How fast can a loader feed a gun before it starts breaking paint?

[athomas]

Everyone is continually attempting to make markers fire faster than anyone can normally pull the trigger. The result of this race is an attempt by the loader makers to provide a feed system that can keep up.

How fast can a loader truely feed a gun without breaking the balls in the breach?

Think about it. A gun firing 30bps. That is a shot every 33ms. A ball typically stays in the barrel at least 5 - 6ms. That leaves about 27ms for the bolt to open drop a ball into the breach and then close again to fire the next shot. Even if the bolt speed is fast enough to open and close in just 17ms, that leaves just 10ms to drop a ball from a dead stop. Thats only 6fps average (12fps on impact in the barrel) but at what speed does a gun start breaking the balls coming into the breach.

The bolt speed I used was just a guess. What are the true bolt cycle speeds of some of the guns (time to open, and time to close)?

[paintballbeaver]

From tests i've done w/ loaders and gun set on full auto and hyper modes i found that your best bet at around 15-22 balls a second the warp w/ a revy works extremly well no breaks or misfeeds, you push 20 -24 with warp and halo and evy 2 is 20-23

next would be the halo and evy 2 that were exactaly the same at 15-19 balls before misfeeds happend

now i'm not saying that your revy w/ turbo rev board cant feed that fast even though it cant i found that this is how fast the thes loaders can load

test done by one fat man lots of paint and an e mag with e-magnum board

[pbjosh]

A quick thought on load numbers-

I can get a HALO or Warp to load in 10ms easy. If fact, they could load in less than that, but I allow the extra for a margin of error.

I have seen several guns cycle forward/backwards in 7-10ms each stroke, and Cockers I have seen times of 15 open, 13 close.

Yup, guns can hit the 30bps rnge easy nowadays-

Man, I thought a Rapide was the thing to have when I started.........

Josh

[athomas]

The retro mag is one of the fastest cycling pb guns in the world. Does anyone know the actual time that the bolt takes to cycle with the level 10?

pbjosh, can you actually get a warp or a halo to drop the next ball into the breach in just 10ms. I didn't think any loader could respond that quickly. In a straight drop out of the loader, that translates into 100 balls per second, which is pretty high even for a short burst.

In most loaders the next ball following the first shot is the slowest to load. The loader's sensor and motor hasn't fully activated yet. The first drop is usually gravity. Its the second, third and so on that really benefit from powered loaders. These balls already have pressure on them by the loaders and are forced into the breach when the bolt opens.

On that note, how fast does a loader take to respond to a shot in order to provide a positive feed? It must be fairly quick or a warp fed mag wouldn't function very well.

[sniper1rfa]

if you think about it, the HALO will feed the first ball the fastest, because its already spring loaded and needs no reaction time. when it starts to rely on the motor (which will never load as fast as a spring) it slows down.

[petefol]

Originally posted by athomas
The retro mag is one of the fastest cycling pb guns in the world.

isnt it THE fastest? anyway, i think the rt can do around 44cps, im not sure tho.

[athomas]

Originally posted by sniper1rfa
if you think about it, the HALO will feed the first ball the fastest, because its already spring loaded and needs no reaction time. when it starts to rely on the motor (which will never load as fast as a spring) it slows down.

Good point. That's a plus for the HALO in my book.

I wish I had a high speed camera, I'd like to see how fast each of the loaders takes to actually load a ball.

[314159]

take a look at some of the load time the racegun folk are using. on an autococker, the only time the gun can load paint, is when a bolt is open. so look at the bolt open data, and that is how long they are allowing to load paint with a given loader. (check out over on paintball nation)

[athomas]

From what I read from the guys setting the racegun cockers, any open bolt time lower than 19-20ms had trouble loading balls consistently. Some did claim to get their Halo to load balls in just 17ms.

[nicad]

i did some pretty elaborate testing of a haloB feeds rates (among other things..). I found that at 22ms a halo can load a ball 99% of the time.. as soon as it gets to 20 and 19ms, it will start skipping consistantly.

pbjosh- 11ms load time? pass the crack around bro! hehe

out!

[Top Secret]

IIRC Racegun was given a few HALO Bs with prototype software, allowing a faster feed rate.

[pbjosh]

Uhem-

"pbjosh- 11ms load time? pass the crack around bro! hehe"

Yes, and then some. In fact, I have had a guy setup his gun, running the gun in Semi, the Open had an extra 2ms to cover the rest of the action. And we had forgot to set the load back up. He went and was chronographing the gun and came back with broken paint. We looked at the timing, and the load was set to 1ms. He had taken about 30 shots before he broke paint.

Now, if you have a load of 17, I would hazard a guess that your cocking rod is set a bit short, or something else is up. I have had no issue with almost every gun I have setup with a HALO and a 10ms load time. Even at Full-Auto. And I have setup alot of guns.

I have had a couple that needed a longer load time, but they had serious blowback issues. I even had a gun that couldn't load with a HALO A in under 45ms.

I have done these setting with many guns, and people have gone right out and played a tourney, not breaking a single ball, unlike their angels or timmies, using the same loader.

And as far as I have seen, the Warp is just as fast.

Josh

[Conqueror]

The problem with talking about feed times on a cocker is that everyone is referring to something different.

When I mentioned on the Race forum that cocker rams open in roughly 8-10 ms, people flamed me. "That's impossible," they'd say. "The shortest CTO I've seen/heard of was 16 ms!" They forget that roughly 6-10 ms of the Race CTO is the indirect SMC solenoid valve opening. Also, the ball is feeding (at least partially) while the bolt is still in rearward motion, and can finish feeding while it is traveling forward, so the feed time may not be simply the "bolt open" time of a cocker. Part of the feeding occurs before that timer starts, and after it finishes.

Back to mags - the figures I've heard are that a normal (non-LX) mag can completely cycle in 20 ms (from trigger pull to bolt reset). That equates to 50 cps, which means at 30 bps it's the loader that would be struggling rather than the gun.

Imagine what Odyssey will bring us next, and a 30 bps mag doesn't seem unrealistic at all - if your finger can keep up, which it can't.

CQ

[orangejulius]

how come I was running a 8MS load time its really not that hard just have a light bolt and backblock and pump arm. and I dont have this software from race.

[Conqueror]

My morlock runs a roughly 40ms Solenoid two on-time, which means the bolt has 40ms to open and load. That equates to a long-arse time (~30ms) for the ball to feed, but I'm using a cruddy Revolution. It still gets 12.98 bps though, which is more than I need.

CQ