This isn’t yet a review, due to me wanting more time firing darts out of the flywheel cage. But after purchasing the Banned Blasters Banshee Cage and installing it in a Dart Zone Pro MkIII, it’s starting to grow on me.
Maxing Out a Single Stage
Banshee cages appear to take inspiration from the Eclipse branch of wheel design, compressing around the entire dart and using ~42000rpm motors. However, we have other developments now; mainly, short darts with small but compressible heads exist on store shelves. After installation, brand new Dart Zone Max darts were easily hitting in the 190s on a 3s lipo battery. With some foam buildup on the wheels for better grip, 200+fps shots should be consistent. And with the massive vent holes and cages built around them, the motors should last for a while. Should, anyway. We have a few more wars and events to run before confidently saying that.
Footage coming soon(tm)
For general high-fps games, that’s perfect. For the local CANE wars and the Foam Pro Tour…that’s a bit of an issue, due to the 200fps cap. In the case of CANE, that’s for all blasters. For FPT, that’s for flywheels. My solution (for now) is running of a 3s LiFePO4 battery. With the lower operating voltage (and thus slower motor operation), that seems to work – I averaged around 190fps in recent chronograph testing, after using the blaster for an entire match. If necessary, I can use Dart Zone Pro darts to cut FPS a little more by the time the FPT Qualifier rolls around.
Testing continues, but so far, Banshee cages are promising! $90 is a steep price, of course. But it may be worth having one blaster with a cage. Time will tell!