Neighbor: Are you guys okay?
Yeah
When the super soaker was first invented, it was an absolute game changer in my neighborhood.
So now that I'm a dad and I know how to engineer
I decided to once again level up my water fighting capabilities with this.
The Guinness World record holding
Largest water gun ever at 7 feet long. As a follow-up, of course, to my world record largest nerf gun
But, she doesn't just look good.
So I'm going to show you how we made it, how she stacks up against the original Super Soaker
and then we'll talk about the science behind how it works
But first let's just take a moment to appreciate the destructive power of a stream of water traveling at 272 miles per hour
Watermelons are great
But I wanted to see how she would fare in a real water fight in addition to running some further tests but before we get into those
Let's talk about how we made it and how it works
Together with my buddy Bob and his glorious beard we created a skeleton for the gun in fact
I won't show it here
but if you want all the gory details
On how to construct a large scale replica like this he uploaded a full video on his awesome YouTube Channel called I Like To Make Stuff
I'll put a link in the video description
and in the end after some EVA foam and a paint job
We ended up here
Let's take a look under the hood to see the design
I arrived at with my buddy Ken the first thing
The first thing you should notice is that most of the mass is down here in the handle not up here
That's because having a low center of mass is really helpful for stability and maneuverability
For something really large like this
All the components you see here are just a fancier version of all the components that make up this gun
It operates on the exact same principles, so let's start by talking about how this one works
And to do that I figured
We might as well ask the actual original inventor of the Super Soaker one of my personal
engineering heroes, Lonnie Johnson
of course one of my first questions to him was how he even came up with this idea
I got the idea In 1982. I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on the Galileo Project at the time
In fact, i was doing experiments in my home, in the bathroom, in the evening time
I wanted to develop a heat pump that would use
water as opposed to Freon. I had made these nozzles i had hooked up to the sink and
as i shot the stream of water across the bathroom
And I saw how powerful it was and how satisfying it was
I felt some high pressure in a high performance water gun and it was really really cool
As I talked more with Lonnie he showed me the very first prototype
He ever built of the gun. We talked about some of the clever design elements. For example this tank here that holds the water
Doubles as the pressure container so each time you pump you are forcing more and more air into this spot
Which makes it more and more crowded with air molecules which increases the pressure and when you pull the trigger
The air is pushing down on the water
So hard the only place it can go is through this tube and out the gun and so this is why this tube is
intentionally bent down like this
because no matter which way you tilt the gun it's always going to be below the water line and therefore water will come out and
Not air and so now in our case instead of pumping we fill this tank up with
High-pressure nitrogen gas and then this tank is filled with about two gallons of water and just like the Super Soaker it has a tube
that runs all the way down and is open at the bottom so then this gas is at a
Really high pressure and it wants to get out so when you pull the trigger
And open the flow it pushes down on the top of the water which forces it up this tube and out at
272 miles per hour and the Trigger is just this ball valve joint here
but I thought it would be lame if every time you wanted to fire you had to turn some the handle so we have a
Pneumatic piston here, that's also powered by the nitrogen
And then we have a solenoid that's connected to some double-A batteries back there for power and so when you push this button it opens
the ball valve and allows water to flow through
Until I release the button. I'll put a link to the CAD files we made along with a build list of all the components
we used in the video description if you want to make something similar
Oh, one final cool feature is we have this cover here
That's held on with rare-earth magnets, so after you've shot a bunch and need to refill the water and the gas
You can just easily access the fill valves through this window here and now back to the gratuitous violence
It's a double rainbow all the way
For some context on the power of this gun the original Super Soaker was pressurized to 40 PSI
And the pressure from the hose of your house is just a little more than around 50 PSI, a firetruck hose
comes in at around six times that at 300 PSI and this beast is eight times the pressure of a firetruck at
2400 PSI which in hindsight is probably overkill
One final really cool feature of the gun is you can swap out the nozzle depending on what you're shooting
So this nozzle has a really small diameter opening which leads to a high stream velocity, but lower overall water output
So it's good for cutting or puncturing stuff then this nozzle is basically wide open at a quarter-inch so it's a little lower
Velocity but it's the maximum water output, so it's good for getting things drenched fast or breaking things with Force
So now with the gun fully tested
I wanted to see how we would do in an actual water fight, so we got together for a party with some family friends
But to make things fair we took turns picking guns, but of course I got first pick
So it worked awesome, and I completely destroyed them
until I ran out of water