CO2 in an X-valve??

[cyrus-the-virus]

ok I just got a few questions about the X-valve on CO2.

INTELIGENT ANSWERS ONLY!!!(poord spelling acceptable)

1: Why is it so bad to put CO2 on an X-valve? What happens to the valve? What inside the valve is going to get ruined on CO2?

2: Assuming I could prevent all liquid CO2 from getting into my valve (hypotheticly) Would the valve still get ruined?

3: Assuming I could prevent all liquid CO2 from getting into my valve (hypotheticly) What kinda of performance could I expect?

4: Is there anyone who has ever sucesffully ran (or currently run) CO2 on their X-mag?

5: Does anyone have a blowup diagram of an X-valve?

[the mag guy]

http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n135/themagguy/X-Valve_Exploded.jpg
hopefully you can make it bigger, for some reason it scales it down.

Heres the deal;
If AGD says "dont" you prolly shouldn't. Im assuming you don't have an x-valve because of the question you are asking.

I have an x-valve and in no way would I experiment with a $300 part.

I assume you know the differences between co2 and nitro. That alone should be reason enough to not put co2 in an X.

Lets just assume that you could run an X on CO2. Under rapid fire or even regular fire the valve would perform about as good as a classic, rendering the reason to upgrade useless.

CO2 is junk anyway man.

[Pneumagger]

there's nothing to stop you frm running co2 in an xvalve...it will just freeze up about 10 times faster than a classic and kill the orings. The reason it freezes up so quickly is the super fast recharge. Looking a step deeper here is what an xvalve does. This is a long winded and technical answer...I apologize in advance.

Take the classic valve for example. It has a very fast regulator on it, easily one of fastest. However the regulator is not the choke point in a classic mag. The two resricting factors are the on/off flow and the sear operation of the mag. The on/off in a mag has a lot of minor headlosses and flow restrictions and thus limits the speed at which about 400psi air enters the dump chamber. Also, the mag only recharges it's dump chamber when bolt (and thus sear) is in the locked position allowing the on off to open. This means that a Mag only gets a fraction of the time during the full cycle to recharge it's dump...when the bolt finally returns...unlike other poppet and spool markers where the dump is continually recharging. These two factors coupled together only give the classic valve about a 12bps rate of fire before shootdown. Replacing the on off with a better flowing on off will only get you to about 14bps before shootdown...once again limited by the short recharge time alotted during the cycle.

So Tom Kaye ( :hail: ) being the genious he is saw these two things and made 2 very small adjustments to the mag operation while keeping the sear operation giving the retro valve reverse compatibility with older mags ( :hail: )

1) He made a better flowing on/off and added stepped pin so the mag had reactivity. Running unregged air to the dump allows the stepped pin to have a light pull and a heavy return due to the pressure acting on different areas throughout the trigger pull length.

2) He allowed the regulator to "slam fill" the dump chamber with unregulated air to an aproximate psi limit, then the reg kicks in and tops off the dump chamber to the set psi limit. Using unregged air to fill the dump chamber allows the air to push by flow restrictions faster, meaning the short recharge time of when the bolt is only back is not much of an issue. This operation of the Xvalve/RTvalve/Retrovalve/Emagvalve/etc is the reason mags LOVE higher pressure...the higher the pressure, the faster it recharges. However, this is simultaneously the reason it cannot handle CO2 with a practical volume of shots. Slam filling a dump chamber with unregged co2 (even if it is pure gas) causes a super fast local decompression within the valve orrifaces. This decompression happens at faster and from higher pressures (750-800psi) than in a normal mag (350-400psi) causing liquid co2 to form plus freezing of orings. (this is because of Co2's relatively high melting temerature and phase daiagrams - you would need an absolutly unobtainably rediculuous amount of pressure to get air/N2 to condensate) This means antisyphoning, Ex-chambers, remotes, and even Stabilizers cannot effect what happens inside the valve to the rapidly decompressing Co2 unless you run less pressure to the valve like a classic valve (350psi) giving the Co2 less decompression to the dump chamber. Then you easily get shootdown again and the xvalve works like crud and you're shooting a $250 classic valve again.

Long story short...You can shoot co2 through an xvalve. It will work and will fire paintballs just as nicely. But If you fire more than 1-2 shots a second, the mag just gets too cold too fast and starts tearing up all the moving orings. I have seen a stock class xvalve mag that ran co2 just fine, but then it was only shooting in stock class very slowly. I used to shoot my older xvalve with Co2 (very very slowly) just to fool around with in the back yard when I had no air. But it would still ocasionally freeze up shooting like 1-2 bps.

[Dayspring]

That was quite possibly the BEST explaination I have EVER seen, and I've been here a long time!

[cyrus-the-virus]

That was quite possibly the BEST explaination I have EVER seen, and I've been here a long time!

QFT Thanks pneumagger