zapdoug

Automag Sam, Neither one. I'm in the biz and just cruise around trying to stay in touch. Getting too old, too fat, and too blind to play a decent game. Being chained to a desk for 15 years will do that to you. Your post actually got into my inbox with a Google e-mail alert on PAINTBALL or I never would have found this place. Good luck on the project. Doug

Yeah and everything I know I learned the hard way. Try not to imitate me:-) You will be OK. 9.2 balls a second is the fastest recorded trigger speed on a standard Automag. With a gravity loader, I think you can get close to 11. I'm sure there are some guys on this forum that have the education to make that calculation for you pretty quickly. Call it one inch of travel (back and forth). Gas moves at sonic velocities so the bolt speed should be close to that on the forward stroke.Spring return on the retrun stroke will be slower. A good engineer should be able to calculate the best possible time pretty quickly. Take about 3/4s of that number and you will be real close to reality. That is one of the things I have learned real well. The engineers save a lot of trial and error. Your friend will have to go the battery route. That is until you figure out how to feed faster than gravity with pnuematic power. The R/Ts cyclic rate can get insane when you start turning up the pressure. Good luck, Doug

Duh ! Automag Sam would probably mean you are using an AutoMag. I suppose you could tap into the side of body and use the blow forward gas. Never tried that. My best guess would be to tap where the rear of the bolt reaches the limit of its forward stroke. This would probably reduce your velocity, but you could adjust that. Did I mention that the depth of the macro line fitting in the body is critical. Needless to say if the fitting is sticking inside the chamber when the bolt (or hammer on a blow back) goes forward your going to ruin the bolt, macro line fitting, and very possibly your day? I'm not sure the wall thickness on an Automag has enough room to get a seal on the fitting and not have it enter the bolt chamber. Been a long time since I fooled with one. But hey you wanted ideas. Be careful, Doug

If you are simply looking to agitate the balls to improve the feeding.....the simple way is to tap into the side of body of the marker and run a line (macro line works well) into the bottom of the loader. A drill, 1/8th inch NPT tap, macro line and fitting is all you need to do the job. Denny Tippmann ( Jr.) and I have both done this is the past and it work surprisingly well. Every time you fire the marker a burst of gas blows the balls around. You of course need to be careful about the placement of the macro line going into the loader. And you need to be real careful where you drill into the marker body. You want to steal the wasted gas not the gas needed to re-cock the marker. This is relatively simple to do on say... a Spyder. If you take the grip frame off you will notice that on the body that there are holes for the grip screws, a hole with a brass screw that holds the valve in, and in between it and the milled slot where the sear goes, another hole. This is a pressure relief hole. It relieves the air trapped in front of the hammer as it goes forward. Without it, air gets trapped between the hammer o-ring and the valve and acts as a cushion there by reducing the velocity. Of course when the marker hammer blows back to re-cock......it vents the blow back gas. Any pressure vented is wasted......and this is the gas you use to agitate the loader. Of course this only works on blow back markers. Now if you are looking to feed one of the modern day hose beast at 20+ balls per second......well that is another thing. Just remember, to shoot 20 per second you have to feed 30 a second, the bolt takes up a lot of your feeding time and balls can't feed through it. Regards, Doug