Old school mag fed gun with oval balls

[Trbo323]

There's another factor that I meant to include as to why paintballs may even do worse with spin than the standard sphere. They're not spherical! They are lopsided and, the lopsidedness is not in a fixed orientation relative to the seam. This has always been the case. What happens when you spin something that is out of round? It wanders.. This is why relatively consistently spinning backspinning balls (fired from a flatline), have no accuracy improvement over a ball fired from a regular barrel.

I think this is a fairly valid hypothesis. My own on the same matter is that each paintball that comes out of a flatline or apex (with the ramp on) is spinning on a very slightly different axis. If a ball comes out that is "leaning" to the right slightly then the spin actually pulls it off course through it's flight because the axis of spin is not completely horizontal. I always found it odd that tippmann and BT both made the end of those barrels round. It seems to me that a rounded opening would be more likely to impart a slight side spin as you are giving the ball surface area to grab on each side. If it were flat you would eliminate the possibility of an off horizontal spin. I wouldn't be surprised if the poor accuracy from those systems is a combination of both these factors. Slightly out of round paint that hits the side wall just a bit causing a slight difference in the axis of spin which pulls the round off course through it's flight compounded by it being out of round... Again.

It would be hard to prove and serve no benefit to narrow it down more though.

Yes, I understand that Tom made a paintball spin. He came to the conclusion that the rifling didn't work, based on accuracy performance, and then set about trying to insure that it was spinning fast enough (hence the progression of techniques, going an order of magnitude beyond necessary), and still saw little to zero benefit. My question was could a paintball barrel impart enough spin. I think it's possible, I just have't seen a convincing case of it. Yeah, Hammerheads video doesn't help in this regard. I mean, it's a .688 barrel. Maybe something tighter, with a more aggressive rifling design (LAPCO .683 for example) might show some ability to reliably spin a paintball. But, this would have zero benefit in regards to accuracy.

Idk, Toms process should prove that the rifled barrels were either not spinning the paint or at a minimum weren't doing it enough. Cockerpunks big barrel test comes to mind as well, even if tom found minimal gains, I would expect them to still show up in a large accuracy test like the one CP did if the rifling was working as advertised. There's no functional difference between not spinning the paint and not spinning the paint enough.

You seem to be drawing a lot of your conclusions off of the Testing and theory by Tom, and the one Hammerhead test. Tom never confirmed the state of the fill. This is nearly impossible to test. He concluded that the theory was correct because he saw no improvement in accuracy. In each of his tests, he was looking for an improvement of accuracy, not whether the ball and fill were spinning.

Well, how many other tests are out there that are as stringent as Toms in regards to spinning paintballs along the axis of flight?

Yes he was looking for accuracy, he was looking for it by following the theory of spinning the paintballs. With the normal rifled barrel the spin was in question, with spinning the whole barrel and breach, I don't question the fill is spinning at that point (yes I can see that someone could argue the fill wasn't spinning all because you can't see inside the ball but proving them wrong would be way too much effort money and time with no gain), tom didn't see the results they were looking for so they eliminated the liquid fill and went to a solid ball which should eliminate a lot of variables (not like I know the exact projectiles they used but I'm guessing the seam, roundness and consistency of each ball would all be better than actual paint)

Sure, Hammerhead was the only company to share a sketchy high speed video of a paintball leaving their rifled barrel. Hammerhead also put more into advertising than any of the other rifled paintball barrels manufacturers, and that video was clearly aimed to support their advertising. That doesn't invalidate any of the other rifled barrels, in regards to their ability to spin a paintball.

No, it doesn't. But lack of proof doesn't mean any of them are spinning the paint either. Like I said, it would be a super easy marketing tool if any of the other companies had a product that actually spun the paint to then prove it with a HS video. They would get to point out the problems with hammerheads video and also prove that their barrel worked. Massive marketing tool even if there was no accuracy gains

To me, back then and even today there's just so many people that just assume these barrels are spinning the paint when there's no proof in the form of either HS video or accuracy results that it kind of blows my mind that they sell so well.

You know the biggest invalidator of all rifled barrels for regular paintballs? They never were never shown to increase the accuracy, in plenty of rigorous testing. If regular paintballs can't get an increase in accuracy from rifling, it becomes a scientific exercise at best. Something that I and maybe you would care about, but that wouldn't sell barrels.

I agree, see above

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