Piranha Eforce STS has big bite

Tacoma, WA
Story by Young Choi
Photos by Sue Schoettler & Burt Talcott

Left side

I saw one of these at World Cup last year and was really surprised with the sleek look and milling put into the marker. In fact, from far away, I initially thought it was an Angel LCD. My good buddy, John Rathbun, was there and showed me some of the features on the new Piranha Eforce STS.

Like every baller out there, I wanted to know how fast I could get the BPS (balls per second) up to. Remember in the Matrix when Neo was like “whoa”? Yeah, that’s how I felt too. The trigger pull may be a tad longer than I prefer but I got the Piranha rippin. It is insanely fast. I promised myself to look into the Piranha Eforce when they became available.

Mike Lucas from PMI was nice enough to send us a Piranha Eforce STS to test out. The body is very different from the “stacked tube” appearance that we are familiar with. It is a “sear tripper” design with a vertical feed. The feed neck is Omen/Impulse threaded so there are many aftermarket feed necks out there if you don’t like the stock one.

The back

The sight rail is easily removable and there is a volumizer to store much needed air for the valve to draw off of. Trust me, with the rate of fire on this beast, you will need the extra air stored in the volumizer to avoid drop off. The on/off button is located on the left side of the marker as well as the Sear Release and the charger port. On the other side is the three round burst and full auto buttons.

The buttons are simple push buttons, far away from any finger. They are located high on the frame and I find it impossible to get a finger anywhere near the buttons which should eliminate any “oops”.

Bolt/hammer assembly	Bolt/hammer apart

The Sear Release is located at the rear of the trigger frame and allows you to reinstall the hammer and bolt assembly without having to turn the Piranha in fire mode. It is a simple catch that pivots the sear out of the way of the hammer to allow the hammer to slide into the body of the gun. It’s a nice feature for us lazy ballers.

The charging port is located on the left side of the gun right behind the trigger. It has a rubber dust cover to ensure all debris will not enter the charging port.

The front grip is PMI’s newer gas-thru grip. With the tapered mill, I found it very comfortable to hold. Nice and ergonomic, not as flashy as some others but hey it’s a gas thru grip.

Inside the grip

The grip frame is larger than its older brother the Piranha EXT Pro. The frame is a little longer, but only by about a quarter of an inch. The trigger pull is extremely light and the Eforce fires at the beginning of the trigger pull. The rest of the pull is just extra and wasted movement.

Hopefully someone will come out with an aftermarket trigger for this gun so the trigger pull can be isolated to facilitate even higher BPS. The frame is made of a polymer plastic, and even though I’m not too keen about plastic trigger frames my assumption is that it keeps the price down on the marker.

The trigger itself is also plastic with a little hook at the bottom. The Piranha Eforce’s trigger is very similar in shape to the IR3’s, just not as drastic. It will be interesting to see how long the plastic will hold up to the demand of today’s machine gunning ballers.

The software package is awesome. Where other entry level electros have a BPS cap in semi, the Piranha Eforce has none of this nonsense. Simply put, this gun is a mowing, welting, eliminating, bonus-balling machine. No BPS cap in semi. The gun will fire as fast as you can vibrate the trigger, notice I didn’t say pull. Yeah that’s right; due to the fact the Piranha fires at the beginning of the pull you can just vibrate the gun to insane BPS levels. Like I said, it put shame to my Angel.

There is also a three round burst feature and a full auto feature. In full auto the software only allows a measly nine balls per second. Ghetto. Makes me wonder why PMI bothered with the burst and semi features in the first place. With the BPS in semi uncapped, who needs burst and full auto modes?

Circuit board

Whoever PMI has that is designing these things needs to give him, or her, a big FAT raise. Yeah I know I said earlier that I didn’t like the plastic frame, but I’m sure they did it to keep the cost down. But the circuit board is housed in the upper portion of the frame. Behind the grips are just the battery and the solenoid. The battery is rechargeable and the Piranha Eforce came with a charger. Thank god, it gets old to switch out batteries. Yeah I know it doesn’t take that long, but I’m lazy. The charger plugs right into your car so you can charge it on the way to the field. If you want to charge it at home, just make a run to your local Radio Shack and buy an adaptor.

The solenoid is huge. I have yet to see a sear tripper with a solenoid that is as robust as the one that comes in this gun. The solenoid is the gun’s engine. This is like having a massive V-12 engine in your gun. I will be highly surprised to hear if anyone ever has a problem with the magnetic solenoid that is in this Piranha. Another feature that I like about the solenoid is there is a little spring that helps reset the Piranha for another shot. Good move in this department.

Back right closeup

For testing my setup was a 16-ounce Co2 tank, Evil Paintballs, and an Evo 2 Loader. The accuracy was pretty decent. I was getting an eight-inch grouping with Evil paint at 40 yards (or 120 feet for some of you folks). I was impressed with that. It was 79 degrees the day I tried the marker out. At the chrono, the marker would not come up to playing speed. With the velocity adjuster all the way in, I could only manage to get 250-feet per second (FPS). Luckily, I had the spare spring that is a little stiffer. After switching out springs, I got a 334 FPS reading. I readjusted the velocity to the 280 FPS range. The variance was about 16 FPS as high as 289 FPS, to as low as 270 FPS. Not bad for a gun running on Co2.

I was one balling people all day. Okay, sometimes two balling, but I was having a lot of fun. The rate of fire is so fast that I was able to push someone back into their bunker with a hail of paint. Everyone at the field was amazed with what I was capable of with a so-called cheap electronic gun. There were a few times that I did have to squeegee throughout the day, so I don’t think the Evo 2 was keeping up.

All in all I had a great day shooting the Piranha Eforce STS. I feel it is a good sturdy gun and I think that PMI should sponsor a team to compete with these things at the national level - much like what Kingman does for Bad Company. I am almost motivated to play with one next season. Wonder if my teammates will let me..

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