SS/XP 300 trigger

General water gun discussion.
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Hawk
Posts: 27
Joined: Tue Sep 23, 2008 5:17 am

SS/XP 300 trigger

Post by Hawk » Sun Sep 20, 2009 4:35 pm

I was showing some of my employees around the arsenal (a perk of my business, I run a beach, so we have water guns in the office), as most of them are as old or younger than my original SS 50, and got a question about the SS 300. (It's kind of sad, they have never had experience with soakers with the power and range of the golden age.) I have two of them, one with a broken spring on the trigger. I was talking about the evolution of the trigger system from the pinch valve of the Classic line, to the gate on the XPs and CPS, and ending with the ball valves on the Max-D line. I showed them the SS 300, and in the middle of regaling them with descriptions of its nearly 2 gallon reservoir, 1.5 quart pressure chamber and 6x stream; someone asked me what trigger system it was. I wasn't sure, since it was the last water gun out before the XP line was introduced and may have been the original introduction of the gated valve instead of using the pinch valve. As someone pointed out, the SS 100 and SS 200 had a 1x and 2x stream with their pinch valves, the secret to the SS 300's 6x stream may have been the valve (it does exceed even the CPS 1000/1500). Which trigger valve type is it?

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Silence
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Joined: Sun Apr 09, 2006 9:01 pm

Re: SS/XP 300 trigger

Post by Silence » Sun Sep 20, 2009 5:34 pm

The lever trigger generally screams "ball valve," which actually hasn't been used in many Super Soakers, before or after. iSoaker.com's image gallery (donated by AquaFlash, I think) confirms that there's no weird mechanism connecting the lever to a pinch valve.

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Hawk
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Joined: Tue Sep 23, 2008 5:17 am

Re: SS/XP 300 trigger

Post by Hawk » Sun Sep 20, 2009 7:24 pm

Silence wrote:The lever trigger generally screams "ball valve," which actually hasn't been used in many Super Soakers, before or after. iSoaker.com's image gallery (donated by AquaFlash, I think) confirms that there's no weird mechanism connecting the lever to a pinch valve.
Yeah, that definitely does not appear to be a pinch valve. But it doesn't look like an XP valve either. I'm not certain what the mechanics of the XP valve is, if it is plunger or a sliding gate, but what I've seen is a rod that moves back and forth and not rotating. The fact that the gears on the SS/XP 300 are rotational in nature, I'm leaning toward assuming that this was an early use of a ball valve. Given the SS/XP 300, XP 250 and XXP 275 all use this system; I bet they are all the same type of valve. Thinking about it, I bet Larami used the ball valve in its higher powered soakers early on in order to get the extra power out of them, but the cumbersome handle prevented them from using it on all their soakers until they developed the complicated (and much maligned) Max-D valve to allow a traditional trigger to be used.

If this is the case, I can tell you my SS 300s are testimonial to the endurance of the ball valve itself as they still work like new stream-wise, but the fault is in the trigger mechanism in the Max-D system.

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