California man spends a year creating the world's smallest Nerf gun and the end result is mind-blowing

The world’s smallest Nerf gun might sound like a joke, but thanks to advanced 3D-printing and other scientific methods, it is a very real piece of engineering.

A playful challenge turned into a year-long scientific adventure, packed with university labs, microscopes, and some of the tiniest moving parts ever seen under a microscope.

YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober set out to break his own record again and again by shrinking a functional Nerf-style blaster to almost unbelievable scales.

When you think the Nerf gun is small enough, it just keeps getting smaller.

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The engineers had to get very creative

The journey began with a simple but brutal problem.

A normal Nerf blaster relies on springs, hinges, and dozens of parts working together to store and release air pressure.

Shrink that to the width of a human hair, and traditional mechanics fall apart.

After all, tiny springs and joints are nearly impossible to assemble, and friction can become a monster.

To tackle the problem, Rober teamed up with engineers at Brigham Young University (BYU), who specialize in something called ‘compliant mechanisms’.

In case you’re not familiar with what that means, all you have to know is that they are experts at designs that bend and flex as a single piece, instead of using separate moving parts.

Instead of separate metal springs, the mini blaster stores energy in flexible structures built directly into the shape.

The team tested several designs, from zigzag patterns to fishbone layouts, before landing on a structure that could flex, snap forward, and launch a micro dart.

Using high-resolution 3D-printing, they produced a version small enough to fire a projectile just a few feet, perfectly scaled down from a full-size Nerf blaster.

And yes, they actually had a tiny Nerf fight.

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The world’s smallest Nerf gun can only be seen on the atomic level

But that was only the warm-up.

The 3D-printing project moved into labs where carbon nanotubes were grown into microscopic blaster shapes using techniques similar to microchip manufacturing.

At that scale, loading and firing required microscopes and precision manipulators, and one wrong move could destroy the device.

Then things went even smaller, into the realm of DNA origami, where strands of DNA self-assembled into Nerf gun shapes about 100 nanometers long.

These final versions were so small they could only be imaged with an atomic force microscope, which ‘feels’ structures at the atomic level.

Trillions of these nano blasters fit in a droplet of liquid, which is pretty wild.

While it started as a goofy idea, the engineering involved in making the world’s smallest Nerf gun is completely serious.

As it appears, even the silliest challenges can sometimes push science and technology forward.

If you want to check out the full journey, you can watch it below:

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