DIY Super Soaker vs. Store Bought (& How We Made It!)

When we found out you can no longer buy air pressure powered super soakers anymore we decided to make our own! Check out our sponsor for this video: Carolina Boots ❤️ https://goo.gl/KNa7QA
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MUSIC
Boom Kat by David Cutter
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This project really shows the power of experimentation and iteration. At least that’s what we’re telling ourselves since we had to go through so many revisions to get this where we wanted it! The first version we made actually worked really well! It fired and held pressure but it was weird to pressure it up with the bike pump on top and release pressure at the bottom. We went through a whole bunch of iterations before giving into the inevitable and adding a hose running to the bottom of a water reservoir.

We also thought it would be fun to make our own nozzle. The first one was just a straight hole drilled through a ⅛” NPT plug. We wanted to make the hole smaller so we hammered it with a punch. The hole certainly got smaller but it was also rough so it just ended up misting the water instead of producing a nice stream. This got us thinking of turbulent and laminar water flow so we designed a nozzle in 3D to address the problem. The nozzle has a grid of parallel tubes that lines the flow up and creates a much smoother flow. We 3D printed the nozzles on our SLA printer and were absolutely blown away with the results. They were functional right away, including the threads, which sealed and held up to 150 PSI!!

Throughout the whole process the water blaster kept on getting bigger too! Mainly because firing the super soaker clone was SO much fun we didn’t like running out of water. We went from ½” to 1-½” to 2” reservoirs.

Once we had the plumbing and functional parts in place we wanted to reinforce the whole structure. We addressed that by adding a 3D printed body to lock everything straight. It had the added bonus of making the assembly look more finished/cool and it also made resting against your shoulder more comfortable.

We were super happy with how the water blaster turned out but of course we had to test it against the super soakers available today (which are only the single stroke displacement type). The super soaker Breach Blast was chosen because it had one of the best advertised ranges (38 ft). In reality it had a huge spread and fired mostly between 20 and 30 feet with some sprinkles hitting around 38. Our water gun had more concentrated bursts that mainly hit 28-33 feet. The main difference to us is that pressure powered water blasters like ours can be prepped and rapidly fired vs the single stroke style that required you to pump every time.