Another WAS thread down in Flames :(

[cledford]

That's the problem - the guy isn't dumb enough to say something that isn't at least half-plausible. The problem is that his explanations (reasonably sounding or not) usually come AFTER being questioned on a claim or statement that just altogether doesn't sound right. Then comes an explanation that "seems" to make sense (on the casual surface) and a lot of people are then satisfied. Upon closer scrutiny (read "real-world" testing with an actual marker, not just a board, powers supply and scope) the explanations don't seem to hold up. When questioned about his testing protocol and data discovered is where things really fall apart - it becomes evident that no formal testing was ever conducted.

I'll agree that the explanation sounds reasonable for both issues, but at least in the case of the shootdown has been proven to not exist.

With regard to the Turbo-rev I'm more out of my element - but it appears that he claims to be taking the lowest common denominators (with regard to components) and making them do things that are at least on the very upper boundary of what's possible and maybe completely out of the realm of what could be done with those particular parts. He then claims "genius" when questioned on how exactly he did what he claims - but can't provide any proof since that is "proprietary secret."

-Calvin

[hitech]

While I'm not buying most of what he has said, the explaination on the original intimidator problem almost sounded like someone else talking. It does sound like a problem that needed fixing, even if it did NOT lead to shootdown.

[Butterfingers]

Can I intrest you into a tornado air swirler thingie for your car. The vortex of air that comes in makes it like a supercharger! I swear! Thing cumbersomely fits in the intake pipe and obstructs air flow to your engine... but by dumb luck it will boost horsepower by at least 30!

How about mikes miracle oil. You can run your engine on a stand with NO LOAD for hours with no oil just like any other untreated engine...

Just giving more examples... Just cause somthing sounds plausable it dosent hold up in the real world. Oldest marketing trick in the book.

[hitech]

Originally posted by Butterfingers
Just cause something sounds plausible it doesn't hold up in the real world. Oldest marketing trick in the book.

Don't get me wrong, I am not defending WAS. However, based on my knowledge of electronics his explanation of the problem made perfect sense. If it were my marker, I would want something like that corrected, regardless of whether it caused any outward symptoms (like shoot down) or not. It was also the first time he has posted an explanation (that I have read) that made sense. Almost sounded like someone else.

[Miscue]

The problem with much of what he says is that it is not absolutely incorrect. When many of us read what he says, we see that there is something obviously peculiar about it.

Lots of things are going on with what he says. At times he takes things to a level of unnecessary complication... and the English language is not exact and has built in ambiguity... what you say is not finite in meaning (This is kinda why law speak is the way it is to make things as clear cut as possible).

Hypothetically... let's say he claimed this:

The Turbo Rev operates upon the Doppler Effect principle: the receiver senses wavelength changes - blue and red shifts - created by a stream of paintballs passing through the light emission at various intervals, and the TurboRev's AI uses this information to actuate the paddles to reach optimal feed rates.

Sounds high-tech/impressive, huh?

Translation:

This plastic hopper has an infrared sensor that turns on and off when a ball breaks the beam. Then the motors spins for a bit. A blue shift = wavelength becomes so short... well, there is no wavelength! Red shift = Hey, it increased from zero wavelength to some X amount! Looky here! We're measuring the Doppler Effect... Um... yeah!

One could say... you're not really measuring wavelength changes and Doppler Effect stuff... there's no way it could do that.

And he could say, yes it does. The AI handles this. It does monitor wavelength changes. Ask him what kind of wavelength changes it measures... what the particular frequencies mean... Well, that's all confidential because those values could be used by others to make a competing product.

The bottom line is... your idea of how you measure such things is in disagreement with his. Who is right? How can anyone tell? People don't know the difference.

Well, I guess if you were to reach really far, you could think of things this way. Is he wrong? Well, I guess not. But is there something odd in all this? You bet. (I'd say that some of what he says is more than a stretch though... outright wrong)

If you had a room of Joe Schmoes off the street... it all sounds good. Get a group of science/engineering types... and they'll "laugh their cotton socks off." He knows this... doesn't care... because he also knows that there are a lot more Joe Schmoes out there with cash in pocket. But hey, that's fair enough... the goal of business is to make money... capitalism is all about capitalizing.

If you were to sell sugar water, how would you do it? Maybe advertise it with pretty women, have basketball players using it, make people think portions go to charity... etc. Tell people that Red Bull gives you Wings! Really!

With this in mind... I equate WAS's tech info with this kind of marketing. He doesn't use technical stuff for the sake of technicality, but rather uses it as showiness for the sake of sales. And I'm pretty sure that he's well aware of what he's doing... very deliberate. He really doesn't care about precise claims... close enough is good enough... he knows that the kiddies out there don't know the difference and will readily hand him their lunch money... and that is the bottom line.

/me wonders how he can figure out a way to put people's lunch money into his own pocket... hey, I got material needs too ya know. :)

[cledford]

It was the same explanation he gave several months ago - and at the time it was "validated" as reasonable by another electronics guru on the Timmy forum.

I'm not saying that it doesn't make sense. It is just that at least 2 months before the Equalizer board came out I had tested my Timmy over a computer chrono and kept the results. I was interested in whether the Palmer reg I was using would keep up at high ROFs (like the 14bps full-auto setting on the Timmy).

There was and average of 2.5fps shoot-down in the 30 shot strings which most people seemed to feel was the pneumatics. It definitely WAS NOT the 20-30 that WAS first claimed, or even the 8-10 that he later backtracked to.

The shootdown thing started (by members of the Timmy forum, not us) when WAS originally claimed to have written more "advanced AI" into the Equalizer code to solve the "massive shootdown" via an intelligent, self adjusting dwell. A lot of people questioned whether there was actually any shootdown to begin with and if so how Jim could work out something as complex as a self adjusting dwell. At the height of the argument WAS posted publicly that he'd found the *true* reason for the shootdown - which after testing on a scope was the electronic issue he describes. He then immediately dropped the AI in the Equalizer code (stating it wasn't needed anymore - which conveniently stopped that debate dead in it's tracks.)

I got involved in all this when Jack-and-Coke posted a thread here the day there new board was released. I took a look at the thread as I'm a Timmy owner and was interested in what the excitement was about. One of the first claims (still up on the WAS website today) regarding the board features was that the new board correct the "shootdown problem" with the Timmy. I knew immediately that there wasn't one and posted a simple question about what shootdown and included my shot string data.

From that point WAS has meandered everywhere on the map regarding the issue. He has claimed at one point that Tom discovered the "shootdown" on the gun dyno (not true), and on other occasions Bob Long found it and came to him (Jim) to help him to fix the "flaw." He never seems to remember that he also was using the explanation that he discovered it himself during the "AI dwell" thread.

The simple 2 facts are:

Regardless of whether it is a good idea - it hasn't been proven to "fix" any shootdown - as there's no proof of any shootdown existing. In fact, Jim Shuler (at the IAO) told me in person that he didn't feel that there was a shootdown issue at all. Jim knows as much about Timmy's as BL and is probably WAS's biggest distributor. He build his own custom line of Timmy's and has pioneered many Timmy performance upgrades - he knows his guns.

The second fact is that he (WAS) has never, ever been able to document his shootdown or testing protocol. He talks until he's blue in the face about testing the electronic components individually - but will not provide information from actual gun tests. I'm certain he never conducted any and l that this is a huge oversight on his part.

-Calvin

[Miscue]

So you stick it up your tailpipe and it blows air in huh? :)

Originally posted by Butterfingers
Can I intrest you into a tornado air swirler thingie for your car. The vortex of air that comes in makes it like a supercharger! I swear! Thing cumbersomely fits in the intake pipe and obstructs air flow to your engine... but by dumb luck it will boost horsepower by at least 30!

[hitech]

Originally posted by Miscue
So you stick it up your tailpipe and it blows air in huh? :)

No, no, no. Someone else has to cram it down your throat to work correctly.

[WickedAirSportz]

The simple 2 facts are:

Regardless of whether it is a good idea - it hasn't been proven to "fix" any shootdown - as there's no proof of any shootdown existing.

Not true. I have proven, without any doubt what-so-ever that the dwell time shifts due to the improper electronics. When the dwell time shifts, the velocity is affected. It's very simple. Now, if you do not have your dwell set correctly to begin with, you may NEVER notice this problem. Having a dwell of 12ms when all that is necessary to keep the valve open long enough to fire correctly is 6ms, is probably not going to show much of a change. BUT, if you setup your marker correctly, so that your dwell is as low as possible, yet achieving consistant velocity, you will most definitely see a huge degree of shootdown with the stock electronics, and there are no exceptions to this.

In order to achieve the high rates of fire, you need to reduce the cycle time of the marker. The only way to do this is by decreasing your dwell time to be the lowest possible without affecting the consistancy. I run my personal marker at 4.7ms of dwell time, because it works fine at this, and I can achieve the 32 cps cycling rate that is shown in the video (and shoot 300fps with paint still). Setting the dwell to 6ms (same marker) yields a max cycle rate of about 24 cps. 8ms yields about 18 cps. Dwell time dramatically affects the rate of fire, and many people do not realize this fact.

In fact, Jim Shuler (at the IAO) told me in person that he didn't feel that there was a shootdown issue at all. Jim knows as much about Timmy's as BL and is probably WAS's biggest distributor. He build his own custom line of Timmy's and has pioneered many Timmy performance upgrades - he knows his guns.

I agree that Jim does know quite a bit about the Intimidator, and we have also chatted about the shootdown problem and that is not what I have heard from him directly. Jim is not the largest distributor of our boards either. :)

The second fact is that he (WAS) has never, ever been able to document his shootdown or testing protocol. He talks until he's blue in the face about testing the electronic components individually - but will not provide information from actual gun tests. I'm certain he never conducted any and l that this is a huge oversight on his part.

I have never done computer chrono testing, its wasn't necessary to even do this myself to see and record the problem on a DSO/LA setup. I was told that I needed to look into the shoot down problem when I was first developing the Equalizer. I was told that chrono results were done and that at 8bps and higher, there was a shootdown problem. At 14bps it was as much as 30fps. This information was not derrived by me. I was told that the information was provided to Bob by Tom K. After looking at the marker firing on a test fixture, using a DSO/LA setup, the problem was blantantly obvious, so what I was told did not surprise me at all.

As far as making money on the Wicked Air Sportz products, that's nice and all, but this is one of my hobbies. My day job is as a CEO of a successful software/hardware development corporation... that is how I make a living.

[JEDI]

If I owned an Intimidator I would want the WAS board in it. And the new WAS eye too. I've shot a classic with the WAS board in it, and it was noticeably faster than a lot of markers I've shot. This was due to the complete set up of the gun, but the board played a very big part.

[Butterfingers]

WAS we DO realize these really obvious facts that you are stating but the fact of the matter is that you have not been able to prove that the stock board has any significant decrease in velocity OVER THE CHRONO. Where it counts.

You can go on with lengthy discussions on how one system works over another but at the end PACT data vs. PACT data WHERE IT COUNTS you arguement holds no grounds.

Very simple fact of the matter is show us PACT data like cledford did showing your proposed trend along with a carefully detailed procedure of operations which we can repeat and you will gain credability.

This is called the scientific method. It is very effective in seperating truth from fiction.

To tell you the truth I am sick of argueing either do it the right way or don't do it at all.

[WickedAirSportz]

Spouting off a bunch of numbers is not scientific. I think someone else should set their marker up correctly and run the tests. As stated numerous times, nobody is going to believe anything that I post... especially when the outcome would be exactly what I have always stated.

[freek133]

Your using that statement as a crutch jim, there are people who would believe your statements if you show the tests that you have performed.

[Butterfingers]

I for one would belive your results if it followed an acceptable scientific test protocol.

An experiment can only be considered relevant if:

1) It is readily repeatable.

2) Relevant data showing the ACTUAL VARIABLE (ie velocity in fps) is presented.


In order to do this:

1) A specific procedure must be stated so that the experiment is repeatable.

2) ORIGINAL RAW Data documented and IN WRITING must be presented as a basis of comparison with subsequent independent tests.

IMHO Cledfords results are more valid than yours becuse it provides a basis for repeatable testing. AND it shows the actual variable.

As a sidenote: This is very important this is how the theory of cold fusion had been disproved. The original scientists spouted all the theory they wanted but at the end the scientific method prevailed. When it came time to repeat thier "theory" they fell short.

[WickedAirSportz]

IMHO Cledfords results are more valid than yours becuse it provides a basis for repeatable testing. AND it shows the actual variable.

And who setup Cledford's marker? I am guessing that the dwell is simply too high, but there was a pattern of shoot down even with his numbers, as I pointed out already.