Test/Review: Prime Time Sureshot green tip, red foam ("chili"/"diamond")

This dart has been known variously around the NIC as "chili" or "green[/red] diamond". It is the second on the market of Prime Time (Dart Zone, Adventure Force)'s two offerings of structured-absorber/honeycomb style darts with full-caliber tips under the Sureshot branding - the first being the blue layered tip dart with (usually) lime green foam that is more commonplace and definitely more well documented.

I have been meaning to look into these for a while, partially because there is a distinct lack of information on them.

Edit: 06-23-23 Fix typos and formatting



I'll get to doing similar writeups for the blue tip Sureshot and a couple batches of waffle and accutip soon enough.

First let's get the boring but important stuff out of the way:

These were purchased a couple days ago from Amazon in a case of 300 rounds for $23.99 US. A little under 8 cents a round is overall a good price.

Mass

5 random pulls from the case went onto the lab balance: 1.05g, 1.03g, 1.04g, 1.03g, 1.03g.

This is very similar to the blue tip Sureshot dart at typically 1.045g. This is a light dart, and there is a bit of pause to be given about reach outdoors as with the blue tip Sureshot, but preliminarily these are not as droppy and "hit a wall and fall out of the sky" as the blue tip regardless, which suggests this distinction is aerodynamic. I may go back on that once I combat test these next event, but at the available distance to shoot at this site they shot well. More on that with the group test.

Dimensional

All the darts I measured were extremely close to the same length as this one at 73.2mm. This is overshooting the OAL spec of the 12.7x72mm by over 1mm, but well within the tolerance. Perhaps some old revolvers of dodgy design might have issues with projectile tips dragging and causing problems.

Tip OD: 11.97mm, slightly sub-caliber. This is a good reliability feature for mags to keep tips from contacting. Still, note that this is strictly a "flywheel dart". I would never try to use it in a barreled blaster. It may happen to work in a long barrel, but consider this incidental.

Undeformed foam OD was consistently about 12.9mm

Foam roundness was excellent. Prime Time ships darts in carefully dimensioned cardboard cartons filled completely with ammo such that it cannot rattle around nor is any pressure exerted on it, and this packaging works much better for preventing foams from getting beat up in shipping than vendors that use plastic bagged 10 round "clips".

Tips are glued on with rubberized adhesive.

I didn't get a disassembled tip image but the core length is fairly short like the blue tip and glue application is complete and without residue/flash.

And onto functional testing!

Magazine feeding is solid. None of the blue tip's occasional issues are observed with tip friction.

The compound used in these tips is significantly higher durometer than that of the Sureshot blue and the tackiness is lower.

I ran these through the usual suspect, this Delta 9.0 T19:

Chrono

I have a new Caldwell and I used that. Conditions were outdoors, mid 80s F, very high humidity by the way. New darts. Units, feet per second:

196

195

194

195

196

195

191

196

192

194

193

194

197

197

196

194

194

192

195

190

192

195

Well, I would call that... not shabby in the slightest.

I did have some concerns about non-uniform stiffness of the tips that turned out to not be an issue at all. That is probably somewhat being mitigated because I'm using a circular gap flywheel system. If you are shooting these on something with a strongly asymmetric gap you might find that is increasing your velocity spread and want to choose something radially symmetric like an accutip or the Sureshot blue instead.

Dispersion

I did a brief target shoot with constant point of aim and a camera rolling to record a sample group. New darts except 3 reused ones that snuck in from the chrono shoot. Distance to target was 50 feet from the cage measured by Bosch laser rangefinder and the target (a gate) for site reasons was slightly oblique to the shooter.

That may be difficult with the Blogger video embed to make that bigger so here is the framecap marked up with the hits as an image (green plus is the POA and red squares are POIs):

Farthest flyers are about 18" apart laterally, same-ish spread vertically. Most shots clustered up very nicely.

Not too bad!

POA was with my usual combat zero on my eotech which was set for (usually heavier) waffle and accutip darts at this range so this is an encouraging sign indeed about the drop/flatness/velocity retention issue with the blue tip Sureshot being improved on with this dart.

In all this I had 0 decaps, 1 tip become slightly debonded around the edge (I threw that in the "to be glued" bin with the other decap darts and tips), and 1 dart exploded on impact:

To be fair, those hits were really hard (listen to them in the video clip). These do seem to retain energy very well for such a light projectile.

Overall

I'm impressed.

I do recommend. Very much. I plan to buy more. Maybe a LOT more.

How is this dart so underreviewed and underappreciated?

I look forward very much to unleashing these sweet angry things on whatever most unfortunate field next game.