The small questions you've never asked.

[jerryjjackson69]

I knew paintballs shrank to size, but I just started thinking about how that works with a liquid filling. Does the filling get compressed? Does some filling escape? Is a certain amount of air left inside to allow for this? Part of the marketing for higher-end paint is less or no air in the filling, helping with greater accuracy, but does some air have to be in there?

[Rusty Brass]

It's kind of mind blowing. Way back when, as the Romans started to conquer Europe, they built roads everywhere that they went so that their armies and supplies could move faster. The carts that they built were uniform in size, being just wide enough for two horses to be under yoke to pull them. As the roads wore down ruts developed from the cart wheels. In order to fit the ruts all carts all over Europe continued to be built to that same track width for hundreds of years. When the railroads were developed the only people with any expertise for making carriages were the cart and buggy makers and they only built them one way - so that set the width of the train tracks. The biggest deciding factor was when they started making road cuts and cutting tunnels though. The width of the tracks determined how wide the carriages could be and still be stable and the width of the tunnels was determined by how much clearance the carriages needed. When WWII started up we had to design all of our fancy new vehicles for the region they'd be operating in - Europe, and the way they'd get around was by train. All of our military equipment had to be narrow enough to fit through European railway tunnels and since we still have defensive responsibilities in Europe all of our new equipment does too.
So the width of the Abrams battle tank was determined by the Romans building their carts wide enough for two horses' asses.

[DavidBoren]

Why are the Romans responsible for the width of the Abrams tank?

[DocsMachine]

I think people are forgetting that paintballs cure and shrink to a nominal .68 caliber, and are not molded in their final dimensions.

-Entirely true, but that still doesn't explain why we wound up with "68" as a caliber. After all, if they wanted ".75" as a final caliber, they just had to make the molds appropriately larger.

AND... it's worth noting that according to rumor, the first balls Charlie molded were in wax, out of a wooden mold. Shrinkage would have been minimal at best for those early examples.

I'm not sure I've ever heard a valid- and/or reliable- explanation as to why we wound up with .68 cal, rather than... well, anything else, .65 cal, .70 cal, .75 cal, etc.

Doc.

[Rusty Brass]

To me, it seems just as strange to intentionally choose 11/16ths as it does for there to be an 11/16ths size already in use for encapsulating something else. 0.170cu-in (2.78cc) volume isn't close enough to an integer to suggest it had to do with dosing. It's not like tubing was commonly extruded with an 11/16ths ID. Or was it?

The fable is the bath bead machine retooled for paintballs but it could be apocryphal? I don't know if there was a machine already in that exact size or not - you're getting a little too scientifical for pre-computer age industrial development with your reasons and volumes. The tubing existed but I couldn't tell you why or what for, that's gotta be the starting point.

*Warning - Pedantic BS below*

There's the old builders' warning: Don't reinvent the wheel. It used to be followed a bit more religiously than now. Sometimes. All kinds of weird materials used to be much more common, standardization has killed off mountains of stuff you used to be able to just pick up where ever. Now we just have relics. The last 40-50 years have seen huge changes in industry as the introduction of computers has forced increases in efficiency and venerable old tools and machines couldn't just be rebuilt (using weird old off-size materials) to stay useful so they went to the scrap heap. We still have some of the measuring systems left over though - schedules for pipe sizing, gauges for diameters, grains for weights, inches/feet for distances... Once something exists and is built a certain way it doesn't really matter why after a while.
Know the story of why the Romans are responsible for the Abrams tank being as wide as it is?

[Siress]

I think people are forgetting that paintballs cure and shrink to a nominal .68 caliber, and are not molded in their final dimensions.

That's a good hypothesis. If there's a nominal tool size minus a reasonable % shrink that lands us at .68" then I'd say it's probable. The next 1/8" increment up is a .75" tool diameter, which would indicate 25% shrink by volume for the paintball. Pretty sure it was a US invention, but let's try metric anyway. Next integer up is 18mm, indicating 12% shrink by volume. I'm not familiar with the exact moisture kinetics of these materials, but even 12% seems really high. I typically work in the <0.5% range for structural materials. Since gelatin and PEG are water soluble, it's certainly feasible that they are made substantially oversize and then dried out to .68". That leaves much of the process up to some rather chaotic phenomena, though... I think it'd be a lot easier to work with monitored and adjusted saturation rates in a humidity controlled environment.

[lew]

-Not quite sure what you mean. The early-generation Max manifolds had two ports, both of which connected to the inlet to the regulator itself. That is, the output from the tank, and the two side ports, were all one passage. You could have your fill nipple on either side, and either just plug or fill the other one with a gauge.

The regulator body, too, had two sets of ports, usually just one furthest from the spring-cap end, and then a set of four just below the spring-cap threads. If you had multiple ports at the far end (some did) you could use any one of them for an inlet, and the four outlets in the middle of the reg body, blow the threads, all connected to the same internal chamber. You could put any combination of hoses, fittings or gauges in those ports, in any order- they all went to the same place.

Doc.

Right, I got that. I'm just wondering if there's a way to close the forward (furthest from the ASA) inlet from the manifold. Closing off the port below would be as easy as installing a 1/8" NPT plug. The reason I ask is that, with that second inlet "nozzle" tightened all the way into the reg body, most of the Max Flos I have of that generation have the regulator sitting at a slight downward angle, which looks weird to me. They function fine, so that's not an issue.

[Jordan]

Cannot be a "marker" without a paintball, so the paintball came first. Air guns, though, date way back... pre-America, and certainly predate gelatin encapsulation. The 68cal airgun, though... now that's a thinker. 68cal is really just 11/16ths of an inch (though the ASTM spec. for size has a LOT of tolerance. e.g. see the text under my avatar). I'm not aware of any other uses for 68cal airguns. And there are plenty of uses for gelatin capsules of such size (bath beads, medicine, chemical delivery, etc). If I were a betting man, I'd bet paintballs came before 68cal airguns.

I think people are forgetting that paintballs cure and shrink to a nominal .68 caliber, and are not molded in their final dimensions.

[DocsMachine]

Yes and no. I have a vague recollection of one of the original players from the first game regaling in the history of it all mentioning the Nelspot as a replacement for sling shots.

-Yessir, but not with paintballs. The early stories- there's a couple books about the first few years- described how guys like Gaines and others, had tried other versions of "projectile tag" before discovering the paintball guns, including using grapes fired from slingshots. By the time Gaines and Gurnesy and the others out the first games together, both the guns and the paintballs had been around for about a decade or more.

Doc.

[DocsMachine]

Why do lesbians masturbate with a plastic penis instead of a vagina?

-More research is needed. If I'm not back in a week, forward my mail.



Doc.

[DocsMachine]

Who was the first company or custom shop to start the mass manufacturing of the ripper milling?

-Jim Eaton originally developed the Ripper milling, back in the very early 2000s. They were initially done by special order- you'd send your body in, and when he had enough to consider it a batch, he'd run 'em all at once.

I think he might have eventually made a batch or two in bulk- that is, new, fresh bodies rather than pre-owned ones, but I'm not 100% certain of that.

I do know that it eventually soured Jim on working in paintball- especially individual customers. Kind of the same reason PK Selective got out of one-off anodizing, it got to be far too annoying with individual customers asking for detailed, one-off jobs, but not wanting to pay for the extra time and work.

Jim still has a production CNC shop, with some pretty cutting-edge equipment, but he only deals with industrial-level customers, the kind of guys that will order 10,000 or 50,000 parts at a time.

Doc.

[THE SHOOTIST]

Why do lesbians masturbate with a plastic penis instead of a vagina?

[DocsMachine]

On an old-school first-generation Max Flow manifold bottomline regulator, can the second/forward air input port on top of the reg body be blocked off without the manifold pushing out air?

-Not quite sure what you mean. The early-generation Max manifolds had two ports, both of which connected to the inlet to the regulator itself. That is, the output from the tank, and the two side ports, were all one passage. You could have your fill nipple on either side, and either just plug or fill the other one with a gauge.

The regulator body, too, had two sets of ports, usually just one furthest from the spring-cap end, and then a set of four just below the spring-cap threads. If you had multiple ports at the far end (some did) you could use any one of them for an inlet, and the four outlets in the middle of the reg body, blow the threads, all connected to the same internal chamber. You could put any combination of hoses, fittings or gauges in those ports, in any order- they all went to the same place.

Doc.

[Siress]

Yes and no. I have a vague recollection of one of the original players from the first game regaling in the history of it all mentioning the Nelspot as a replacement for sling shots. This was over a decade ago, I was tired, hot, and probably hungover from college exam fatigue - so my memory could be faulting out on me. Jim Lively is the guy I was listening to. To me, it seems just as strange to intentionally choose 11/16ths as it does for there to be an 11/16ths size already in use for encapsulating something else. 0.170cu-in (2.78cc) volume isn't close enough to an integer to suggest it had to do with dosing. It's not like tubing was commonly extruded with an 11/16ths ID. Or was it?

[Knuckle Dragger]

Who was the first company or custom shop to start the mass manufacturing of the ripper milling?