We all have fun shooting streams of water at people, but there are more interesting things than streams. Fan blasts, multidirectional nozzles, even spinning nozzles. Even though they may seem like gimmicks, they do have their uses in certain situations. Fan blasts can be used for cover fire or in defence, spinning nozzles can be used to dish out water all over the place in a short space of time, and multidirectional nozzles can be used for um... shooting your teamate who's standing next to you while pretending to be aiming somewhere else (imagine the ads: Turn against your teamates with the multi directional soaker!).

I often find myself in a situation that calls for a fan blast, or other specialized nozzles, but I never have them on my blaster! So that means I have to make my own. So far, all I've seen are nozzles with a hole in the center. It's time we made some custom nozzles!

Fan blast nozzles are easy enough. A few small holes overlapping in a line would do. If you think about it, anything is possible! You could make several holes in random places drilled crookedly so that they shoot all over the place, and you have a shotgun nozzle! Heck, you could even make a nozzle that would shoot your team logo on a wall!

I'm going to go try making a fan blast nozzle in a little while, but there are an infinite number of ways to drill into an end cap. Any ideas you have for nozzles that may be useful will be appreciated!

Many homemades in the past have had specialized nozzles. Usually fan blasts have been the easiest, but I have seen homemades before fitted with irregular ones for a more crazy pattern dispersal. A spinning stream can be eachieved quite easily in theory, although it might be a little difficult in real life. Simply grind down the inside of an endcap to get it to be loose on the end, attach some ball bearing so it can spin around the outside, cut some grooves on the sinide clockwise, or counter clockwise, and fire away. The force of the water should push into the grooves, spinning the nozzle.

That would decrease range because of the spinning factor. You could do something similar to what the helix does, using the pump stroke to spin the nozzle.

Are there any pics of those nozzles you said?

Personally, I'm interested in trying to spray patterns (team logo idea). It would be interesting to walk out on the street and spray your logo/name every 10 feet. :D Unless your logo/name was too complicated...

Yeah, you would need a really short name. Perhaps initials, because there's only so much room on an endcap. Fan blasts actually are really useful, especially ones with some power behind them.

A really short name, or a really tiny drill bit/rotary blade (don't know what it's called). I might try "hi". ;)

Edit: If this works well, I'll add it to my nozzles article on my website.

I made a fan-blastesque nozzle once. What I've been messing around with is stuffing straws into the nozzles (my nozzles are male, So I can fit the straws in) to increase lamination. Lamination improves, and so does range, but I'm not sure about that stream speed. What good is a perfectly laminated stream, when everyone can dodge it?

When I've increased lamination, speed has gone way down. When I drilled out my 4100 fan blast, creating a ~20-30x nozzle, the resulting stream was beautifully laminated. Of course, it was also one of the slowest moving things I've seen... :ph43r:

I've tried putting a straw inside the 1/4" hole in the nozzle and it shot a whole 3 feet! It was perfectly laminated, though.

I also tried putting spit wads in a straw on an argon nozzle (it fits right in this little hole that the nozzle is in). It shot about 20 feet. :rolleyes:

Well, this is old news to me, but it didn't work out too well. It didn't make a fan; it was more of a stream.

Anyways, I made a water balloon filling nozzle.

I wrapped electrical tape around both ends of a short straw (enough so that one end fit in a 1/4" end cap nozzle with a good seal, and the other could hold the water baloon on well). It worked, but could use some improvement. Most of the problems had to do with the straw being too soft. I was using those skinny balloon animal balloons, but it should work the same way with a larger balloon except with more electrical tape. I was using a 3' piston homemade, so that made it difficult to get the water balloon on top because I couldn't hold it (because I needed two hands to get the neck of the balloon over the straw, and pushing down on it caused it to shoot), so I had to put it between my legs to secure the balloon on. This is one time where the straightforward design of the PPP was a disadvantage. I plan to get a barb/reducer when I buy more homemade parts to replace the straw.

I think that most nozzles can be used for WB filling (not animal type though) just strech it over the nozzle and pull the trigger. Then again with powerful guns it might just obliterate the balloon.

And also, when I stuck straws in the nozzles I was using a different type of nozzle that lets me put in maybe 15 straws into the rear to emulate the "cheese screen" of a stock gun. My nozzles have a 3/4 Non-threaded endcap epoxied onto the non-threaded side of a 3/4 inch brass adaper. I just stick the straws into the inside of the threaded side.

EDIT: spelling

Ya, most guns can do that, but not most homemades. You could buy a conical nozzle, but this is much cheaper.

Speaking of homemade nozzles, has anyone found something we can use that is cheap and easy to find in a common hardware store? I would love to start using better-than-endcap nozzles on my homemades and modded guns, but the item[s] has/have got to be very inexpensive and widely available.

I've seen "sweeper" nozzles in several hardware stores by the hoses. These nozzles are fairly cheap from what I remember (less than two dollars). When I get the chance, I'll take a trip and buy a few to test out. ;)

I don't see any major problem with conical nozzles. After paying lots of money to get the material to build a homemade, we might as well just use professional nozzles to get the best performance.

Sweeper nozzles sound really interesting--I'm surprised that they even make them. Are there any conical nozzles with nozzle selectors? THAT would be cool, and even if those weren't available, it might be possible to build a nozzle selector--of course, there would need to be a method to seal the nozzle.