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A Brief History of Squirt Gun Technology
ectospasm writes "This article in the Los Angeles Times is a brief history of the squirt gun, with it's main focus on Super Soaker, the undisputed champion of the water arms race. Interesting because the original Super Soaker idea was the brainchild of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer. I especially like what they say about a forth-coming product line aimed at college-aged children. ;-) " I need a big honkin, uber efficient squirt gun
for sniping these kids that keep ringing my doorbell and running.
This got me thinking of ways to make a more powerful jet through chemical means. Use vinegar and baking soda for the propellant; however, this would not be cool around people, since vinegar is kind of unpleasant. This also made me think about spud guns, aka potato launchers. Perhaps one could put a disc in a barrel to act like a piston and power it with hair spray just like a spud gun.
By the way, for all of you who like water guns, I suggest renting a power washer from your local hardware store. Just don't point it at people, wooden fences, or anything else that can't take 1300 PSI. ;)
Wah!
When I was 10 (back in '91) I bought the first model of the SS50, which, for its size, was by far the farthest advance in water-propelling technology I had ever seen or cared to imagine. I douched everybody when we went at it in the summer time. Then my friend got a 100. Damn him.
However, I discovered an interesting way to make my old SS50 (and second SS50 -- the first had a design flaw that busted some sort of seal if you filled it up too much) actually propel the tank off the gun at a staggering speed, and with a much farther range than the actual water stream. The tank would shoot roughly 50 ft. at a 90 degree angle to the ground... aiming this at lower trajectories ended up worrying my neighbors because they'd see, in essence, a rocket-propelled tank of water rifle across the street. Needless to say, my parents took it away.
The trick is, fill the tank about 1/4 full (or 3/4 empty for all you pessimists) with water, and screw the tank on to create a seal, but not to torque the bottle on so that it cant be quickly unscrewed. Then, begin pumping. Pump the thing until you are either physically exhausted from pumping or the gun refuses to pump any more, which ever comes first (at 10, it was usually the former). Then, with great haste, aim the gun at your target (At *WAIST* level, you could probably put an eye out doing this near your shoulders) and quickly unscrew the water-containment bottle. After about 1/2 to 3/4 a turn, it will rocket off the gun fixture at an incredible speed and for an amazing distance -- something usually not comprehended for something so small.
TECHNICAL NOTES:
TO acheive maximum distance, use a higher-modelled gun with a tank from a smaller model that will still screw onto the water-pressure valve. This allows even more air to be compressed and to fill a smaller volume. Normally this tends to increase distance significantly more than it does speed, though I'm sure the two are related. The last valid combination i tested was an SS50 bottle screwed onto an SS100 gun...
Watch out, neighbor-kids, here I come...
--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org
A friend of mine back in junior high had a water shotgun. It didn't shoot far at all, held barely enough water for 5 or six shots, but man... people started running when he started pumping it. There was something about the blast of water that made our friends freak out that a water stream could never do. I've been looking for this at every Toys R Us and Walmart I've been to, but I've never been able to find it.
"This is for fight, and this is for fun!"
Ok, repeat after me:
"This is my supersoaker. There may be others like it, but this one is mine. Without me, my supersoaker is useless. Without my supersoaker, I am useless."
Ahhh.... The good ol days of the super soaker 50... It was feared by every kid in the neighborhood. A few weeks ago i got the opportunity to play with the newer models... IT HAD A SHOULDER STRAP!!!!!! It was too heavy for me just to keep holding... I wonder how they'll market these "too heavy for 11 year olds" guns? I havent had a real waterfight in years because they just stopped losing their novelty... It'll be interesting.
-- There's only one replacement for displacement.....
...was this personal forest fire fighting rig we had. A 5 gallon metal tank backpack, with a 1/2" hose leading into a pump nozzle assembly that sorta looked like an old inline telescopic bicycle tire pump - but bigger.
Shot a 1/2" diameter stream of water about 75'. It was used during forest fire season to put out spot fires, and it weighed 65lbs full (50lbs of that was water!)
When you pack one of these babies, you win whatever water fight you get into - although it's hard to run in when full.
Ahhh, memories...
When I was about 15 or so I was at a youth group retreat. The girls came ot our cabin at about 5 am and woke us up by screaming and throwing confetti. Well, a few nights later we got bakc at them.
'round about 4:30 in the am I had one of the younger guys wake me up. I got about 5 or so of the teenage guys up and we got our water guns ready. I guess I was the Sarge' so I got A water balloon too. We crept to the girls cabin and we concentrated on the back room where the age 13+ girls slept. I slowly opened the window while another group went to chekc the front door.
The frond door was locked so the others came around back too. Just as the window was almost completely open one of those morons come running aound the cabin and says, like we're in a crowded room, DID YOU GET IT OPEN YET? He didn't wake them up. We all got ready. I bit the ends off of my "grenade" and lobbed it in.(the next morning I found out that my I woke up somone by hitting her in the face with that grenade) We opened fire with abut 8 water guns through this open window. For about 30 seconds all I could hear was our laughter and the screams of startled half-asleep chicks on the other side of the window. After we were out of ammo, we told them why and warned them against ever waking us up like that again.
Since the majority of "adults" on this retreat were women and were awakened by our activities we got in trouble while the girls did not, but I refused to accept any punishment as long as the girls went unpunished. (that is another story though)
Also when I was younger than that I got this battery operated water gun that sprayed a continuous stream of water (not like the broken stream of enter-tech type water guns), my best friend and I tood turns hiding in the bushes in front of his house and spraying water into the open windows of any vehicle that drove up the road.
This huge monster truck looking thing came up te road and I was so excited that I started shooting early, the headlights of the truck illuminated the stream from my gun like a silver ribbon that lead straight back to me. The driver of the truck hit his breaks and started to creep back in reverse, I must have army crawled 40 feet in 2 seconds to get the hell out of there.
Anyway, that stuff was extremely fun and I'm just happy that I never got my butt kicked for any of the stuff that I did when I was a youngster. The thing that sucks most about growing up is that I can't do things like that anymore.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Yep, I remember being introduced to one of the M-16 models at my college graduation party in '86. My best friend was hosting this party and his snotty little brother was taking pot-shots at us from various vantage points. We were so hammered it took a while to figure out where the water was coming from. Little bastard was doing things like belly-crawling under a picnic bench and releasing a few quick bursts before retreating to refill.
God that thing was cool once we busted him and confiscated it. It looked like the real thing from far enough away and in the twlight lighting. I can see why cops didn't want punks running around with these, they looked real as hell. You could put a pretty good bead of water where you wanted it too, nothing like the volume that you can dispense from a supersoaker, tho. But for stealthy, accurate sniping, this was the sh*t.
Well, it's not exactly a squirt gun, but it's close..
Actually you can still make these, just get then end of a ball point pen, about 3 feet of surgical tubing (any drug store has it, no prescription) that is 5/8" diameter. Tie one end of the tubing shut and then put the pen end in the other side of the tube. Then get the cap from a 2 liter pop bottle, drill a hole in the middle of it and attach it to the hose. Push the pen cap into the hole in the bottle cap and turn on the water. Fills it right up, and you get a nice stream that isn't very thick, but it shoots a good 30 feet or more.
Ah yeah, the joys of super soakers.
I still think they need to make one you can snap CO2 cartridges into. Too inefficient to have to stop and pump it up in the heat of a battle.
Laser sights are nice. For a couple years I've had a 5mw laser module thats migrated around my various weapons of choice. Useful on the waterguns when you can't hit someone directly, but want to splatter the stream off something over their head.
Also very useful on the suction-cup dart guns they used to make. (The ones that would leave welts, not the new toned down ones) With a laser site on my circa 1994 six-shot SuperSoaker dart gun, and specially reinforced darts (the new darts aren't strong enough for the old guns), I can raise a welt from fifty feet away with dead-on accuracy!
I remember when I got a Super Soaker XP-Something or another and gained a new appreciation for the work that Laramie had put into their products. I squirted everybody that I could, and became a proficient sprinter at the same time. I became dissatisfied with the performance of the weapon after a short while, and proceeded to modify it. It turns out, that on this particular model there was a two-part nozzle that had a little cone-shaped piece of plastic in the middle that forced the water out at greater pressures. I decided to remove this and see what happened. Needless to say, the distance on my shots decreased from about 35' to 15', and my endurance in water battles was greatly diminished, but there's nothing better than jumping out of some bushes at someone and emptying your whole tank of water on them in under 5 seconds. Kind of like the "Sawed-off shotgun" approach to water battles...
keep acting shocked and move slowly towards the cake.
Not quite the same but some hooligan in my town filled his "water gat" up with vegetation killer and went around writing things on people's lawns. It was a pretty bad thing to do but it was fairly funny to see a very large "F*&^" in the yard in front of a $300,000+ house. He pretty much destroyed all of the lawns in one of the nicer parts of town. What do you do when that happens? Just leave a big "F*&^" in your lawn? Do you just dig up the dead parts and leave it spelled out in the dirt where you dug it up? You pretty much have to redo the whole lawn and that's a nontrivial task if you've got a really large lawn. We wrote remarkably clearly for making words and letters as big as he did... I've always wondered how he did that.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
I've always been tempted to fill one with gas and try to use it as a flame thrower.....but better sense has always gotten the better of me. OK, its a horrible little idea, but have any of the little pyros tried it?
I had one of those battery-powered 9mm water guns probably ten or twelve years ago. I loved that thing, before the days of super soakers, that bad boy was da bomb! :)
The newer supersoakers can't easily be hidden either. In hind sight, that old one looked an awful lot like a real gun. I'm probably lucky I didn't get shot by a cop.
Burned the thing out when I added a strap on battery pack that doubled the speed it shot at. Didn't make it through the summer, I seem to recall.
37 b.c. Roman General Semper Cuni Linctus develops Squirtus Maximus, an ox bladder filled with water, that is operated by a legionaire jumping up and down on top of it. The device is used to dampen the resistence of the Gauls in what is now Southern France.
800 a.d. Danish barbarian modify the Squirtus by adding a nozzle. The weapon is used by chieftan Unferth the Hairy during his invasion of Ireland. Marks the first and last time in history that an Irishman is known to have showered.
1200 a.d. Improved squirtgun consisting of a large water reservoir and a modified billows is used by Islamic forces attempting to lift the crusader siege of Acre. Entire christian army is rusted solid and subsequently slaughtered.
1345 a.d. Rebelious Flemish peasants route a French army by using water filled gourds that smash on impact. Considered by historians to be the first appearance of the water balloon.
1356 a.d. Pope Pius IX bans the use of water based weaponry in a papal edict arguing that it is a "mockery of god who has dominion over the waters of the earth."
1803 a.d. Steel tubes with a nozzle on one end and a piston on the other are used by Portugese guerillas to expel fluids in the general direction of french occupation forces. Weapons are prone to rust and less than effective against muskets.
1939 a.d. Rust proof stainless steel squirt guns used by Nazi forces occupying Norway. The weapon is found to be non-functional during the norwegian winters.
1958 a.d. Soviet scientists develop first plastic squirt gun. Eisenhower warns nation of a "squirt gap" School children accross the country engage in squirting drills where they crawl under their desks and cover their heads.
1959 a.d. U.S. scientist in the secret "Vaudeville Project" develop the squirting flower.
1983 a.d. President reagan accused off selling squirt guns to Iran in exchange for freedom of US hostages.
1999 a.d. Timeline joke has grown stale. Shoeboy decides to stop and submit his post.
--Shoeboy
I don't have a SuperSoaker, but I do have this thing that is like a humongous syringe (w/o needle of course) and a pistol grip on the end of the plunger. The whole thing is about 3 ft. long when empty, ~ 6 ft. long loaded full. No batteries, easy to fill -- just stick the business end in a bucket, full sink, swimming pool, river, etc. and draw back on the plunger handle...
They were originally designed to pump the bilge water out of canoes and kyacks, but they pump a *fat* stream of H20 when used in reverse, baby!
I use mine to hunt/snipe the large racoon population that inhabit my apt complex.
My uncle gave me mine as a gift, but I think you can find them through outfitters that specialize in whitewater rafting, canoeing, etc.
And don't forget those 3-man-crew water-balloon slingshots -- 250 foot range!
"Women love me, 'Coons fear me!"
Laser pointers and your supersoaker would be a great combination at the evening pool parties. Lasers really light up mists of water. I know mine shines a bright, spectacular beam in the fog. Imagine the display you could have with a bright red jet from the end of your gun!
Do they make laser diodes of different colors besides red yet?
Err, as I remember it, 10 years ago Entertech was winning the watergun arms-race with a line of battery-powered auto-firing squirt guns; I miss those things! OK, the clips were too damn small and hard to fill, the guns tended to leak, and the electronics tended to rust and/or short out after a year or two, but man were they cool! I had their Tek-9 look-alike (a step above their handgun-style models) but what I really wanted were the M-16 or RPG monsters; couldn't afford them, though, on my middle school lunch money. The quick-fill "grenade" water-balloon pump that looked like a plunger-style detonation trigger was pretty cool, too.
Less than a year later, though, new laws required the barrels of gun-shaped toys to be brightly and unrealistically coloured (IIRC, this was after a several kids were gunned down by cops who apparently couldn't distinguish their water/Lazer Tag(TM) guns were the real deal), and the realistic Entertech weapons lost much of their appeal with bright red barrels.
Super-soakers arrived a year later and made waterguns fun again. Also, they worked better.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.