The Dart Zone: Continued dart evaluations, preliminary full length vs. short comparisons: Sureshot blue tip, DZP/AF Max, Accutip, waffle tip (Ekind 06-23)

This is going to be a long one, but it ultimately makes sense to put all this data in one post, and it will be seen why. As such, I will keep review commentary on the darts a bit terse.

More after the jump, but here's (for reference) the Sureshot green tip group from last time:

Chrono data was recorded using a Caldwell outdoors. Lighting was appropriate and very few errors occurred. I deleted a total of 3 or 4 shots over the entire dataset that were suspicious.

Weather during the tests was typical for the area of about 90F and high humidity.

For all, test blasters were T19s. The usual suspect, my primary:

And my personal short dart blaster, this blue/marble Gamma - with the sweetest, smoothest running cage I have ever built, incidentally.

Plus, a couple different full length 9.5 blasters.

A word on 9.0 vs. 9.5 Hy-Con

I do not have a 9.0 shorty at the moment, so one wasn't in the mix. However, as to 9.0 and 9.5 - at all of the speed settings I am using (including their dialed-in "full" velocity which is where I usually run them in combat if there are no interfering velocity caps), with new and once-fired darts, the 9.0 and 9.5 perform nearly identically in velocity and dispersion. (The advantage of the 9.0 is actually more consistent performance with used ammo, than it is flat-out more pew factor with good ammo. "Full" is not fully supercritical as this would cause excessive velocity spread; this is typical of Hy-Con which is very intolerant of overspeed.)

About group tests

I used the same procedure and location from the Sureshot green tip "chili" dart review to plot groups using new and once-fired darts only. Wind was minimal.

I conducted 3 shoots per dart type.

One ran the full length blaster at "full" velocity.
The next ran the short blaster at "full" velocity. (This is obviously not the same velocity as the full length blaster.)
The last ran the full length blaster, but now adjusted on the chrono with the SAME dart to closely the SAME VELOCITY AS the short blaster at ITS FULL velocity.

The last shoot is intended to offer a control for the obvious confounding variable in short vs. full length comparison shoots: the full length from a flywheel blaster collects more muzzle energy and usually has a higher velocity despite its higher mass than the short dart.

This is significant because drag-stabilized projectiles as a rule become increasingly less stable with increasing velocity. The reduction in velocity, in itself, is very obviously a factor in dispersion.

Constant velocity is only one possible idea of a fair comparison here, and makes the assumption that stability is primarily velocity-driven - although attempting to reach constant muzzle energy instead would not largely change the result (actually, by specifying an even lower velocity for the heavier full length, it would give it further advantage, if the velocity/stability correlation is significant in the first place for that dart).

Accutip (aka Whirlwind, Accustrike/-fake, cloneostrike; black foam, TBNC NFStrike batch)

The tried and true ultrastock classic. Like the waffles in this post, I tested these only in reglued state (see this post for why).

Mass as a x72:

1.24g
1.18g
1.23g
1.18g
1.22g

And as a shorty:

1.06g
1.06g
1.04g
1.05g
1.06g

Dimensions:

Some chrono strings as a x72, firstly on 9.5:

And now the 9.0:

Two strings of shorties on the 9.5 blaster, one shot at the same time as above:

And an earlier one:

Full length, full velocity:

Likely that flyer was just an error in tip installation. There was one I knew didn't seat right when gluing these and then forgot to cull.

This is an old favorite of mine and it performs very solidly.

Now as a short dart:

Man, that missing bit of foam not only slashed muzzle energy a large bit and moved the POI down about 10 whole inches, but increased dispersion a LOT.

Full length at matched (~170-175fps) velocity to short:

Much better.

Prime Time Sureshot blue tip/green foam

This dart is the more commonly known of the two Sureshots.

It isn't even a, let-alone the same as the, waffle tip dart although there are a number of people confusingly calling it that, not the least of which Prime Time themselves in their now-down Amazon listing.

Dimensions:

(OAL is the same as the green tip at just under 73mm)

Mass as x72:

1.04
1.03
1.05
1.05
1.05

As shorty:

0.88
0.90
0.87
0.87
0.87

Chrono strings of the x72, one earlier on a 9.5 blaster:

And a day ago on the 9.0 right before the group shoot (N.b. temp swung a bit):

Shorty chrono earlier:

And shorty day-of:

Full length at full gusto:

Yeah; I'm not a huge fan.

This dart is inconsistent in both velocity and dispersion compared to the green tip "chili", is droppy as, gets less velocity from at least this flywheeler, and this was observed after one shot into a soft backstop:

Tips starting to debond.

Onto shortifying it:

Hey, look at that! Short darts are more accurate than full lengths! QED!

Okay; but not so fast. Let's be fair and fire the full length at the same velocity as the short.

Once again, a significant improvement in dispersion AND drop.

Waffle (Ekind, 06-23, blue and red foam)

Another classic superstock era dart.

Also another dart with crap glue that needs to be reglued in my opinion and were for this test.

Dimensions:

Mass:

1.29g
1.31g
1.44g
1.39g
1.37g
1.33g
1.33g
1.37g
1.35g
1.34g

Reds and blues were identical tips and were identical dimensionally, foam/qualitative-wise, mass-wise and velocity-wise far as I could tell from these batches. This batch has a quite soft tip compound and is for sure on the heavy side. Also, this foam sucks.

Chrono as x72:

As short:

Group:

(notice I separated red and blue darts here)

Not THAT bad.

But... Ewwwwwwwwww. Don't buy this batch. Just ...try to get a different dart than these. They are inconsistent as in every respect, including mass, with small bore weak wimpy foam that put my setups way in the hole on velocity. It's amazing they grouped as well as they did.

Now let's shortify:

And try full length at matched velocity (N.b.: Red hitmarkers in this particular test are a mixture of red and blue foam darts):

(Whoops. The 2 hitmarkers off in the plants ARE NOT flyers, they are an image editing mistake while plotting the hits. Disregard.)

And last but not least...

Prime Time (AF/Dart Zone) Max

This is a well reputed dart of this type (a sub-caliber tip intended mainly for barrels, but there is a contingent advocating stuff like these, DZPs and Workers for flywheeling, mainly in association with either springer compatibility or with that branch of flywheel development where ridiculously small gaps like 7.0 or 6.3mm for instance are used in concert with them to get somewhat higher critical velocity than possible for a full-caliber tip type).

Mass (**as full length):

1.06g
1.08g
1.05g
1.05g
1.05g

As short:

0.88g
0.88g
0.87g
0.87g
0.89g

Chrono as x72:

Chrono as short:

Dimensions:

Groups...

Full length:

Very suboptimal but not totally unusable.

And short.

Nope. Garbage.

I didn't even bother comparing the full length to the short at matching velocity.

Overall, these are crap, and I'm fixing to return the unopened 2 cases I have.

Foam wear was significant and velocity depreciation awful when reused after being flywheeled.
So was the increase in dispersion after the darts were fired and struck objects, becoming a little dog-eared. They will only make a group like that first one once. Then they basically become Elites.
They don't seem very stable at ultrastock velocities. The short form of them was even more squirrelly at a lower velocity.

I have a more detailed commentary to make on these, this whole notion of sub-caliber tips for flywheeling, and other stuff I gave a shot (including putting some of these through an experimental, significantly higher crush Hy-Con, and trying a few other random flavors of sub-caliber tip like DZ Pro and Worker that I had a handful of, incidentally) but the overarching junky results from these widely-advocated darts on fronts that are NOT simply a matter of velocity or velocity consistency (and hence might be addressed by systems designed with very small gaps exclusively for this class of dart) casts doubt on the credibility of that advocacy. I don't care if you can crank down on these things crazy tight and be a chrono hero. It's a fair point, but that is not what makes a good blaster.

I would also add as a footnote that with all this short dart shooting going on, even though it was also isolated single shots and nothing ever went cyclic in here, a total of 7 failures to feed occurred. This is an example of observed stack tilt, with new darts ready for a test shoot:

I have worse examples with Max darts.

Problems were not linked to a tip type, contrary to what some of the goalpost-moving arguers have been editing their position toward lately ("Oh, it's just that you were using waffles and accustrikes! Small tips don't do that!"). Uh; Yeah they do. Max darts and assorted full-cals all exhibited some form of issue with the mags or with sticky feeding. And my mags are very clean and new because they almost never see the field compared to my full length gear.

To be specific these were typically low-feeds where the tip crashes into the inside of the mag body or otherwise hangs up instead of making it cleanly down the feed ramp. The T19 was able to avoid crushing the dart, recover and keep shooting on the next trigger pull every time, but repeating this with a different blaster would tend to not end well.

All of that's properly for the followup analysis post, though. For now I just wanted to get this stuff up. Also, more is coming. I'm going to try to capture data from as many random blasters as I can at local events, for instance.

The Dart Zone

Pages

Thursday, June 29, 2023

Continued dart evaluations, preliminary full length vs. short comparisons: Sureshot blue tip, DZP/AF Max, Accutip, waffle tip (Ekind 06-23)

A word on 9.0 vs. 9.5 Hy-Con

About group tests

Accutip (aka Whirlwind, Accustrike/-fake, cloneostrike; black foam, TBNC NFStrike batch)

Prime Time Sureshot blue tip/green foam

Waffle (Ekind, 06-23, blue and red foam)

Prime Time (AF/Dart Zone) Max

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