How fragile paint with L7 vs. L10 bolts?

[Menace_AO]

All,

As title indicates, just curious what the real difference is in terms of fragile paint handling between the two, both on paper and in the real world.

Not talking about preventing chops and all of that. I also get that the L10 has a better overall profile, has slower acceleration, and all the rest.

Have just been thinking that the L10 handles fragile paint about as well as any high end modern marker I've ever shot, and wondered how, in objective terms, the L7 might be expect to stack up, removing the factors of chopping, clipping, high loader tension, bad paint, etc.

Hill did all that testing with the sleeper e-mag with L7 bolt and firing at a pretty good rate through a Rotor with no issues, but it wasn't clear what kind of paint he was using. If it was something like Graffiti, then not terribly impressive. But something like Evil or Ultra or GI 5-star, that would be impressive.

Anyway, just wanted to throw a wide net and see what all of your experiences have been with the L7 and really high-end, fragile paint.

Maybe some of the pump guys could also weigh in here.

Thanks very kindly to one and all.

[Spider-TW]

The only data point I've noticed is with some fragile cold weather paint that I've been using to test my spring-feed L7 (foamie). I has not yet broken a ball at the bolt. I've broken a few in two different barrels, about halfway down or at the two-piece transition. I also smacked one in the spring feed with the follower, but none broke at the bolt.

I think part of it goes back to TKs data about the mag being as soft or softer than most markers at the time. The other end is that the trip down the barrel is a bit of a limit on paint abuse.

Feed issues aside, I can't see the L10 being much softer than a foamie L7. Even the non-foamie bolts have a cup that spreads the stress across the paint shell, so I expect the gas forces to be worse than the bolt. A right-bored barrel seems worse than both of those.

[GoatBoy]

Preface: I haven't used an L7 bolt in a bajillion years.

I'm pretty sure I got a really bad batch of Redemption my last outing -- I dropped one from about 3 feet onto dirt and it broke (split at the seam).

Broke in my q-loader pod, broke in my q-loader hose, broke when I was testing my Zetamag speedloader.

When cycled with my tuned L10 bolt, I didn't have any problems.

The radius on the L10 bolt I think makes a difference when it comes to "next ball wounding" issues over the L7.

Other things being equal, I think it's a matter of that initial acceleration from rest. The L10 bolt I think has softer acceleration from rest thanks to the spring and venting, but the L7 bolt has slightly lower operating pressure and a slightly heavier bolt which might help with that.

So I think the L7 should still fare reasonably well with brittle paint -- certainly better than a single high-pressure blast from, say, a Nelson based gun.

There are a lot of other culprits for paint breaks -- one of those being the detents. And I'm not talking about doublefeeds either. There are some detent styles that I think are much harder on paint than others. Like, "I'm supposed to push this fragile round thing over this other spring-loaded round thing which makes contact with and puts all its force on a single point? This can't be good."

Other example I've seen is the Tiberius, which is kind of like an L7, but has a lighter (I think) bolt, light spring, poorly shaped bolt tip, brutally stiff detents, and has consequently murdered more paint than my Automags.

[BigEvil]

Dan,

When we went to Living Legends 7 and the paint was bad I sold and installed every LVL10 kit I brought with me (and I even pulled one out of one of my guns for someone). Everyone said that there was a giant improvement.

The lvl10 bolt is a 2-speed system. Starts slow, then speeds up. At least that's what we are told. So in addition to the foamy, the chamfer on the bolt tip - the bolt itself actually moves slower when it hits the ball.

[Menace_AO]

Thank you, all! Very good.

Spider, when you say 'L7 foamie' bolt, you aren't referring to the old L6 shorty bolts, correct? I have heard of longnose foamie bolts, and may even have seen pics, but now (after a quick check) for the life of me cannot call any up. Seems all the old posts with pics have inactive links. Those must be a bit of a rarity, as I've never seen one in person, and more than a few of all different sorts have crossed my path in the last few years.

Goatboy, good to know, and certainly can vouch for the detent issues you've mentioned, as well as bad batches of Redemption. That stuff is amazing when fresh, amazing in a different way when just out of season. I've had it rupture in my pods for no apparent reason other than that they were struck by brief jolts of sunlight.

BE, we agree both on the bad LL7 paint and the effectiveness of the L10 bolt in dealing with it.

As I used only the L10 then with no comparison, that may well answer the question. But at the same time, I want to eliminate the bad paint issue and assume good paint that, while very brittle, is brittle in a deliberate, uniform, and predictable way, vice bad paint, which is brittle in a very non-predictable way.


I also have always understood the L10 and L7 to be different in terms of initial force owing to the different cross sections of the power tube stems, resulting in lower initial forward bolt speed/force in the L10 (indeed, part of what requires higher pressures just to get the cycle started) Moreover, judging by the animations, it seems also that the L10 offers a softer pressure pulse on the ball as well owing (a) to the more initially restricted airflow in the L10 and also (b) the hogged out bolt which allows additional expansion and thus some drop in pressure seen by the ball.

Certainly the lower speed of the L10 is what allows the bounce on paint, since if the bolt is moving too quickly and with too much force it will still clip a partially fed ball, vent or no vent, true?

I've never been able to get clarity on the impact (no pun intended) of the pressure pulse on the ball in terms of real violence. Would love to see some ultra high speed footage of the air pulse hitting the ball, to see how it truly affects it.


In any case, thank you all very kindly as always, and by all means, bring more, everyone!

[vintage]

if i understand what your looking for wouldn't the best thing to do would be get some speed ball paint and single load them for a test? this would eliminate all the other factors except the bolt and detent.

[Menace_AO]

This would work, but would be prohibitively costly, as I'd want to test all the major stuff out currently and even if doing small samples would need a few balls of each, but cannot buy just a few of each from the local dealers/fields.

Direct experience from a wide range of players using a wide range of paint over a wide range of geography over a decent period of time is potentially a better source of data than one guy doing random small batch samples.

Have a half-baked idea and this is just to get a sense of whether it's worth pursuing.

[GoatBoy]

The key is designing the test correctly for widespread validation. We've seen testing in paintball, but we've almost never seen properly designed tests that encouraged independent validation of results. This has been my major complaint of nearly all the efforts so far.

This means:

1. low barrier to entry to testing -- if your method requires some stupidly expensive gauge or obscure measuring equipment or literally firing off an entire case of paint, it's useless.
2. Specific enough so people can't screw it up, or at least so you can justify discarding some idiot's data (other than just general principle).
3. Still able to produce meaningful results after satisfying 1 and 2.

If you want to do this "cheaply", take a handful of your brittle paint and reuse it.

You have to construct "backstop" to catch the paint as gently as possible on the other end.

Fire a round, collect it, put it it back into the gun, and fire again. Repeat it until it breaks. Count how many times you can cycle the paint before it breaks.

To cut down variables, I would chrono a just-fit barrel, then without otherwise changing setups, change to a very short overbore barrel (or none at all) and since you're manually loading each one, remove the detents. Removing the barrel should also drastically lower the velocity, making it easier to gently catch the paint.

Like literally I could print a twistlock stump that would serve this purpose exactly. Or just use a ULE body and remove the barrel and detents.

This pretty much removes all other effects and can be done "cheaply".

[knownothingmags]

The key is designing the test correctly for widespread validation. We've seen testing in paintball, but we've almost never seen properly designed tests that encouraged independent validation of results. This has been my major complaint of nearly all the efforts so far.

This means:

1. low barrier to entry to testing -- if your method requires some stupidly expensive gauge or obscure measuring equipment or literally firing off an entire case of paint, it's useless.
2. Specific enough so people can't screw it up, or at least so you can justify discarding some idiot's data (other than just general principle).
3. Still able to produce meaningful results after satisfying 1 and 2.

If you want to do this "cheaply", take a handful of your brittle paint and reuse it.

You have to construct "backstop" to catch the paint as gently as possible on the other end.

Fire a round, collect it, put it it back into the gun, and fire again. Repeat it until it breaks. Count how many times you can cycle the paint before it breaks.

To cut down variables, I would chrono a just-fit barrel, then without otherwise changing setups, change to a very short overbore barrel (or none at all) and since you're manually loading each one, remove the detents. Removing the barrel should also drastically lower the velocity, making it easier to gently catch the paint.

Like literally I could print a twistlock stump that would serve this purpose exactly. Or just use a ULE body and remove the barrel and detents.

This pretty much removes all other effects and can be done "cheaply".

you printing bolts now.
I did a lvl 10 bolt print once got 100 shots then I shot it out the end of the barrel. it was AWSOME!!!!!

[GoatBoy]

you printing bolts now.
I did a lvl 10 bolt print once got 100 shots then I shot it out the end of the barrel. it was AWSOME!!!!!

The core automag valve area is where I stop... I think it's pretty much fine as is. It's everything around it that I'd print...

The closest I've come is printing a new foamie/tip for these bolts...

[cockerpunk]

The key is designing the test correctly for widespread validation. We've seen testing in paintball, but we've almost never seen properly designed tests that encouraged independent validation of results. This has been my major complaint of nearly all the efforts so far.

This means:

1. low barrier to entry to testing -- if your method requires some stupidly expensive gauge or obscure measuring equipment or literally firing off an entire case of paint, it's useless.
2. Specific enough so people can't screw it up, or at least so you can justify discarding some idiot's data (other than just general principle).
3. Still able to produce meaningful results after satisfying 1 and 2.

If you want to do this "cheaply", take a handful of your brittle paint and reuse it.

You have to construct "backstop" to catch the paint as gently as possible on the other end.

Fire a round, collect it, put it it back into the gun, and fire again. Repeat it until it breaks. Count how many times you can cycle the paint before it breaks.

To cut down variables, I would chrono a just-fit barrel, then without otherwise changing setups, change to a very short overbore barrel (or none at all) and since you're manually loading each one, remove the detents. Removing the barrel should also drastically lower the velocity, making it easier to gently catch the paint.

Like literally I could print a twistlock stump that would serve this purpose exactly. Or just use a ULE body and remove the barrel and detents.

This pretty much removes all other effects and can be done "cheaply".

how easily and genitally you catch the the ball will have a bigger effect here, so if you want to do this test in multiple locations by different people (with different backstops) its not going to be good data.

really, when testing how gentle a gun/loader is on paint there are really only two solid methods:

1. have a bunch of the same paint, like a lot. like 10 cases of it. and shoot it, and count the breaks.
2. make the paint extremely fragile by making it cold, and see what temp/combination of things, actually allows you to shoot more brittle paint.

the first method is extremely expensive unless you have an in with a paintball company. it does have the upside of having real world accurate reportable data. ie you can say "this gun/loader combination breaks this many of this grade of paint, in this many shots" which is useful for several reasons.

the second has less real world reportability, but is also much cheaper/easier to do. it lends itself better to iterative engineering cycles.

[nak81783]

how easily and genitally you catch the the ball will have a bigger effect here

I know you and I have, for the most part, agreed to use accuracy and precision synonymously, but it's in your best interest to continue to differentiate between "gently" and "genitally", especially when it comes to catching paintballs.

Sorry, I had to. As promised, I've kept my mouth shut in the current "fast car" thread, so I had to tease a little here.

[cockerpunk]

I know you and I have, for the most part, agreed to use accuracy and precision synonymously, but it's in your best interest to continue to differentiate between "gently" and "genitally", especially when it comes to catching paintballs.

Sorry, I had to. As promised, I've kept my mouth shut in the current "fast car" thread, so I had to tease a little here.

lol, you are right, it didnt have a nice little red squiggly line under it though!

haha

[GoatBoy]

how easily and genitally you catch the the ball will have a bigger effect here, so if you want to do this test in multiple locations by different people (with different backstops) its not going to be good data.

really, when testing how gentle a gun/loader is on paint there are really only two solid methods:

1. have a bunch of the same paint, like a lot. like 10 cases of it. and shoot it, and count the breaks.
2. make the paint extremely fragile by making it cold, and see what temp/combination of things, actually allows you to shoot more brittle paint.

the first method is extremely expensive unless you have an in with a paintball company. it does have the upside of having real world accurate reportable data. ie you can say "this gun/loader combination breaks this many of this grade of paint, in this many shots" which is useful for several reasons.

the second has less real world reportability, but is also much cheaper/easier to do. it lends itself better to iterative engineering cycles.

[cockerpunk]

I agree that the things you propose will probably converge much faster if you can get over the massive band gap. But this is very monolithic/centralized both in effort as well as control of data.

Mine is more of a distributed suggestion. We have a sea of monkeys available to us. Most of them rank Petarded on any intelligence metric you might to apply to them, aren’t particularly skilled, don’t possess a lot of means, and probably spend a lot of time on MCB. But there are a lot of them scattered about, so if we can distract them from spanking themselves long enough to follow some simple instructions, it might produce something useful. The monkeys need guidance.



If a test requires someone to have 10 cases of paint -- ANY paint, much less all of the same type, it is a dead test from the start. It is a total, absolute non-starter and nobody will ever reproduce that test. So you will get a max of one person to ever do the test, his word becomes canon, and the rest just copypasta. And everyone is completely hosed if that one person happens to be a manufacturer. That is the *last* group that you want to allow to control the data, yet by the construction of the test, they’d be the only ones willing to perform it.

This unfortunately has sort of been how the base of paintball knowledge has evolved.

Aaaaanyways, moving on.

The key point will be to catch the paint as gently as possible (genitalia optional). Again, that without the barrel, the velocity will be greatly, greatly reduced. Set up some cloth so it catches the paint just as it's about to start descending from the arc, like a landing ramp. It's basically like landing a huge jump in other sports. I think it's doable -- it’s just a matter of making it easy enough for a retarded monkey to perform.

Your #2 (huh huh) is going to happen incidentally by some of the monkeys just repeating the test in cold climates, so I don't think it's necessary to actually build it into the procedure. What's necessary is for monkeys to actually to just do the test and *record* their conditions. Otherwise you have to add temperature control as a barrier to entry to the testing, which again is not helpful.

The point is to just have people collect the data, correctly, with whatever they have, and then aggregate the data. Over enough data, trends will emerge.

It's more important for people to just record their conditions and setup, most of which are taken care of with just... a video. Record the test. For example, even if they don't record ambient conditions, if they state date/time and location, we can at least hit the ol' weather almanac and get an approximation of conditions. We can also see if they constructed the "catch" correctly.

If they screwed anything up, unceremoniously eject their data and move on to the next monkey.

This will be the path out of the fog. It’s either this, or not at all.

two things:

1. you don't get folks around the world to help you by calling them all dumb as monkeys. i've never said such things, and people still hated the notion of actually going out and testing things when they thought my tests were bunk. i always have encouraged them to do so, and really, the entire point of punkworks being a forum, was to get other folks to test other things, or re-test our stuff, and really to have a real scientific community in paintball. but no one wanted that, if a test didn't reinforce there preconceived notion, they just *****ed and moaned and called me (us) names.

hell, they still do it.

2. that exact test was actually done. its actually a great test method, it is however extremely time consuming and expensive. i understand why it was hard, cause i freakin did it, but to actually test what we wanted to test, it was the only way.