Over at Super Soaker Central (Ain’t the web great?), user JLspacemarine has posted this nicely-detailed build of a hardware-store constant pressure water gun. Although much heavier, it reportedly out-performs the commercial toys. [via Hack a Day]
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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.
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When I was a kid there were no super soakers. But I had a spent fire extinguisher with the top that unscrewed. I’d fill it 2/3 full of water and screw the top on. Then with a properly trimmed valve stem I’d put the air compressor chuck to the stem and the extinguisher nozzle. Then I’d squeeze the extinguisher handle to allow the pressure inside the extinguisher. In the days of little plastic squirt gun wars, I’d soak my enemy to their underwear with one blast.
Nice work. If you’re too lazy to build one from scratch, it’s a pretty simple task to modify an existing Super Soaker (or off-brand equivalent). Boring out the nozzle, removing safety valves and reinforcing certain parts of the gun will yield a fearsome backyard water weapon!
I am pretty amazed at the online Super Soaker “hacking” community. There’s a bunch of mods here at SS central:
http://www.sscentral.org/mods/
Most of SS’s newer guns have those annoying “high pressure” chambers, or the CPS bladders. Neither of these are capable of allowing you to pressurize and then empty the entire water tank.
If you removed the nozzle from the XP75, you could dump the entire tank on someone in about 2 seconds. The gun also had some serious recoil at that point.
Unfortunately this was very hard on the valve assembly, and would rapidly result in the metal valve pull shaft pulling out of the valve piston.
Sean,
I understand the need to post content. But put in a little effort.
You describe the link as “a nicely-detailed build.” Perhaps your idea of nicely-detailed and mine differ wildly, but there is hardly any detail in this post! It has a few esoteric meanderings about which O-ring he used or where the handle came from, but there are no sizes, no plans, no part numbers, no explanations, no calculations, in short… no build details.
Knowing little about how a super soaker works, and nothing about how a CPS SS works, one would have a long way to go, and a lot of research ahead of them to get to a place where they could begin to understand what JLspacemarine did.
This is not my idea of “nicely-detailed”
When I wrote “nicely-detailed,” what I had in mind were the photos. I see a lot of builds with the opposite problem: Lots of textual description but few in-process or exploded shots. People get excited about building and don’t take pictures during the process, and personally I always find such pictures to be as or more helpful than textual descriptions of what was done. The way I look at it is: We should be grateful to people who take time to document and post their projects online, especially when they’re not directly compensated for it, and of all the many such “amateur” projects I’ve posted for Make: Online, this one really does stand out as having more detail about how it all goes together than most. True, it’s not a set of well-drafted blueprints or specifications that would satisfy an engineer, but I personally don’t think it’s right to hold enthusiastic amateurs working in their free time to that standard.
Disclaimer: I’m one of the founders of the linked website.
JLspacemarine’s page was adapted from forum posts meant primarily to show what he had made. To most members of our community, this is plenty adequate to duplicate the water gun, but I can see the difficulty a newbie would have. We suggest newbies start with a simpler water gun. This helps eliminate some redundancy in our guides.
I wrote a detailed guide on building a simpler air pressure water gun that is available here: http://www.sscentral.org/homemade/aph/
That guide is not flawless, but it will be a much better start for newbies. I’m very receptive to suggestions as I intend to redo the guide from scratch sometime in the next two years. Any feedback on the website as a whole would be appreciated as well.
Here’s another homemade water gun some here might find interesting: http://www.sscentral.org/homemade/supercannon2.html
Typically I am not a big proponent of over the top safety disclaimers or even practices but, and though there is no actual information in the links such as pressure values and orifice size, I will say humans will die if injected with moderate water pressure into the blood stream.
Thanks for the great post on your blog, it really gives me an insight on this topic.
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