odin heard from a friend that you could put a more powerful spring in nerf guns and shoot the darts farther and faster. so he took it upon himself to figure out how to take apart his strongarm all on his own without any help from youtube videos and how to remove the spring to be replaced.

it was impressive show of self directed tinkering which is a skill i love to foster in him so i just had to help him find a replacement spring. we went to the local hardware store and they had springs that were very close, but were just a bit too wide or too hard to compress ( hardware store kid helping us broke into a big grin when he asked what we were looking to use the spring for ).

online we went and of course there are folks who specialize in these sorts of things and we bought a pack of 3 springs from orange mod works. each spring has a 7kg power output ( stock strongarm is 2.8kg ) and they claim it the “muzzle velocity” will increase to 90+ feet per second.

the aftermarket spring is on the left. you can see it has a few more coils and is a bit harder to compress which leads to the increased power output.

later: it works! with some rudimentary testing it looks like he can shoot a dart around 130-150 feet which is over twice the distance he can get with stock strongarm!