Thursday 29 October 2015

BW12 Koosh Observations, Gen 3, 29th October 2015


Had a shipment of Gen 3 Kooshes arrive today, so here's my notes on them.
I had intended to get 400 blues for myself and 300 yellows for a friend, but apparently forgot to leave that note so received every colour currently available.
Interestingly, while the blue Kooshes have a regular orange tip, every other colour has a slightly redder tip. I can't feel much difference between the two, but I can't say for sure that they're the same.
Like with previous Koosh batches, the foams for different colours tend to be slightly different. In this batch, the colours with the slightly thicker foam were blue, light green and yellow, while the grey, orange (streamline colour) and dark green had slightly thinner foam. The foams tend to be pretty consistent throughout each individual colour.
All the different colours feel similarly stiff, comparable to Gen 2 blue Koosh foams. I couldn't definitively say one colour felt any weaker than the others.
The Gen 3 light greens are significantly different foam-wise to early light greens, which tended to be very thin. Ironically I'd say Gen 3 light greens are probably the thickest of the Gen 3's, as they also have the smallest diameter shaft.

Two of the major issues with previous Koosh batches were excess glue around the tip and insufficient/uncured glue. The latter has been well and truly eliminated, every single tip I checked was very well glued on and couldn't be budged without quite a significant amount of force. The former still occurs, however a lot less frequently than previous batches. In my Gen 2 batch I had to clean up just about every single dart, however in this Gen 3 batch only about 20% of the darts have excess glue around the tip.
Annoyingly the excess glue is harder to remove as it is all cured properly, but I'd rather spend more time per dart cleaning 20% of my darts than spend less time per dart cleaning most of my darts.
A good case for the properly cured glue is this misfit. Despite the tip being half out, it took a significant amount of force to remove the tip from the body. With previous Kooshes a tip like this could be ripped out very easily.

I did some quick testing of each colour through a few blasters. Nothing scientific or proper, just a quick test.
All colours (including the slightly thinner ones) fit reasonably tightly in my Sweet Revenge and all shot similarly well. The foams are certainly much better in thickness and consistency compared to the early Kooshes. Performance is comparable to cleaned up Gen 2 blues.
Loading up each colour into an 18, I tested the Gen 3's in my Hobbymods/OzNerfNerd kit EAT and Bullpup RS.

As with the Sweet Revenge, all colours of darts appeared to perform similarly and comparably to cleaned up Gen 2 blues, but again no significant or scientific testing was conducted. The EAT had no troubles with helicoptering darts, though some did appear to fishtail.

TL;DR: less darts have excess glue, glue is cured very well, foams seem reasonable (though no testing has been done on foam quality). Certainly no new issues are introduced with the Gen 3's as far as I can tell.

5 comments:

  1. This is titan. Do you know what xploders are?

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    1. Yes. And no, I have no interest in them whatsoever.
      I think they've disappeared from Australia, haven't seen them for a few years.

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  2. This is titan. I was thinking that I could take a take a toy blaster(It's basically just an empty shell) and fit in the xploderz internals. Not for any practical use, just for novelty reasons.

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  3. This is titan. Do you still have your star wars captain rex blaster? If so, would you be willing to sell it?

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    1. If you checked the Nerf Armoury page, you would see that no, I don't have it any more. Even if I did, shipping to Canada (which I believe you mentioned some time back) would likely cost so much that you could instead buy a Retaliator. I'm sure someone in Canada or the US would have a spare, and shipping from them would be far, far cheaper than from Australia.

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