JUST SAY NO!....to macroline that is!

[cgrieves]

I had a stainless braided hose fail (a good brand too). The black plastic wrap balooned up like a sausage which gave me enough time to put the marker down and leave the area before it blew :)

I've never seen a macro line fail, although all of our team use good quality, 3000 psi rated macro as far as I know. In fact I have a curly remote hose (Mamba), which must have 2-3 Meters of actual hose, used it for five years and it's never failed despite the obvious abuse that remote hoses get.

Also a couple of months ago we had a fill rig braided hose blow while attached to a bottle. It whipped around like a pi$$ed-off cobra, until John "Yoda" Sosta did a Steve Irwin on it and caught it bare handed

[Animal Mother]

That doesn't sound like a STEEL BRAID if it came with a plastic wrap on it. More like a grease hose or hydraulic hose.. I have had both of those types of hoses bubble and blow on me. Always right at the connectors...

I get steel braid and then shrink tube it. It seals nothing, it just prevents my gun from getting scratched, and it looks nice :)

Also if you had a steel braided hose on your fill rig.. that's like 3000psi.. are steel braids even rated for that? The guy at my scuba shop has a hose on his compressor thats as thick as a garden hose.. thats why i have never connected a hose to my fill station. Put a macro on that and it will blow halfway through opening the valve...

We're talking 800psi and 3000psi man.

[cgrieves]

Yup, was stainless braided hose. The paintball importer had covered it with shrink wrap to make it less shiny (attractive to woodsballers!)

And yes, the fill rig had a 4500 psi rated hose....

[SIGSays]

ss hose is $8 for any size..


paintball wizard

macro is like $10 for a 2 fittings and 3 lines... 2 of which are ugly...

[MarkM]

This isn't such an isolated instance, here is a thread that has changed just one or two peoples thinking

http://www.p8ntballer-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21269

and this is the thread that caused the one above to start

http://www.p8ntballer-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20954

I currently have macro not micro line on my Angel but the output from my regulator is set at 350 psi, i do have the braided line to swap over taken from my previous setup and will swap it as soon as I get the spare time to do it.

[funkmunky56]

Macroline is NOT a bad thing... in small doses, when used with Compressed Air/Nitrogen, and without serious bends being navigated by the hose in small distances.

32 Degrees Macroline is DANGEROUS, and should be outlawed, but unfortunately, they gave so many PB stores such a great deal on those kits with the pair of fittings and the 4 colors of hose, that most places won't throw em out. the 32 Degrees hose walls are UNEVEN, and there are obvious weak spots inherent in its low quality. have one of those weak spots on the outside of a bend, and it's GONNA pop.

Parker Parflex is available a lot of places, including some PB stores who actually CARE about the safety of its customers, and directly from Parker through it's Authorized Service Centers, convieniently located in most major metropolitan areas. Look in the phonebook for Parker, under "hoses and fittings", perhaps, or maybe "hydraulics" or "pneumatics"

Parker is a manufacturer of all kinds of high-quality industrial hoses, fittings, and gauges. I buy my macroline from the center for 60 cents a foot, over here in Metro Detroit (Farmington Hills to be exact) they have a customer counter, you just walk in, show them a piece of shoddy macroline, and say, "I want parker parflex in this size" maybe bring a fitting for them to size it to as well.

--Dave

[SIGSays]

well i made the switch over to ss hose.. lol cuz i was bored.. my macro line was working great for me... can anyone tell me where i can get the shrink tube wrapping? or like sell me 2 feet of it?

[Animal Mother]

Damn MarkM...

After filling his air system the macroline connection blew up in his face, sending him to hospital.

Yeah thats not good.... I will NOT trust that much PSI to a plastic straw.. no way.

Sig, I did a search on Google for "shrink tube" and found many places. I forgot where I got mine.. sorry. It was awhile ago. i just ordered two feet of 1 inch width black shrink tube. it cost more to ship it.. I shoulda got more, lol

[funkmunky56]

just read the posts a little farther. NO, Parker does not manufacture the line for 32 degrees. They get it from Exotic Automation. Parker's lines are ALL printed and coded, right on the hose, and they recycle any line that doesn't meet their standards by grinding it down and reextruding it.

Parker Parflex has a W.R. (working rating) of 500 psi constant, and a burst ratio of 4-1. what this means is that you can (theoretically) run it up to 2000 psi before it can burst. This is of course in lab conditions, using inert gasses. Temperature is definitely a factor in the durability of ANY material, which is why NOONE recommends using Macroline on a marker running CO2. In certain weather conditions, CO2 can spike up to 12-1500 psi, and that, combined with the stressing of the hose due to the cold generated by CO2s thermal expansion, can bust a hose out quickly. --Dave

[Animal Mother]

Ah ha!! I found it for you guys

I got like 3 PM's about where I got my shrink tube. I did a search in my old e-mail and found the e-mail recipt.

http://planetengineers.com/default.asp?cat=Heat+Shrink+Tubing

It was actually 1/2 inch.. "Heat-Shrink Tubing 1/2 inch Black - Continuous Length"

Here is another look at the shrink tube on my SS line. So safe even Gizmo approves, hehehe

[Mutilus]

Re: Oh yeah ...

Originally posted by Pete02019
Keep the thermoplastic tubing out of the sun. the added heat drops its ability to keep in the pressure.

As Tunaman stated in another (tech) post, '... put a towel on it'

This is the first post in this thread that made sense. Macroline is plastic, plastic expands and contracts easily in heat, if it expands or contracts too fast with pressure in the line (Especially when the line is bent because of the added pressure on the line) BOOM it pops, I have been airsmithing a long time and Macro Micro and yes even metal fiber wrap line have burst while I have been adjusting markers. It happens, but you should avoid heat on you marker anyway because of the seals inside you marker cooking and bursting. Of course I don't know the conditions under which this MAcroline burst but I bet it had to do with stretch from bending the line or over heating the line then applying too much pressure.

[WickeDKlowN]

I have had Macro/Micro blow a few times on me...

Now all I use is SS hose, unless I am running less that ~400psi. Then I'll consider macro...

[funkmunky56]

Mutilus: what do ya mean, "the only post that makes sense so far"? I should beat the mutha f'ng s**t outta... just kidding. but seriously, I thought I laid it out pretty well... (/me is overly sensitive)

--Dave

[MarkM]

Originally posted by Animal Mother
Damn MarkM...



Yeah thats not good.... I will NOT trust that much PSI to a plastic straw.. no way.

Sig, I did a search on Google for "shrink tube" and found many places. I forgot where I got mine.. sorry. It was awhile ago. i just ordered two feet of 1 inch width black shrink tube. it cost more to ship it.. I shoulda got more, lol

Well it was a little scary..as you may have noticed I posted a get well message as I thought it was just a so and so is ill type post...how wrong was I? If you read through it all after the hospital and being flown back from Toulouse it added quite a few days to his paintball holiday at the Millenium. I have never liked how difficult is was to use Macro line (the big stuff) and to add heat to it to make it bend...is well to say the least nuts...even don't feel that very hot water is such a good idea.

Not that it will help many of you americans but the shrink tube covering you can buy from electrical/electronic suppliers both retail and trade. I'm sure I have seen posts before saying that you can buy it in Radio Shack, it certainly was available when we had Radio Shack (Tandy) in my country, I got mine from Maplin Electronics quite recently the only problem I found with it was I really needed to totally dismantle the hose connectors as some of it was a little tight to slip over, I did buy the wrong size the first time as it wouldn't fit at all

[Animal Mother]

People actually heat it up to bend it? Oh thats just asking for it.. Yeah that sucks about the guy injured by his macro exploding, hope he recovered from it.

Yeah you can find shrink tube at places like Radio Shack and Home Dept. in the states. but they never have what I am looking for.. so i just ordered it online and donated the $5 to UPS, hehehe

the place above got it to me fast and it was just one big spool of shrink tube. Good stuff. i got 2 feet in case I screwed up but it came out perfect the first time