Ammo Test: X-Shot "Air Pocket" dart - Not good

Zuru's modern era offering of a somewhat waffle-derived honeycomb absorber tip design, full-caliber tip for short barrels and flywheelers. There are a couple colorways of this same dart associated with different product lines. I have these.

These do not use standard commodity tubular dart foam. They use their own odd thinner wall, larger center hole spec. As expected this makes for a bit flimsy a foam by comparison.

As an unbonus, the tips can't be refoamed with standard foam, and foams salvaged from unwanted instances of these darts can't be used to refoam other tips.

The tip is a VERY low durometer compound. It has a very short core.

Rubberized adhesive is used. However, bond strength is very low. You may also spot a major problem afoot already from the above. That being this:

If you follow any of my flywheel work you may know that this lack of bonding on the end face is a major flywheeler internal ballistic sin in most cases and can cause issues you may never expect. We'll see that in action in a bit.

Here's the debonded foam end showing the very incomplete glue coverage:

This is as a rule with these darts, not a fluke. It is evident Zuru or their OEM is limiting glue quantity to NOT have to wipe excess glue flowing out of the tip bond line during the process.

Anyway onto the numbers. Mass, grams:

• 1.08
• 1.07
• 1.03
• 1.07
  
• 1.08
• 1.07

Chrono, 9.0 Hy-Con:

• 152
• 131
• 147
• 127
• 151
• 161
• 157
• 157
• 149
• 142
• 162
• 167
• 141
• 149
• 161
• 158
• 113
• 129
• 155

Yikes!

From this we can pull a couple observations. One, all those erratic abysmally bad shots are due to the glue. Two, the critical velocity of a 9.0 'con with this thing is also crap to begin with at about 160fps. Low durometer compound and flimsy foam do that.

Dispersion:

Also yikes. An expected result from completely out of control velocity, and major mechanical issues as tips are dangling halfway off to start with (some darts were fully decapitated by the blaster and more blew up on impact as well).

0/10 Can not recommend. I wouldn't even bother with this stuff for a low performance application. Packing peanuts are about all they are good for.

Ammo Test: Worker Gen3 ("HE") Heavy as full length

I have been meaning to give this particular tip a try as a long dart for flywheel use for a while now, and I also wanted to check out its "heavy" variant, so I did both.

Of course it's a sub-caliber tip. Note there is an undercut on the contact surface in further addition to that, giving a tip mounting result that is halfway between a normal dart tip and the original intentionally-unseated Worker factory assembly job. As a flywheeler I am not a fan of that detail.

This isn't a stock foam, so this next bit is just additional transparency that the foam I'm refoaming these with for the test is to spec and not crap:

Mass, grams, assembled as x72:

• 1.35
• 1.34
• 1.33
• 1.34
• 1.34
• 1.34

Well that's pretty tight, eh?

Chrono on the 9.0 T19, fps:

• 177
• 178
• 182
• 178
• 178
• 178
• 178
• 179
• 171
• 174
• 182
• 178
• 174
• 184
• 169
• 177
• 177
• 182

Like the mass spread, that's quite good velocity spread. The velocity magnitude is a good bit low for the 9.0 Hy-Con, but that's just because this is a sub-cal and so the tip deformation is reduced. If desired or apt, the critical velocity could be cranked back in with a tighter gap setting, though this would de-optimize or even prohibit use of full-caliber tips in the process (depending on how far one goes with that). Anyway, I'm not really giving the non-200fps-ness of the velocity any gravity here, it's just a parameter.

They fed very well in mags.

Ready for things to go rather sideways after this very promising start?

The dispersion test. Range was 52 feet 6 inches.

 

Yeah; not quite. Doing about as well as the Max dart, so not useless, but there are better choices for sure.

The obstacle strikes aren't quite that damning this time, I was shooting through a small corridor between chairs and columns and other items from where I was to this fence.

As the shooter who fired all these, the spread of these seems not to be anything to do with stability. They are as expected from a heavy solid dome, very well mass-distributed and very stable. I also inspected what I was firing and there were no obvious instances of wonk with glue, crooked tips or damaged foams. I think this with both this dart AND the Max dart is mainly strict dispersion, due to a mechanical precision issue with the flywheeling of common sub-caliber dart tips.

Messing with some of these barrel darts and some flywheels shows some non-aligning/forcible misalignment during contact (and resultant foam bending) behavior similar to what happens with ogive profiled dart tips in flywheel blasters, just less extreme. I can't be sure that is happening in the blaster in realtime, but it seems to follow.

I didn't test these against their short counterpart, maybe later when I have some more unused tips, if I still have any of my short dart stuff at that time. Nothing new is expected there though, Max dart behaves conventionally with the short losing some velocity and gaining a bit of dispersion versus the long.

Further experimentation this observation (sub-cals seem to be making my flywheelers less precise) leads on is pretty much: does applying tighter gaps to them to raise the tip deformation improve that non-self-aligning/misalignment retaining during contact/... characteristic and tighten up groups, or is this observation perhaps moreso about the geometry of the tip and its proximity to the known problematic ogive sort than the diameter of the tip? All the tips I know to be the most accurate flywheel darts are not just full-caliber designs (that could be by chance alone), they also have a cylindrical OD (not a substantial taper) and a very limited radius on the front edge. Perhaps these features are key.

But anyway as to this tip for flywheeling (within a mostly full-caliber compatible/optimized environment at-least): overall a large meh. Not only the lack of precision, but these tips aren't as heavy as I was hoping (ordinary waffle is actually just-as or heavier), and that's on top of the high cost and the present lack of availability as a factory assembled full length. If/when the stock of Worker full lengths clears out and switches over to these it will be interesting to give them a fair re-go with virgin foam of a different batch and maybe my opinion on them would be less negative just for the availability. I'm still going to bring these to some combat. They should be good for very rangey support fire from messing around with them so far.

EOTech 552 Genuine vs. Clone

I wanted another sight so I don't have to move mine around between blasters. I have also been using low cost Chinese clone 552s as my go-to nerf optic for about the last 10 years and wanted to own one of the genuine version the whole time, obviously deferred because of cost. 

Recently I figured I would have a look at ebay for any deals on the secondhand real deal before grabbing another new Amazon Special, and sure enough, there was this sweet old unit with a bit of character/patina to it. I bid, and I won, and now I finally have a real one.

 

 

Sorry metric fans, not this time. This is freedom hardware.

 

 

Comparisons to my most often used, relatively modern era ClonEOTech of the same model (552) follow:

The railgrabber on the genuine is wonderful. I never thought tightening up an accessory could feel so well fitted and rock solid. I guess I hit my specs on Picatinny rail then...

The anodizing on the aluminum parts is proper type 3 on the real deal and quite matte, the clone just whatever thin spec and kind of shiny.

The battery box locking lever on the genuine is much more secure and there is a beefy soft rubber gasket it is getting mashed into, going along with the overall weatherization of the entire thing that the clones lack.

Both take 2 AA cells.

Nothing about the externalities of the clone is evidently truly reverse-engineered. A lot of part geometry and dimensions don't align whatsoever. The most visible being the flatness of the hood top on clones.

Everything is a little different about the keypad on the back.

Something about all ClonEOTechs, they are not really holographic sights. They are reflex sights mocked up as one. You can see that here with the semi-silvered looking lenses on the clone much closer to the ends of the hood.

There are a couple ramifications. Firstly, parallax error, the clones aren't as good at eliminating it because they are really just red dots. Secondly, yes, indeed, the real thing has a MUCH clearer/less "shaded" view than a clone, since there is no need of a semi-reflective element to bounce the reticle off. I didn't realize how much nicer that would be. Finally, the clones do show light from the illuminating LED through the front and from the rear seen from above and obviously the real holographic doesn't. Not a big deal for tag sports, but it's inherent to them.

The reticles on the clones can vary and the A65 is perhaps not really 65 (or 68, or whatever exactly it's supposed to be) MOA, one of mine that is older is similar to my real McCoy or a little smaller, and my newer one has a bigger ring.

The reticle of the real deal, being a hologram illuminated with a laser, has that distinctive laser sparkle to it. The reticle of a clone is flat LED light. The newer clones do the dimming with LFPWM and you can see the frequency (some hundred Hz).

Obviously if you have used a clone, the night vision mode on the clones isn't, the button still says NV for replica points but it toggles to a green illuminator instead. Actually, this green reticle can be useful for visibility in some circumstances.

The reticles of either are famously un-photographable with any accurate or clear representation (something wonk about camera optics interacting with the sight optics differently than an actual eye) but this is the best I can do on that task:

 

This A65 on this clone appears like the real thing here but looks slightly bigger in person:

 

Actually, but maybe not surprisingly given their primary market (?) the clones seem to have a more useful/larger elevation adjustment range for tag sports. The genuine is pretty well maxxed out to get it zeroed how I want it on my T19 but it does hit it.

In the end: Yeah, of course genuines are expensive overkill for tag sports, but also, I'm glad I have one. What a sweet piece of hardware.

On that note, if you use any sort of 1x optic on a blaster and you DON'T own a clonEOTech yet, get yourself one. Despite the dimmer view they are ...really pretty damn good in every respect.