Blaster anatomy.
Nearly every springer in the hobby is the same handful of parts in the same order, and this page names them. Below is a generic bolt-action springer, cut open and drawn cocked, rear on the left. It isn't any particular blaster — it's the vocabulary they all share, and once you can read this drawing you can follow along with anything happening at the chrono table, where every blaster has its speed measured before it plays.
The cutaway
Terms people mix up
Ram and plunger are two dialects for the same hardware. The moving assembly is the plunger: a plunger head (the piston, wearing the o-rings) on a plunger rod. Many builders call that rod the ram or the ramrod, and some use ram loosely for the whole assembly. When a parts listing says ramrod, it means the rod.
Catch, sear, and trigger are three parts of one handshake. The catch notch is a groove cut into the plunger rod — it's geometry, not a part you can hold. The sear is the pivoting tooth that sits in that groove and holds the entire spring load. The trigger is a lever that swings the sear out of the way. The trigger never holds anything back; it just asks the sear to let go.
The breech is the doorway — the opening and mechanism where a dart gets into the blaster. The chamber is the seat just past it, where the dart rests sealed against the barrel entry, waiting for air. A dart passes through the breech once, then waits in the chamber until you fire.
The barrel is functional: a tube whose bore closely fits the 13 mm dart, and where all of the acceleration happens. The shroud is cosmetic: the bodywork around the barrel that gives a blaster its silhouette. Two blasters can be identical inside and look nothing alike outside — the difference is entirely shroud.
Prime, stroke, and draw all describe cocking the blaster. To prime is to cock it: pull the handle until the sear catches the notch. The stroke is how far the plunger head travels on that pull. Draw force is how hard the pull is — on the Backyard Mayhem fleet it's an easy pull a kid can manage, while Performance springers ask noticeably more of your arm.
Dead space is any air the plunger pushes that never ends up behind the dart: gaps at the breech, loose fittings, the pocket left when the tip of the plunger rod stops short of the barrel entry. That air gets compressed for nothing, and the cost is speed. Good designs land the rod tip within a millimetre or two of the barrel entry, and small blasters feel the loss the most.
Rated eye protection — ANSI Z87.1 or CSA Z94.3 — on every head, every time: competitors, referees, and anyone standing close enough to catch a stray. Every blaster we build or field is blocky, bright, and unmistakably a toy, and that is what keeps it on the right side of Canada's replica-firearm rules — the law judges the whole blaster, not the color of its tip. Realistic-looking builds aren't in our fleet and never will be; the orange muzzle tip is our house rule on top. Speed has rules too: Backyard Mayhem runs 50–100 feet per second, Performance runs 100–150 for adults who signed up for it, and for social play the hobby's ceiling is about 130 feet per second with a one-gram dart. Dart weight matters just as much — a heavier dart carries more punch at the same speed — so we test every blaster on the chronograph with the heaviest dart its owner plans to field. The number on the label is the honest one.
A diagram is a fine start, and foam in the air is better. Bring your curiosity to a club event and a jerk will gladly open a blaster, point at every part on this page, and show you exactly where the sear holds all that spring back.