Hasbro

Background

For my second co-op, I worked as a design engineer on the Nerf team at Hasbro. My day-to-day involved concept ideation, CAD, rapid prototyping, working in the shop, and creating functional prototypes. I led the mechanical design for a variety of projects across different blaster series, including a full blaster reshell, flywheel fixture development, a holster accessory, and a fully functional pistol.

In accordance with Hasbro's confidentiality policy, I am only able to disclose limited images with minimal detail of projects completed during this co-op.

Motorized Flywheel Test Fixture

The Rival product line is a series of high-performance Nerf blasters that fire small foam balls both mechanically and electronically. The performance metric of these blasters is typically established simply by testing a new blaster out-of-the-box. In order to avoid the inherent variability of testing a certain sample size of blasters, this project was proposed to create a “gold standard” fixture for motorized Rival blasters in order to standardize blaster and round testing.

I designed and built the fixture shown, which is specifically designed to mimic the performance of the Rival Hera. For this fixture, I replaced the stock switch with a toggle switch so the user has more freedom during testing. There is also a basic hand pusher to load the Rival balls through the flywheels, however this will eventually be replaced with a spring-powered toggle mechanism to keep loading force constant. Critical performance-dependent dimensions were thoughtfully considered during the design to produce an accurate and standardized firing platform.

This fixture successfully matched the average velocity of the Rival Hera, firing approximately 90 feet per second.  I led communications with an outsourced partner to manage further fixture development for other motorized Rival blasters, using my initial design as a template. This project offered great experience in fixture design, fabrication, wiring, and project management.

"Blue Sky" Nerf Pistol - Bell Crank Mechanism

The goal of this project was to create a fully functional blaster prototype featuring a unique priming method, inspired by an unearthed ten year-old prototype. The mechanism at the center of the design is a slotted bell crank, which is used to change the direction of applied force by the user while maintaining enough of a mechanical advantage to easily compress the blaster's priming spring. When priming, the two links move diagonally and axially along the internal ribbing of the housing while sliding within the bell crank as it rotates to draw back the priming rod. Material selection was key for this project, and I chose specific 3D printed materials for the mechanism and the housing, and turned pin caps out of delrin to minimize friction within the system.

I tested and verified the mechanism using SolidWorks Simulation prior to prototyping to ensure the force required to prime the blaster was within Hasbro's standards. This greatly reduced the development lead time of the project by successfully demonstrating the mechanism's behavior in CAD before fabrication, resulting in a fully functional prototype. This project incorporated mechanical design, design for assembly, 3D printing (FDM, SLA), turning, model making, testing, and iteration. 

Blaster Shell Redesign

For this project, I was tasked with creating a new housing for a current production blaster. Within SolidWorks, I imported a sketch provided by the industrial design team to accurately achieve the desired aesthetic, and I used master modeling to ensure the blaster's internal components were properly aligned and secured by extensive internal ribbing. I worked closely with this project's industrial designer to evaluate design changes based on mechanical function, and took design liberty in areas where the aesthetic was more flexible or not clearly defined. I fully assembled the blaster prototype using my 3D printed housing and existing production components for the internals. The result was a fully functional prototype that performed on par with the existing blaster after which it was modeled.