Making the Qloader actually work

[Levi]

Does anyone else here still use a Qloader?? I get the impression that a lot of people bought them back in the day and quickly became disillusioned.

After returning from a multi year paintball hiatus, I attended Supergame a few weeks ago and rocked my Q-Mag for two of the three days. It worked really well, and gave me very little trouble.

What really surprised me though was the amount of attention it got. I had a lot of great conversations and interactions with folks about it both on and off the field. From players, to refs, to vendors a lot of people took notice of it. I literally had guys dive into my bunker while taking fire, look over an exclaim “is that a Qloader… no way!... and on a Mag wuuuut!”. It never got this sort of attention 8 or ten years ago… I guess it’s becoming a bit of a classic item now or something.





A user messaged me for more information in the interest of creating something similar. So I’m dropping all my Custom Qloader stuff here plus whatever tips, tricks and anything else I can think of. I’ll go over the custom parts & modifications. I’ll detail some tuning considerations that help keep the Mag happy with this loader. Then I’ll talk about the remaining deficiencies and how I plan to address them. I’ve got one or two failed Qloader experiments too that I’ll post once I dig them out of whatever box they are hiding in.

There used to be a lot of information out there on the forums, however many of those have disappeared. Of the ones remaining, the pictures that accompany them are long gone. Frankly, a large part of being successful with the Qloader is in knowing its idiosyncrasies and how to operate it. I’ll start with some more general “how to” type info and go from there.

So buckle up buttercup… here comes the Qloader thread that (almost) nobody asked for.

[Levi]

Description:
The Qloader is one of the most unique paintball loading systems out there. Utilizing a socket mounted on your marker that accepts the Qloader pods, you reload on the field by replacing the empty Q-pod with a full Q-pod. The pods twist-lock into the sockets. Each Q-pod has an internal torsional spring “motor” that provides the force to feed the paintballs into your marker. The spring gets wound up through the action of loading the Q-pod. It’s a purely mechanical force feed loader that you can mount almost anywhere.

Advantages:
It’s probably the fastest loader ever made.
Can be mounted in a lot of different ways.
Makes possible some very low-profile setups.
Purely mechanical with no batteries.
Quieter than a hopper, no loose paintballs sloshing around when you move.

Disadvantages:
Can be a royal pain in the ass.
Takes a decent amount of setup, adjustment, and tuning.
Only 100rd capacity in each Q-pod
Can be difficult to find pod packs that fit the Qloader.
Not the best with really fragile paints.

Resources:
Qloader Manual available on Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20111005091716/http://www.qloader.com/manual.pdf
Old Qloader tech thread on PBN:
https://www.pbnation.com/showthread....ght=%2Bqloader
Not my video, but does a good job of covering the basics:
https://youtu.be/T9o1sd_f48Y
Old WARPIG review of the first gen Qloader:
http://www.warpig.com/paintball/tech...ew/index.shtml

[Levi]

OPERATION:

Setting Pre-Winds:
Changing the pre-winds is how you adjust the force with which paint is fed to your marker. More pre-winds drives the paint with more force.

The Qloader pods are powered by an internal spring motor that is wound as the pods are loaded. There is an internal rotation limiter that stops the spring motor from completely unwinding once the pod is empty. This allows the spring to retain a number of pre winds. First gen pods had an oversized white plastic ball that served as the rotation limiter. This was apparently a failure prone item and was eliminated on the second gen pods in favor of a nut on threaded rod arrangement. I have no direct experience with the first gen pods so everything below is in reference to second gen units.



The “correct” number of pre-winds will depend on the specifics of your particular setup. A feed tube with fewer elbows or sharp turns will likely require fewer pre-winds to achieve reliable feeding. Likewise sharper turns or longer feed tube arrangements will require more.

In general, I try to find the lowest number of pre-winds that will reliably feed for a given setup. Too much force on your ball stack will tend to deform the balls which can cause all sorts of issues which I’ll get to later.

I believe the Qloader pods shipped with 10 pre-winds of the spring motor. I have been running about 7 pre-winds on my Q-Mag setup which is mostly working well. However, I need to go through all my pods & verify that the springs haven’t relaxed from sitting for years.

Cleaning Q-Pods:
They really aren’t too bad to take apart for cleaning. The outer (top) cap pulls off, and the spring motor will slide right out. In most cases you can leave the plastic parts (screw, drive tube, and inner cap) assembled and just rinse them out and let dry. When reassembling, put a little light oil on the spring, the threaded rod, and hub. Then put it all back together.

Typical Disassembly:


Full Disassembly:


Setting Feed Tube Length:
This is very important. You will need to make sure that your feed tube holds a whole number of balls. Look closely at how the Q-pods twist lock into the socket. Now imagine a ball being half way in the pod and halfway into the feed tube when you twist that pod… you’ve just chopped a ball in your socket/feed tube and it isn’t a particularly easy mess to clean on the field. You need to adjust your feed tube so that when the balls are at rest they line up with the “shear line” between the socket and Q-pod.

Loading Q-Pods:
Loading your q-pods requires some attention, but isn’t too difficult once you get the hang of it. The most important thing is to make sure your Q-pod is loaded without ANY gaps between balls. The manual states: “Avoid gaps between paintballs when reloading a q-pod. Gaps of more than one paintball may cause paintballs to break when the q-pod is feeding.” I disagree with the one gap is ok mentality. Remember the Qloader is a finicky system with many variables that all need to be right… with a little attention it is easy to eliminate the gaps and potential breakage issues they introduce. My advice is NOT EVEN ONE gap should be allowed.

Now, how to do it…

First off, don’t use the banana shaped loading "silo" thingy. Throw it away, use it to store your beanie baby collection, whatever… just don’t use it for loading pods! Seriously, don’t even try, you are wasting your time.

Instead, grab a non-force feed electronic hopper like a revy or an egg or something else equivalent. Using electrical tape or some other means, adapt the loading socket onto the feed neck of your hopper. Put balls in hopper and wind them into the Q-pod. I use an egg, and it works really well for me. The feedneck on the egg is clear so I can watch the balls feed as I turn the handle on the loading socket. It is important to watch the movement of the balls as you turn the handle. If you are turning the handle and the balls stop moving, that means you are creating a gap inside the Q-pod, which means you need to stop and correct the problem. If you frequently encounter balls not wanting to feed smoothly while loading, look closely at your loading socket. You may need to do some light sanding to smooth the transition and prevent hangups.



As you can see, I have the socket mounted directly on the feedneck. This works with the egg because I can see through the feed neck. If you have a revy or something else with an opaque feed neck, you will need to put a short length of hose between the feedneck and loading socket so you can see your balls. An even classier option would be to use a piece of clear acrylic tube to connect hopper and socket. I’ve been tempted to do this with my current setup just to give me a better view.

The only downside of the hopper method is that you will need to refill the hopper after every pod you load. This is my somewhat extravagant solution to that…



When you are getting started just use the hopper, it’s not that big of a deal to refill for every pod. Wait until you know whether you are going to stick with it before considering anything fancy here.

Next important item. When you go to load an empty Q-pod, give it about a half turn before allowing paintballs to enter. Here is how I do this. Insert the empty Q-pod in the loading socket, but don’t twist it all the way to where paintballs would be able to enter. Give the handle of the loading socket about a half turn or so and then twist the Q-pod the rest of the way to where paintballs will begin to drop in.

What can sometimes happen at the end of a Q-pod is the “paddles” at the top of the pod can stop with a paintball only partially pushed out of the pod. When this happens, you have a situation where you can chop the ball with the Q-pod when you twist to remove it. I’ve found that adding this half to full turn seems help to push the final couple paintballs out of the pod. It is not a %100 fix but seems to help. I have some other ideas I will be tinkering with that may eliminate this problem completely… more on that later.

[Levi]

Pre-Filling Feed Tube:
When you are getting your marker ready to go play, you will want to pre fill your feed tube with paint. If you have an empty feed tube and insert a loaded Q-pod, the balls will promptly race through the tube and break in the breech of your marker. Before you put that first Q-pod in the socket, hand load paintballs into your feed tube by pushing them past the detent spring in the socket. The feed tube on my Q-Mag holds 10 balls including the ball sitting in the breech waiting to be fired.

Carrying Q-Pods:
This can be a little tricky since the Q-pods are just slightly bigger than standard paintball pods. I’ve found they are a too-tight fit in most standard pod packs. There was actually a Qloader branded pod pack they sold for these. There are several pod packs recommended in the PBN thread, however most of those are long gone. I use a molle tactical vest with pod pouches from Special Ops Paintball… which does not appear to be around anymore. Finding these pod pouches on the used market might be a viable option.





If anyone knows of a currently available pod pack that fits the Q-pods nicely, please post and I will add your recommendations here…

Changing Q-Pods:
Changing your Q-pods during play is pretty straight forward. Twist, pull, insert new Q-pod, and twist to lock.

But wait….

Remember that situation I mentioned at the end of the loading section? Where sometimes an empty Q-pod will stop rotating with a ball only half way out. Here is where it pays to use some finesse. When you twist the empty Q-pod to release it, do it gently enough that you can feel for a pinched ball before you have applied enough force to damage it. If you feel the Q-pod come up against the resistance of a pinched ball then stop turning, turn it the other way to lock it back in, flip your gun over so gravity pulls the ball out of the Q-pod and into the feed tube, and then twist it to unlock from the socket. Now you are in the clear, turn your gun back right side up and pop in a new Q-pod.

What I think is happening is that the last ball is getting pushed out of the Q-pod, but then the pod stops rotating at a point where the position of the paddles allows that last ball to roll back into the pod just enough to get pinched. I may play with fine adjustment of the rotation limiters to see if I can make the Q-pods stop at the right spot every time. I have my doubts that this degree of repeatability is achievable though. I also have some ideas for detents to prevent this rollback into the mouth of the Q-pod that I will try at some point. But for now I have myself trained to be careful when swapping pods.

This is one issue I still encounter occasionally in my current setup. I considered this to be the one “unhandled error” of the system. I believe I can fix this, but just have not devoted much time to this particular issue.

[Levi]

Now for the particulars on my Q-Mag. I machined an adapter that fits the socket and made up an aluminum feed tube. The Qloader socket is their Custom Mounting Socket (CMS). The elbows and feedneck adapter are factory Qloader accessories. I’ll go through all the parts in detail now because I have modified every single one of them.

SOCKET:
Here’s the modified socket (bottom) & an un-modified one (top):



The little black “top hat” piece that holds the feed valve spring in has been modified to make room for my socket adapter. Cut the protruding tube portion off so you are left with the bottom “washer” part. This will now press into the socket and hold the feed valve spring in place just like it did before.



Socket Adapter & Feed Tube:
Here’s my feed tube assembly:



The socket adapter is friction fit into the socket. The two O-rings hold it securely. I have an earlier version of this socket adapter that used only one O-ring which did not quite hold well enough.



There’s nothing remarkable about the adapter & tube. They are made to fit the elbows & be the right length to fit a whole number of balls between the breech & socket. To determine the right length for the tube, I used a couple of the “quick release hose adapters” to make up a short hose & adjusted until it was the right length. Then I measured it & made the aluminum tube to match.



If anyone wants dimensions on the socket adapter & tube just let me know. I’d be happy to post them.

[Levi]

ELBOWS:
Now the elbows… these are an accessory that was offered back when Qloaders were a thing.



When I first put this together it did not feed well at all. It was massively disappointing. I’d get a couple shots then it wouldn’t feed, I’d whack the side of the gun and get a couple more shots before it stopped again. I jacked the pre-winds up which helped at first but caused other issues. With the ball stack pressure now being so high, the paint would turn oval inside the feed tube. Since the balls were getting squeezed smaller in one direction, my feed tube was now the “wrong” length and I chopped balls in the socket when I would reload on the field. Not to mention lots of barrel breaks too.

Turns out the culprit was these damn elbows. They were trying to turn the corner too tight and the paint was jamming up. These just weren’t a great design from start. The good news is that they are fixable.



If you look at the standard Qloader plastic elbow you’ll see they are not quite 90°. It’s like they recognized that trying to turn a sharp 90° was an issue, but forgot when they designed these low profile elbows. My first attempt to remedy this was to smooth out the inside corner with a Dremel. This didn’t help much on its own. You can see below how the paint is still hitting the outside wall of the elbow almost straight on.



The real game changer here was modifying the shape of that outside curve inside the elbow. I accomplished that by pouring some epoxy into the outside radius of the elbows. To keep the epoxy from gluing both halves of the elbows together I used a piece of electrical tape to create a parting line. Just screw the elbows together with a piece of tape sandwiched between, secure them somehow so the outside radius is down, and pour a little epoxy in each side.



Once the epoxy cured I tuned it up a little with the Dremel by adding a slight radius down the center (where the two halves meet). By filling the outside radius and removing material from the inside corner, I was able to re-shape things so the balls are sort of cutting the corner inside the elbow end never meet a wall head on. This worked wonders, I was able to drop the pre-winds way down, and the whole system started functioning much better.

[Levi]

Feedneck:
Now for the feedneck part that screws into the warp body. This is another Qloader factory accessory that was available back in the day. The one shown here I bought off their website a long time ago. This is one of those parts I wish I had bought a few of when they were available. If anyone has one I (and one other person I know of) may be interested in purchasing it.

It can be a little tricky to get the right part here because there were two different versions that were often confused. They had the Shocker NXT/ION XE adapter and then the regular ION adapter. The one you want is the regular ION adapter. Here they are on the Qloader site courtesy of the Wayback Machine…



Notice how the NXT/ION XE part is a little fatter at the threads. This is because it is a larger thread (7/8”-32), and it does not fit in the Mag body. The Automag bodies are Angel threaded (M21x0.75mm), and technically the ION threads are different (13/16”-32). However, when you convert the metric units you’ll see they are so close they may as well be identical for this application.

The one you want does not fatten up at the threads. I’ve seen listings for the NXT/ION XE one that have the picture of the regular ION adapter in the listing. So it can be a little bit of a crap shoot, be careful.

This is where the next problem crops up. Once I started really playing with this setup, I found I would often shoot a Q-pod empty and continue to shoot through most of the paint sitting in my feed tube before I noticed the pod was empty. The paint just tended to keep rolling into the breech as I moved. Now I stuff in a new Q-pod and the paint zips through my mostly empty feed tube and creates an unholy mess in my marker.

To fix this, I modified the feedneck to accept an O-ring “detent” that prevents the paint from rolling freely into the breech, but is light enough that the Qloader can easily push past it. I cut two opposing slots in the feedneck using a thin cutoff wheel on the Dremel and snapped an O-ring around so it protruded in through the slots like this.





The slots should be cut so that the inside edge of the slot is flush with the outside of the Mag body. In other words, with the feedneck screwed all the way in, the O-ring should be right up against the body.



Now, how not to do it… When I was first trying things to fix this issue I had cut just one slot. I started shallow and slowly worked deeper to find the point where the O-ring was deep enough to do its job. The problem was that by the time I had the O-ring deep enough, it stuck too far in and it would occasionally get folded over the edge of the slot by the incoming paintball and create a jam in the feed tube. I ended up filling in the ends of the too deep slot with epoxy to bring it back to where it is today.

[Levi]

Level 10 Tuning:
When running the Qloader, it seems that the anti-chop is more likely to kick in. I ran all day Saturday without any trouble, but started experiencing some chuffing of the level 10 later in the day on Sunday. I rebuilt the X-valve and re-tuned the level 10 before Supergame. When I tuned it I did not have the Qloader installed, I was just handloading paint and testing over my chrono at home.

I believe the added force of the ball stack on the bolt adds some resistance that can induce unnecessary activation of the anti-chop. I suspect this effect will vary with paint size. The smaller paint will have more “clipping” of the next ball in line than the larger paint. I would expect modern small paint to exaggerate this effect. (Amount of clipping x Ballstack pressure = Additional bolt resistance) I’d love to test this hypothesis, if only I could find some .690+ paint.

Here’s what happened on Sunday that makes me think this could be what’s going on. Sometime about middle of the day on Sunday, I was re-entering the field after reloading & etc. At the chrono station I find that my velocity had risen since I last chrono’d that morning. I had set everything up Saturday with a healthy overbore & hadn’t changed anything. I suspect that my paint had grown a little due to heat, humidity or a combination of the two. Thus reducing the amount of “overbore” and increasing my velocity. My chuffing problems all started after I turned my velocity down.

There’s others more qualified to write a tutorial on L10 tuning, so I’m not going too far into that here. But as I understand it, there is a sort of balancing act going on between the mainspring and the pressure in the dump chamber. The stiffer the mainspring the lighter (theoretically) the bolt will move forward once released. With a given mainspring there is a minimum velocity setting that will allow the gun to cycle properly. The actual measured FPS can be affected by outside factors like paint to bore sizing though.

In hindsight, what I should have tried instead of turning my velocity down was to open up another size on my barrel. This is all speculation of course since I didn’t think to try any of this until everything was over. For now, I think I’ll tune the L10 to be a little more forceful. I was running the red spring, I have some silver springs I can try to see if that takes care of it. I'll also be ready to change bore size and/or L10 tuning the next time I encounter this. Hopefully I'll get some results that can either confirm or debunk the above suspicions.

[Levi]

List of items I need to further refine will get added here...

[Levi]

When I find my failed Qloader experiments they will go here...

[Siress]

Didn't most of these die out due to the plastic cracking and falling apart over time?

[Levi]

It wouldn't surprise me if an equal amount are sitting in closets barely used after people got frustrated with them. The plastic in the sockets is a little brittle, the pods not so bad. Machining an aluminum socket is on my "want to try" list.

[Siress]

Possible - but even just having a source of 3D printed sockets with reinforcements where needed would be huge. At present, I'd never adopt a qloader due to the fragility and scarcity - so solving the scarcity would get someone like me back on board.

[Levi]

It really wouldn't be too hard to make that happen. I have some preliminary stuff modeled up in Solidworks. When I get around to making that aluminum socket I'll probably print a couple iterations first anyway.

[Trbo323]

No way, that was you I ran into at supergame then. I had the blue ule mag with a drop forward

Sent from my motorola edge 5G UW (2021) using Tapatalk

[Levi]

Oh that's funny! Yep, I remember "blue mag guy". So hard to recognize people when the masks are on.

[RAZRBAKK]

Wow, this is incredibly helpful. I've been working on a friends Longbow, converting to a Q-Bow. When I used it in the backyard it shot great, but in his hands at the chrono over the weekend it basically became a juicer. I'm confident part of the problem was his fists of ham, but a lot of it is down to the setup. I'll be digging into it this weekend and hopefully these tips/tricks can make it useable again.

[Levi]

I hope you can get it dialed in. When they are working right it is awesome. Feel free to hit me with any questions that arise.

[Cdn_Cuda]

Awesome write-up and info! Thank you!

[iamthelazerviking]

Never have used one, never will, but I can appreciate this in-depth breakdown. Awesome info, fun to read!