What do you do with a blaster that is too large to be a secondary, but is too bad to be a usable primary? You either make it work better to be a primary, or minimize it for use as a secondary. The Nerf Trilogy is the perfect example of this debate going nowhere. That is until I came along.

Quick rundown of the blaster: The Trilogy is a pump-action, top fed, single shot blaster. It uses shells to fire 3 darts at one time before ejecting the shell. The whole system is slow. Shells are terrible, and having the blaster throw your only means of firing roughly on the ground is a recipe for disaster. One way or another the shells that come with the blaster will stop being usable from being ejected.

That’s if the blaster comes with them in the first place. The Trilogy I own originally belonged to someone that bought theirs from an unnamed online superstore. It never came with shells, so he complained to customer service. They sent him a second one for free. The original owner gave me the first blaster as a bunch of bits because he disassembled it. Shortly after I won a bet with the same guy involving a gummy pizza, and used the money to buy replacement shells.

So I had a free, fully disassembled blaster, that I had no attachment to. I tried out the other Trilogy that was still in one piece and realized that I hated the stock setup. From then on I was set on hacking up my Trilogy one way or another.

I started with removing the stock. It was uncomfortable anyway. The diagram below shows the cuts I made in red. The line above 1 is for simply removing the stock. Leave the plastic wall that connects to the rest of the internals alone.

For the next part I decided to make a shell catcher. Since I only owned three shells, I built it around that. To save money and time I decided to reuse the stock and rebuild it as the catcher. In the diagram above, the second red line is where I made the cut for the height of the shell catcher. The total height for the catcher should be around 5 1/4 inches. This puts the top of the catcher just above the ejection port. Highlighted in purple is a piece of trim that can be removed. Areas in green needed trimmed with a dremel tool. Ignore the top line for the moment. The most important part of the bottom line is to shorten the screw pegs to clear the area for shells.

Now look at the second diagram above. Parts in purple should be removed. The part in yellow is important, save that for now. Now start clearing the area represented by the top green line in the first diagram, and the area in green in the second diagram.

The barrel could also be shortened for a total minimization. But that was a lot of extra work for little gain so I left it alone.

You want the yellow highlighted panel to face towards the bottom of what used to be the stock, tri-pattern out. If cleared properly this panel should slot into the green highlighted areas, with the angled end facing the original rear of the stock. When you are happy with the fitment, trim the top of the panel to match the top of the catcher.

If assemble correctly, the catcher should look similar to the image on the above. I recommend putting a panel in the slots on the front and rear of the catcher to add strength. Plastic from cheap picture frames or something similar will work. Similar material can be used to make a top door for the hopper, and clean up the rear of the blaster. I used a combination of wood putty and epoxy to fix the new catcher to the side of the blaster.

Finally, a coat of industrial yellow paint was added. It was available and compliments well with orange and black. The blaster was then reassembled, and detailing was added. A sling was added to compliment use as a secondary, and the Trilogy was done. 

Overall, this build cost $7 despite my best efforts. It was fun to work on this blaster since messing it up didn’t matter to me. At the end of the day I took a terrible primary blaster, and turned it into a mediocre secondary. I see that as an absolute win.

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