Mark Rober explains his yearlong odyssey to break the record for world’s smallest Nerf gun five times, culminating in ones made out of DNA.
When Mark Rober set out to break the record for world’s smallest Nerf gun, he never expected he’d end up making more mini Nerf guns than the total number of actual Nerf guns ever to exist.
In his yearlong mission, Rober ended up breaking the record five times by collaborating with leading experts and employing different engineering techniques.
One of Mark Rober’s record-breaking mini Nerf guns
His first few batches of mini Nerf blasters were made possible by drastically simplifying the design of the Nerf gun. “All materials are springs, even glass,” Rober told CNET in an interview. “You just take advantage of that springiness [to] build all the hinges and the springs into one part.”
This one-part design broke the record a few times but eventually reached its limits. At 1,000 times smaller than a standard Nerf gun, about the perfect size for an ant, the mini Nerf guns were still able to fire.
