Wildstyle Shotgun Pistol
• Spyr Yeethammer (WIP)
• Je/ShoelessHistorian Booster (WIP)

Sellers

A full list of non-US sellers can be found here: https://www.stuffbysilly.com/wheretobuy

Printed Silly Shells are available from these sellers:

• OutOfDarts: https://outofdarts.com/products/silly-shells 
• SilverFoxIndustries: WIP

Performance:

Since Silly Shells are used in several different blasters, each with different springs, prime lengths, and air sealing methods, its difficult to provide FPS numbers for Silly Shells as a whole.

That being said, you can roughly expect (from a 65mm prime 1.5"OD PT blaster like Wildstyle):

• 3x Elite: 70 fps per dart. Roughly the same for 6x half darts.
• 2x Elite: 85 fps per dart. 80 fps per 4x half dart.
• 1x Elite: 120 fps
• Bottlenose: 150 fps approximately.
• Sniper: You can easily hit anywhere from 110 fps to 250+ fps, depending on barrel length and ID size, full length dart or half dart, SCAR/BCARs, what blaster it's in, etc etc. 
• Rival: 70 fps per 3x balls. 80 fps for 2x and 1x. AccuRival hits harder.
• Hyper: Untested FPS. Its about the same as rival up to 3 hyper balls, but then FPS falls off as more balls are added. 
• Mega: 100 fps for full Mega, more for half length Mega.
• MegaXL: 70 fps for full MXL.
• Ultra: 120 fps approximately.

Silly Shells in Magazines

One of the main design goals of Silly Shells was to make them work well in both box magazines and tube magazines. 

Silly Shells have a recessed rim, which means they can feed smoothly out of box magazines. 

Silly Shells are also the correct OD to fit smoothly inside hobby-standard 1.5"OD polycarbonate plunger tube material, meaning that it is very easy to make a magazine tube that you can see through to count your ammo.

At the time of release, the box magazine for Silly Shells is still under development. I really don't want to release it before I'm sure I won't be changing it much in the future (specifically the feed lips and the location of the mag-release catch notch on the mag).

At the time of release, the geometry for Silly Shell tube magazines is done, but not currently used in a blaster design. The tube mag works, but I haven't finished the blaster that uses it! So, I will be making a separate listing just for the components of the tube magazine for other designers to build around. That listing can be found here: I'll add one when I upload it. its like midnight at time of writing and I don't wanna deal with it lol.

Please check the shell compatibility spreadsheet to see which Silly Shells work in which blasters.

Print Info

Each shell uses approximately 41 grams of PLA when printed at my recommended settings. 41 grams is a bit heavy for a shell, but in my opinion its worth it for the extra durability. 

I recommend you print shells, at maximum, 3 at a time. Doing 4 or more at once has greater risk of them popping off the buildplate. 

I don't use brims, but you decide if you need them on your printer.

You are free to print at whatever settings you want of course, but my recommended settings will be good for durability.

Recommended print settings:

• The first 13mm of the shell (from the back of the shell, up 13mm) should be printed at 100% infill, 5 walls. 
• Everything above 13mm should be printed at 10% infill, 5 walls.

There's several ways to do this variable infill in each slicer. 

• In BambuStudio and Prusa Slicer you can cut the model into “parts” and set individual infills for each.
• In Cura you can set different infills with some trickery.

If you can't do variable infill, the shells should be fine if you just do them at 20% infill 5 walls through the whole shell as well. This is just less ideal than the split-infill method.

Hardware

Silly Shells have no hardware. They are fully printed!

… except for the Set Screw Sniper barrel, which needs some hardware to keep the metal barrel in place and sealed.

• (2x) Dash 016 o-rings
• (2x) M3x6 Socket Head Screws
• (2x) M3 Square Head Nuts
• (1x) Barrel (Standard hobby-spec aluminum barrel. 16mm OD.)

(The Collet Sniper Shell only needs 2x 016 o-rings, no screws or nuts)

Upcoming and Work-in-Progress Shells:

• Nitro cars?
• Maaaaaybe gel balls, but I hate gel balls so much. Bad for play and the environment.
• Elite shells with twisted chambers to spiral the darts
• Sealed barrel shells
• Shells with alignment geometry on the outside edge to line them up with multiple sealed barrels at once.
• A meme shell for Ballistic Balls.

Things I want people to make, because it'd be really cool and I don't have time to work on them:

• A shell with an inline clip would be super cool. You can use the Bottlenose shell as a template tolerance-wise.

Misc.

If you build any of my designs, I'd love to see yours! Feel free to message me on Discord (Sillybutts#5905) or tag me on a post on Reddit (u/SillyTheGamer).

Thanks to Rraijjar, BoomstickMods, SpyrMakes, lightningeagle14, Chance, Nevets, and others for giving me advice during the design process of Silly Shells!

Note: Please print Silly Shells in bright colors, for safety reasons. Preferably orange! 

See stuffbysilly.com/wheretobuy for licensing questions.

China: 你好！ 我擁有這個設計。 想生產請聯繫我. 你好！ 我拥有这个设计。 如果你想生产，请联系我.

Changelog:

• 5-30-2024: Release
• 5-31-2024: Updated the source file for Main Silly Shells to have a new dummy modeling shell with the maximum safe size to fit inside breech loaded blasters (like break action shotguns). Theoretically, the front/back length can be extended as needed because a break action should have an open area behind the breech and nothing in the way of extra-long shells.
• 6-2-2024: Added a new Sniper shell that uses a threaded collet (only needs 2x 016 o-rings, removes all the screws and nuts from the normal Sniper shell). Also added a Hyper shell. 
• 6-3-2024: Improved the example parts for designers in the STEP and F3D files. Added an 8" long Bottlenose shell. Improved the collet sniper shell a little bit. 
• 6-7-2024: Added an experimental shell for the new N1 N-Series darts by Hasbro. I don't have one of the darts yet, because the line itself isn't released. But this shell should fit them well.
• 6-8-2024: Updated the N1 N-Series shell to have better dart fit. 
• 7-4-2024: Added a shell for Demolisher missiles. They fit on the Wildstyle shell pistol.
• 7-10-2024: Updated the N1 shell again to have even better dart fit. 
• 7-12-2024: Added some tightening wedges to the Mega and MXL shells, to better hold worn or loose darts.
• 7-23-2024: Added a bunch of new shells!
  • N1 dart single, double, and triple shot shells.
  • BoomCo Straw single, double, triple, and quad shot shells.
    • Note: I prototyped 5x and 6x BoomCo shells, but the straws are just too tightly packed in that form factor. I'd really rather not deform or break ammo that is no longer produced, so I will not be releasing the 5x and 6x shells.
  • .50 Cal foam ball shells (1 and 2 barrels, each barrel holds several balls).
  • Wide head full length dart shells (wide head darts such as stickies, whistlers, taggers, or suction darts).
  • A “over-under” shell that holds 2 full length darts AND 1 Mega dart, and fires all 3 at the same time. A wide spread wonky fun shell for sure :)

Donations & Merch

If you like what I do, please consider supporting me! 

I don't charge for my files, so any donations or merch purchases would be greatly appreciated!

• Patreon (Monthly donations)
• Buy Me A Coffee (One-time donations)
• AWESOME shirts made in collab with Brandon Diaz
• RedBubble My merch shop, full of fun Nerf-y stickers and shirts! 

Note: Please print Silly Shells in bright colors, for safety reasons. Preferably orange!