WaterWar.net

I am posting this as a possible help with repair thread/to question the reliability of the water warriors colossus. I bought the Colossus last spring, so I have had it a little more then a year at this point. During that time I have had a few battles with it and have kept it indoors the rest of the time. It was very surprising that after only a year a few plastic parts have snapped and the internals were badly rusted (even my Vindicator wasn't this bad, and it was kept outdoors for three years!) Has anyone else had reliability problems with the Colossus or did I just get a bad model?

I have included pictures of the various problems:
Overall view of blaster open. You can't really see to much from this one, but notice how rusted the trigger rod is. Even my Vindicator isn't this bad and it's gone through h***! Should a year old gun that has mostly been kept indoors be this rusted?
Here you can see how the plastic guide for the trigger mechanism snapped. Without the other end of the groove the trigger must be pulled really far back in order to fire at all. I plan on gluing a piece of metal to the remaining part to remake the rest of the groove.
This spring got rusted so bad that it broke. I'm not sure if this happened as I opened it or before that. Ether way the gun still seems to hold pressure without it (air at least). Another thing to note is the fact that the Colossus uses a pull valve where all the other water warriors guns I have taken apart used ball valves.

The other thing that happened is that when opening the gun the plastic that the pump cap attaches to broke and came off with the cap. The plastic on the Colossus seams very brittle compared to other Water Warriors guns as I was pulling it very lightly when it broke.

For the most part I think I can fix most of these problems (though I am open to suggestions), but I am really posting all of this to increase awareness of possible reliability problems for other guns.

Also, how do the rest of you guys upload so many pictures at once?!? It wont let me add more then three attachments.

If you have the pictures hosted somewhere, you can link to many more than you can attach. I've increased the attachment limit to 10. Try not to use attachments though, the board has a limit on how much total space is reserved for them.

So far, I have not had any Colossus problems, but I also have not looked inside any of them since I first bought one.

If I used a link though wouldn't people have to click it in order to view the picture? I have seen SEAL and others post lots of pictures imbedded directly in the post. Is that done by linking?

I wouldn't have taken this one apart if not for the broken trigger part. In general though it feels less sturdy then the older water warriors models. The plastic itself is more flexible and brittle then older guns. Surprisingly Nerf Super Squirter actually uses pretty high quality plastic in something that is basically an over sized squirt gun. Maybe in another year I will have to disassemble my Colossus 2 and see how that holds up.