Nerf Pro Gelfire Ignitor Review

Gel ball, meet Jolt. That’s the basic premise of the Nerf Pro Gelfire Ignitor, which uses a grip plunger to fire balls from an integrated hopper. For $10, it actually meets or exceeds all expectations I had for it. It’s still not a 200 to 250+ fps primary, but it’s a fun little blaster that gets the job done, even with a couple quirks. And with a few mods, foam dart hobbyists might grab some, as well!

Eye on the Ball

The Ignitor is simple in construction and operation; the plunger, barrel, and hopper are all one piece (there’s a seam at the top of the plunger, but it appears to not come apart). Laid over all that is a partially skeletonized shell that contains the trigger, safety, and plunger catch. You have two rails, though those seem decorative at most (how would you even use them?). In an adult hand, the blaster conforms well to the palm and fingers. The T-handle prime is quite easy to operate.

The hopper sits at a 60 ball capacity. That’s small, but it’s already a fairly small blaster. However, there’s a secondary reason for a small hopper: dead space. The blaster simply catches the next ball above the plunger tube (no breech to speak of) and holds it there until you fire. Once the ball is moving, some of that air pressure is going to venture up into the hopper. If you had a large hopper, like those in the Mythic or Legion, the air pressure loss would be insane as the hopper emptied. As it stands, though, the Ignitor’s hopper seems well-sized to maintain ball velocity.

With the small hopper, of course, comes a small opening for filling it. That’s always annoying. I hope you have one of the plastic bottles used for hydrating and pouring balls! Though, of course, once you have that, you won’t have balls bouncing back out like in the Dual Wield Pack.

Performance

The blaster has a decent rate of fire, with it using just a hopper. One dart per second is reasonable to expect if you’re trying to go fast. An added plus is the agitation the blaster format inherently gets from the priming action; so far I’ve had zero misfeeds, and only two double feeds.

There’s no hop-up here, so expect to arc balls toward your target, rather than hitting with pinpoint accuracy.

The gel ball velocity, meanwhile, averaged 159fps (at first) in the sample I bought. Towards the end of the hopper, with the added dead space being pressurized, I was still averaging ~149fps. It’s nice to see a blaster outperform the numbers on the box art.

Internals and Mods

As stated before, the shell is rather minimal, fitting around the plunger assembly. And it’s a decent plunger, with a 32mm diameter head and around 41mm of draw length. 33mL of plunger volume is nothing to sneeze at, especially from a modding perspective. The plunger head is bolted down, so adding or replacing the spring will need some creativity.

The blaster uses a leaf spring for the trigger and catch. However, there is a slot in the molding for a small catch spring – it presumably got deleted once the leaf spring proved sufficient, since those cost less.

How long until someone makes a Talon-fed short dart pistol out of this?

Last Thoughts

The Ignitor is better than expected, and would be fun as a sidearm, at the very least. As a hobbyist, I’m more interested in what it will look like after people are done with it!