Wednesday 24 June 2015

BW12 Koosh Observations, June 2015

Some observations on the new BW12 Koosh darts I just received, akin to Torukmakto's posts on The Dart Zone (link left). Batch was ordered on the 6th of June, 2015.

I ordered a batch of 600 blues and 400 yellows, as I wanted a replacement for the now-discontinued greens.
From left to right: New blue, New yellow, Old green, Old blue
First up is the foam difference. While the picture isn't the best, courtesy of iPotato, you should still be able to see some difference. The new foams are slightly thicker than the older foams, with the new blue also being slightly darker. The green foam I noted in my previous review as being unusually thin, which is especially apparent went comapred against the new foams.
Comparing the two blues together, the new foam is also more consistent throughout. In the old batches I bought I noticed two distinctly different blue foam sizes - one thicker foam closer to the new foam, and one older, thinner foam closer to Elite/green Koosh foam. The new Kooshes have no such difference, being largely quite uniform.
My original Koosh batches were older batches form before the eBay listings had "improved adhesive" on them, and a lot of them had uncured glue on the foam. The uncured glue is no longer a problem post-"improved adhesive", however excess glue is still a problem. I found excess glue on about 15 of the 20 darts I opened up initially, and it's not particularly easy to remove either, which means you'll have to spend some time removing the excess glue from most of the darts.

One dart I found had other issues. While it didn't have a significant buildup of excess glue around the tip, it had an off-centre tip as well as seemingly having had glue along the body of the dart, contributing to the additional shininess you see in the above picture.
This dart is a bit of a freak, I didn't see any others notable off in my quick look over the dart packs.
A number of the yellows for some reason have black marks on the back, ranging from an almost imperceptible smudge to a clearly darkened base, such as the one in the bottom left. As far as I can tell it seems to be just a colouring and not any significant additional material, as it appears similar to what you get when making a stamp without enough ink.

I test-fired the new darts from my Sweet Revenge and modded Rapidstrike and got similar performances to my old blues, nothing I personally could notice (nothing was tested scientifically), however Toruk noted with a newer batch that he got a significant muzzle velocity increase from his modded Rapidstrike Tacmod 2.1 with the new Kooshes compared to older batches. I'd attribute this to the new foam.

TL;DR: All Kooshes are the same now, no unglued/uncured darts but still a lot of excess glue. Foam is slightly thicker and better.

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