Hands-On: Water Warriors Sphynx

[isoaker]

Finally managed to acquire a Water Warriors Sphynx (2011), the air pressure version!

As already noted by others, there's no more fake electronic pressure gauge trigger (back end of the grip area is smooth). Also, most definitely air pressure with water being visible through the semi-translucent PC as it is being pressurized. PC capacity is a little less than the Hydro Power version, but still respectable. Power is also decent, though not quite pushing out the massive burst that the Hydro Power version tested here did. Initial tests gave the biggest nozzle roughly a 4x rating (a touch higher, technically, being measured at 130mL/sec which works out to ~4.3 oz/sec).

Still want to test it out a little more, but for now pictures of the Water Warriors Sphynx are posted.

Enjoy!

[HBWW]

Are you measuring the full volume of the PC? Or just the standard releasable amount of water? You may have clarified this earlier, but I forgot, and its odd that the PC would hold less than the HP version as there is no diaphragm to block out the rest of the casing volume.

BBT's air pressure blasters look great this year. I may end up getting one myself, not sure though. They're still not up to speed with the old CPS's, but they appear to be amongst the top in air pressure performance.

[isoaker]

For separate air pressure chambers that do not separate the air from water, the volume measured is the available pressurized water, not the total internal volume of the pressure chamber. While not quite up to the good ol' CPS level of output, it's still quite decent. My main complaint with the Sphynx as with other similarly sculpted blasters is that my hand doesn't quite fit into the trigger/grip area leaving either my lower three fingers feeling squished or my pinky with no good place to go.

[HBWW]

What about CPS bladder measurements? I take it that you're careful not to count any bladder dead space on those if compressed air volume on separate-chamber AP's don't count either.

I'm not sure on how the Pre-Chargers looked internally. Does the maximum expellable amount of water change based on air pressure put in?

I would say that full chamber volume is a more useful figure for separate PC's than expellable amount of water, as the maximum amount of water expelled can vary easily if there are differences to the PRV. It's for some of the same reasons that one measures PR's by the entire chamber volume. Just my opinion though.

[isoaker]

CPS bladders are primed before testing (i.e. removing the air inside the bladder), but the volume recorded is the amount of water pushed out not including any water that's left trapped within the bladder (dead volume). Total volume in most cases of a PC is usually larger than the PC volume reported on iSoaker.com since I only report what can be pushed through the nozzle.

The Pre-Charger series was the biggest pain to figure out how to best do PC measurements. In that particular case, the amount of water that can be pushed into the front side really depends on the position of the sliding piston is before the blaster pushes air to the back-side of the chamber. For sake of argument and consistency, I kept all blaster sliding pistons at their full-forward position, pre-pressurized the back side, then pushed water into the front side (priming the tubing to flush out any residual air trapped in tubing), then did the volume measurements. What one could do, though, is fill the front side with some water first (say 1/3), then do the pre-charging, then pump in more water to give one more available PC capacity and still be able to pretty much empty the PC. However, it would be very tricky to do this in a consistent for doing available PC volume measurements and chose to consider "stock" PC volume based on the amount pushed out following the instructions of pre-pressurizing first before pumping water.

You are absolutely right that full PC volume would be a nice number to have since available volume depends on PRV variability. However, getting that measurement properly would be more involved (best way would still be to dismantle the blaster and measure directly since other methods have no way to account for water trapped in tubing. As I, personally, prefer not to open blasters unless repair or really curious about their internals, I'll be sticking to simply measuring pushed water volumes for now (the easiest) and hoping that PRVs between blasters of the same model do not vary significantly (might be an additional 30ml/1oz. at most, but I'd be surprised if another stock blaster of the same model would differ much more in available PC volume than that due to its PRV).

All this said, I should probably put a note on the iSoaker.com reviews about all this stuff. I think parts of explained somewhere, but not all.

[HBWW]

I never measured full air PC volumes by that method. For the Max-D 6k, I held the trigger open and pumped water in upside down. It is indeed difficult to account for water in the tubing, but I think I got a fairly decent figure in my review. With some PC's, direct, internal measurement may not be possible if the PC's are glued on instead of simply sealed.

[isoaker]

Water Warriors Sphynx review posted.

Enjoy and soak on!