We came sooo close to breaking 70 last year. I personally came within 5 ft of 70 on my aging-but-still-going-strong 21K. Well, that was measured to the last drop; this year I may revise my measurements to include the middle of the largest puddle, which is more accurate in terms of effective soaking range. After all, a few drops at 65 would not be enough to score a kill, but a puddle at 60 would definately be.

I accidently broke the trigger valve on my 11K, which I have not had a chance to test. The thing has 80 balloons and more potential power than the 21K. That is my best shot at 70 ft this year, but what should I do about the trigger valve? Replace it with a ball valve? I have no spare 2100 trigger valves left.

If I do replace, I'll take pictures for an article on trigger valve replacement, which is not very well documented [is it documented at all?]

I am in the process of writing an tutorial on trigger valve replacement. Currently I only have one picture online of my replaced trigger valve on my Super Soaker CPS 2700: http://www.sscentral.org/images/dscn0373.jpg

You'll get the basic idea from that picture, though I should download the whole image set from the memory card. The repair, of course, will differ from water gun to water gun depending on how everything is set up. This was actually a very extensive repair and what you see is only the final product. Parts of the case on the internal side had to be removed. I also had to fashion a way to attach the PC to PVC, and I found the best way is to use a 3/4" male threaded to 1/2" female pipe reducer. That however only applies to CPS PCs that have male ends (i.e. the O-rings are attached to the PC). The smaller PCs will have to use a different method.

In my post at Super Soaker Central I noted that this is much more than a modification. This is far stronger than before and I now can add essentially as many balloons as I want without fear of a break. The flow path has been changed to linear. The PC is larger than that of the smaller CPS water guns, so technically I suppose I could add an excess of 100 balloons, though I doubt that would really be useful. This modification/repair should allow for extended distance, so I would definitely recommend it.

I have a few pictures from the 2100 replacement, which I never actually finished because of the tediousness of this repair. You should see all the sawing and butchering I had to do to the casing to get the new pipe to fit in properly.

The way the 2100 is setup, I had to wrap tape around the end of the vinyl tubing so that 1/2" pipe would fit there, then raised it to a 3/4" elbow to a tee for the pc, keeping the pc to ball valve part laminar. It seemed all nice and dandy until I took another look now and realized that I forgot to attach it to the pc itself. That is a problem, since the plastic connector won't fit in 3/4" pipe. Maybe I could ram the piping into the rubber neck of the pc and glue it?