11 Round Tubes

[Maxwell]

Mildly interesting. I noticed my Drop 10 was leaving an extra ball at the top of my tubes this weekend when I was shooting some HK 4 star paint. Turns out paint has gotten so small our 10 round tubes are 10.5-11 round tubes. I've had 2-3 tubes with broken paint per day of play. Not a big issue but the extra room can make a difference with brittle paint.

I figure if I trim all my tubes down the industry will immediately shift to .68+ paint. A small sacrifice for the greater good.

Food for thought, how many "extra" paintballs are being made at these smaller sizes, how much extra profit/savings is that yielding? Has to be significant.

11 can squeeze:

10 reballs next to 11 paintballs for comparison:

[Reflex0283]

That paint is tiny! I thought reballs were small

[Maxwell]

50/50 to roll through my .675 insert!

[Reflex0283]

Rolling through is crazy, usually the paint is at least misshapen enough to catch on an oblong part of the ball

[Ecapnation]

Paint is small and those tubes are huge inside.

[nerdcore]

Can you stick some padding in the bottom to bring it back to an even 10? I need to try out my tubes. Or see if someone can mod existing stl files for 10 rd tube caps to add a little more material that goes into the top of the tube.

[Maxwell]

If this becomes a common occurrence that would be my plan, I was thinking inside the lid though similar to your cap printing idea. HK has some pods that use padding that worked pretty nicely.

[Nish]

On this day. Maxwell became the martyr paintball needed.

[tyronejk]

Going from 0.69 to 0.67 results in 5.7% savings in shell material and 8.5% savings in fill.

[OpusX]

MBAs ruin everything 😂😘

[Maxwell]

I love MCB. Thanks for doing the math tyronejk

[trashcollector]

What paint was that?

[Maxwell]

4 star HK

[Rainmaker]

Wow, that’s really interesting. Darn capitalism for you I guess

[Shrek5595]

when i used to use HK i did notice it usually runs a little smaller. always had to use the smallest bore with that paint

[uv_halo]

Can someone get a good weight measurement on these smaller balls? I've heard rumor that they are still at the max weight of the spec (3.1G) and, if they are smaller with the same weight, they will actually fly a little better.

[TF_Aloha]

I think it's still 3.5g max for the ASTM standard, but I'm not paying the money to read it again for sure.

[uv_halo]

TF_Aloha you may be right, I can't recall off the top of my head exactly but, if they are still managing a 3.1g weight, they managed to increase the density at least a little, if they're below .675

[TF_Aloha]

uv_halo I think that the density increase is due to increasing amounts of cornstarch replacing PEG in the fill. The cheaper the paint is, especially from Kore, the more starch is in there. It's a lot cheaper than PEG so private equity bean counters love it. It does increase density, but it doesn't seem to help performance (maybe the corn starch doesn't stay evenly distributed).

It also might be due to the thicker shells. Cheap paint uses a lot of recycled gelatin (which they get practically for free) to replace expensive virgin gelatin. Recycled is much weaker, so they need extra thick shells to get a seal. If the shell is more dense than the fill, that could also explain the increased density of modern paint. This definitely isn't a good thing though, because if the shell isn't round and of uniform thickness, this just guarantees a bad center of mass and creates silly flight paths.