Note: For Warp Feed and HALO technical comment, skip to technical section later.
My girlfriend plays in the Polar Bear 3-man circuit and had a tournament yesterday, so to avoid being automatically recruited into pod-filler position for her, I elected to enter a team in the advanced division. I invited a guy I regularly play with at Stalker, who is MUCH better than I am, plus a player from Iowa State to take in the other two spots. Not to be a "I rule and you don't" type person, but I think the team would have had a very good shot at at least making finals.
Would have. Except to-remain-unnamed player from Stalker vanished on Thursday and never mande the event, causing somewhat short-on-cash player who drove up from Iowa to choose going back fo rthe Iowa-Iowa State game (apparently something that big only happens once a year when you live in a state called "Iowa"). So I'm there, I'm committed to the entry fee, dang-it , I wanna shoot some people. Or at least not be pod-filler. Even though it's been raining all night, is still raining a bit, and it's obviously going to be a mudbath.
So at the captain's meeting, I ask for extra players, and a team kindly volunteers me two of their younger brothers who have never played a tournament before, one with some decent rec experience and the other with 4 games total under his belt. I'm just desperate for teammates at this point, so if they can pay for their paint, I'm happy. (Finally getting the $225 owed me by the player heading back to Iowa may also have had something to do with this decision.) I'm out to have fun, so I don't really care, besides, I figure with the right direction they'll at least make good decoys and by sheer ego alone I'll triumph over the other teams, right? Wrong.
Ok, so they grab/borrow/beg/steal equipment. One plays with an A-%, the other.. I don't remember. Entry level/mid-range gun, although on CO2.
First game: Max'd, as the other team failed to show up. Not a bad way to start the day.
Second game:
Warp feed promptly jams. I'm running it off of 10.6 volts, but it won't budge. Take off hopper, force balls through so it's spinning again, jams. Suffice it to say, I'm both not shooting and trying to get the bloody warp to work, not even being much help to my poor decoys. They get shot out, I rather quickly get bunkerred, not being able to shoot and all.
After game 2, I run a whole hopper through the warp, so I figure the paint has just been in the moisture too long.
Game three:
Wrong. Repeat game two.
Game four: Ok, screw the warp feed. I dig up an elbow and pop the oring off the warp feed on the E-Mag (the one that wraps around the joint between the WF tube and the gun body - taking it off gives you a precious 2-3 more mm to attach the elbow onto) and decide to play with the HALO on an elbow - despite the fact that the last time I did this, the elbow never quite managed to hold onto the shortenned PF tube and would always fly off whenever I did anything mildly stressful - like slide into a bunker. So game 3 starts, I get a few shots off, and then - HALO jams. Not the kinda jam where the feed cone in the HALO gets stuckon a ball, the kind of jam where balls arn't coming out, thus the HALO is not detecting movement, thus the HALO is not spinning. Why? Because of hte HALO's narrow feed neck, paint is getting stuck above the "eyes" and the spring tension on the feed cone isn't enough to push the balls through. I've had variations of this before, with the old HALO's breaking paint and the extra paint gunk around the ball being enough to get it stuck in the feed neck so the balls just wouldn't drop.
Again, spend time trying to make gun shoot, teammates get shot out, I get bunkerred. Teammates do manage to take one with them.
Game five:
Highlight of he day. We play the team I borrowed my two teammates from. They're pretty convinced that we're easy points, and they ahve no reason not to be.. I think my gun is working. Get to the starting box, 10 second countdown, I take two test shots. First one shoots, second, blank. HALO jammed again. My guys are like "You can't shoot? What are we going to do?" I reply "I'm going to talk you through it and look important." Game starts, they go to their starting bunkers, I look important. I slide in behind our right guy in his laydown sausage. I tell our left guy to move 2 seconds after I do, I get the guy sharing my bunker to shoot over my head and drop the other team, and move into a horseshoe just on our side of the 50 - a kill spot, if your gun will shoot. Our left guy, as instructed, hits a dorito just left of center on the 50 - which I don't think the other team sees right away. (One nice thing about newbs is they'll do exactly what you tell them.) So their team is kinda focussed on me now, I'm pulling off my halo and hand-feeding balls into the elbow, figuring I'll just pop up ove the horseshoe and drop 4 shots and hopefully get someone.
So I pop up over the horseshoe - and see two of the other team walking to the deadbox, plus some "smoke" rising from behing a mushroom/teacup bunker on their 30 on the other side of the field. I get up to go bunker that guy, only to have HIM get shot out just as I leave my bunker.
So my two decoys just hosed their older brothers' team without me firing a single shot. Needless to say, they are quite elated and the other team is half really happy that their brothers did so well and half really pissed that their brothers did so well. (I find out later that my guys wern't allowed to play because they "wern't good enough", that rule has since been changed, heh.)
Game 5.5:
The HALO on my girlfriend's gun goes down as she's chronoing - another ball jammed in the neck above the eyes, plus a ball chopped in the gun as a result of the misfeed that resulted from the lack of positive pressure from the jammed HALO (also a belt B). Having nothing better to do, I give her my emag/HALO combo. It's stopped raining by this point, although everything is still muddy as all hell, and the emag performs flawlessly in her hands and gets its first elimination (and string of shots over 5) for the day.
Game 6:
Gun works, I do not. My teammate is shooting over my bunker, I get up to make a move and stick my head right in his line of fire. Ow. The stupid ones always hurt more. I'm surprised to find we've picked up 20 points for an elimination on the scoresheet when I go to sign it - certainly wasn't my doing. (Pretty sure they didn't count my teammate's elimination of me on our score)
Game 7:
Gun still working, but oneo f my decoys gets it on the run and I lose it running up the right tape when I think the other team is behind their bunkers or looking the other way. I was right about 2 out of 3 of their players, but the last one hoses me good. The remaining teammate managed to doff an opponent before going down.
End of day result: Of the 6 elminations scored by my team during the day, all 6 were scored by my "decoys". 3 on the team I borrowed them from. Ouch for me, ouch for the older brothers.
The girlfriend does, however, manage to make it to semis, meaning I get to be pod***** on Sunday (today).
End of the day saturday, I'm dicking around at the chrono station, and notice that my E-Mag, in E/hybrid mode, will fire 1-5 "shots" per trigger pull. Kinda like the sear isn't catching. I say "shots" because it's really 1 shot followed by what would be 1-4 chops. I'm thinking it may be time to replace the main spring, but I havn't looked into it yet. Anyone seenthis before and knows why, LMK.
This morning, I'm cleaning HALO's. I drop the pin that holds the lid in between the car seat and the center arm rest, which might as well have been a bottomless pit for my ability to find it after that. Finish cleaning out the feed neck from the busted paint (this is the GF's HALO), put it back together, and the thing will not work. This is a converted HALO, and I had the same problem wiht it before the conversion, but the HALO is now dead - despite disassembly, checking all the connections, etc.
HALO two fares better, gets disassembled, cleaned, and functions fine for the three games of semifinals (she didn't make it to finals). Note: Same paint, same bags of paint, but not raining or humid at all. Only change from day 1 to day 2.
TECHNICAL COMMENT HERE
So, with this, I have a few observations:
1) Level 10. Don't need it when everything works, but DEFINITELY need it when everything does not. Every HALO and Warp Feed breakdown but one was accompanied by a ball chop. Yech.
2) The narrow feed neck on the HALO is a design FLAW, not a feature. Yes, the thing feeds like a mo-fo - except when a ball, because it's swollen, has broken paint on it, or a grit of sand, gets a LITTLE bigger than it's supposed to and jams up the whole thing. I'd rather have a slow-feeding hopper that works ALL the time than a quickly feeding one that doesn't. Better average doesn't work here - 20 bps sometimes plus 0 bps the rest of the time is much much worse than 13bps all the time.
3) The Warp Feed also suffers a design flaw - or at least is ripe for a design improvement. I've attached a diagram below, but the rough summary is that because the plastic disks are mounted so that they're parallel and slightly closer together than a paintball, when the disks squeeze the ball they bend outward farther than 90 degrees. This creates a force which pushes the ball to the OUTSIDE of the warp feed - get balls that are big enough, the balls get pushed into the housing, creating enough friction that the belt drive slips and the warp doesn't feed. The bigger the ball, the more the disks get spread apart, and the greater the force pushing the ball out. I'm thinking I may be able to solve this with a tighter belt, but I may also just mash my paint as well. There's certainly no need for the tighter belt if the balls arn't being pushed into the housing. To solve this, the plasic discs should really be sections of a shallow cone, mounted so that the distance between the disks measured from the inner edge is larger than the ball, and they "angle in" so the distance between them at the outer edge is smaller - see diagram. Note that you'd want to "bevel" (see diagram part 4) the outside edges of the disks so that the opening of the disks was still wider than a paintball - this lets the disks grab the ball, then as they pull the ball into the feed, the ball slides past the "corners" and then gets pushed towards the center of the feed wheel instead of out to the housing. Since the feed wheel spins with the disks, no friction problems.
I think that would solve a LOT of the feed reliability issues Warp users complain about.
End result: On wet days, I'm going richochet on my centerfeed cocker, assuming the woman isn't using it. Or maybe I'll just pick up a centerfeed emag body and switch, or sell the emag and invest in one of the SFL's or whatever it is that has the exchangable feed ports. That is, after I get the richochet fixed, as it appears the little sensor that detects when a ball has gone by is busted. Gah.
Well, that's my comments for today. Hopefully they won't start too many flame wars.
- Chris
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) The Urethane (not plastic) friction disks are spaced for most bore paint, funny how I never have trouble with mine. IF you need you make room for a big bore paint that doesnt fit, you simply add a friction disk spacer which can be done in less than 5mins. I also hope you lube'd the friction disks, and have fresh batteries in the warp. If over time you see that the friction disks are losing tension applied to the balls because of wear(warping outward), you simply take the disks and flip them, that's why thier straight. Again, not a design flaw, only lack of knowing your gear.
