Super Soaker Central

Hey guys, I recently dug out my old 2100 from my tree fort. I didn't realize that they still worked, so I am really happy. Anyway, after cleaning them off I retested the ranges and compared them to my old reviews (thank you Ben for archiving them).
I fired both guns at a 45 degree angle from the shoulder over a flat stretch of the road in front of my house. I used yarn and tape to make a straight line from where I had shot to where the shot had hit the road (not the furthest splash). I then measured the length of the yarn with a ruler since we don't have a yardstick around here. Anyway.
CPS 2100 (mk1?): 43.5 feet vs old reading of 40 feet

It could be that I incorrectly measured earlier, but I can remember some of my friends' 1200s shooting a little further, or at least more water after a lot of use. Does anyone with more of a background in physics or more experience in testing used guns vs new guns want to comment on this?

Lastly, I think that Isoaker's 2100 must be an mk2 if he's only getting 36 feet out of it.

Isn't there some aging factor where after a certain time the rubber stiffens and gains more power? I read that in the SSCentral glossary I think.

Sounds like reasonable error for me. Especially as you're not using a tape measure.

I think it's a psychological thing. You've been exposed to too much Hasbro advertising that it has skewered your perceptions of good range.

No problem about archiving the site. I've since changed the links page here at SSC to point to your new page and I'll change hydrowar.sscentral.org into a redirect in the near future.

I could imagine that the rubber will harden with age, but that's just speculation. I don't know if that actually occurs.

43.5 ft. vs. 40 ft. doesn't sound too different. More data from both tests (in terms of number of data points) is necessary to determine if the two are statistically different. Likely they are not, and even if they are something else could be causing the increase (like wind, temperature differences, etc.).

I'll note that rubber definitely degrades with use. The more cycles you put through the bladder, the weaker it gets. Larami designed the water guns to minimize fatigue (the technical name for this) by limiting the expansion of the bladder.

I've read the same thing that captainfear did – rubber dries out and hardens with age. I could swear it was something that Ben wrote.

Thinning and weakening happens based on how much you use the rubber. Hardening and strengthening happens over time. If these water guns were sitting in a treehouse for a few years, it's pretty easy to imagine that the latter outweighed the former.

You guys bring up good points. My CPS 2100 shoots further than it used to according to my tests and my CPS 1500 shoots less than I remember. Let me tell you about my 1500. We had this big naval war 4 or 5 years ago with this youth group in SC and whoever was using the 1500 lost it when their canoe got flipped and it sunk to the bottom of the lake (generally soakers float but if there is no air in them and they fill with water...). Almost a year later I was visiting my gf and her youth pastor said that they had found my 1500 when the lake was drained as it is once a year every year. It still worked! I respected the 1500 before but now I truly think that it quite possibly the best gun ever made. Being at the bottom of the lake the rubber couldn't possibly dry out and harden so it was more susceptible to fatigue.
Of course we are dealing with a change in rage of 3-4 feet in both cases which is a distance imho that is riding the line between margin of error and good enough for evidence.

Moron, he's been around far longer than Hasbro soakers have so I think he's got a good idea of good range.

My theory is that the nozzles were not made for higher CPS pressure, and since a CPS's bladder decreases in pressure over time (as far as I know anyways), the lamination will improve, thus providing a longer range shot. But this should be evident in all CPS blasters whose nozzles are designed for lower velocity streams, new and old alike. However, since there are no new - old CPS's (i.e. new 1200's), this can't really be tested. Guns like the FF have nozzles that seem to work fine with both high and low velocity streams since the nozzles have no straws/screen laminators.

I heard the story of the 1500 before (but didn't remember any of the details except that the 1500 was still pressurized when it was found), pretty amazing. Larami and most soaker designs seem to be very conservative on bladder expansion; my CPH's tubes always explode within a year or 2.

Yeah, I'd forgotten about that story, too. Thanks!

A simple test we could do is take two new rubber bands and store one in a cup of water. The other would inevitably become harder over time, but I don't know what the soaked one would do. I'll start it when I next pick up a handful of rubber bands from somewhere, so expect the results in a couple years.

C-A 99, I'm sure the folks at Johnson R&D/Super Soaker/Larami performed a slew of tests to figure out how high they could take the pressures without losing the laminar stream. Also, there's an article floating around that lists the known operating pressures for several water guns, and the CPS ones has consistently lower pressure (I don't know if there was confusion between PSI and gauge PSI, though). And finally, my CPS 4100 seemed to have fairly decent lamination out of the box. Sorry, but I just don't buy the argument that the designers overlooked some statistic and accidentally designed for higher pressure.

I've heard about CPSes having lower pressures too. They gain their power from big pressure chambers, big internal tubes, big valves, and finally big nozzles with laminators.

It's probable that the bladder is not manufactured exactly each time, and Super Soaker have made nozzles that don't completely match the PC, for example, none of the nozzles on the Max-D6k are larger than 2x, but the PC's can clearly handle 3x-4x without much, if any consequence to range. The Flash Flood's small nozzle is too small. And even on the CPS line, the nozzle orfices vary between the 1200, 1000, and 2100, even if their pressure levels don't match. While they did engineer the CPS line very well, I doubt they did it perfectly, and if they did, there is still slight variation to manufacturing. After all, iSoaker's 1200 shoots 4m less than his Blazer.