E-Bolt, Dwell and Feed

Some may have seen my comments on my 98C and problems of the Halo B missed feeding at high rates of fire. When I first installed my E-Bolt I set the dwell higher than recommend in the correct assumption that I could maintain paint velocity and still run low pressures (stock valve). Once I got everything set up as I wanted with a Palmer Stabilizer and the double trigger I found it very easy to walk the trigger to provide cover fire.

On occasion I found that I would make 2 to 3 shots with no ball feed. That failure to feed got me taken out on several occasions. We fiddled with neck stack height and finally discovered that there was no preload on the cone spring. Once that was fixed I assumed there would be no further problems. There seemed to be none for a while.

I then switched over to HPA and was no longer limited by freeze up. I rediscovered the same old failure to feed. I began to notice that when the marker would fire with no paint in the chamber the mechanism would sound different. Not just the report from the barrel which is always different without paint, but something different about the action cycle itself. The impression was that the front bolt was short cycling. I began to think that maybe because my dwell was set high that the slight delay in hammer return was allowing the next trigger pull to signal the bolt forward before it had fully retracted. This would prevent the next ball from dropping since the bold didn't get out of the way. Now, I do not know if my supposition is true, but making a dwell adjustment was worth a try.

We reset the dwell to minimum recommendation and tried some tests walking the trigger as fast as I could manage. This time pushed to the limit of my finger speed there were no failures to feed. My son tried, he shoots faster, and also could not induce a failure to feed.

On the speed ball field everything worked like it was supposed to. After a break to gas up and load pods when I took a test shot on the field, no ball was fired. I tried a few more and nothing came out. Great! Another malfunction! Then my son said, "Did you turn the hopper on?" Duh. One of the best evenings of speedball I have had in months.

I did not know that too high a dwell could cause slow enough retraction of the bolt to cause a miss-feed. Not completely sure that it was what caused the problem, but no other change was made at the time the dwell was reduced and after that one change the marker no longer malfunctioned. I learn something new every day.

Edited by Bruce A. Frank

wow, cool. thanks for the heads up. 

Lightningbolt wrote: Higher dwell times definately slows shot speed and efficiency takes a dump too.  If you don't have the low pressure kit, taking a guess I'd say run your pressure high and dwell to fps.

I forgot to mention that I do now have the LP kit valve and volumizer and run the marker at 200 psi.

Edited by Bruce A. Frank

Try messing around with differant pressures. 200psi does seem low. Id take it up to 250 and see how it does. Dont know much about the E-bolt though. Im sure you checked, but my Halo B was not feeding every shot when the batteries were very close to low. Maybe the eye wasnt sensing an absence of paint? Also, my Halo B does push balls past the detent occasionaly over long periods of fire, not that that has anything to do with your problem.

I run my e-bolt with lpk and a palmer stab at no lower than 300, works the best around 32-330, I have no idea how you get your's to even work at 200.  I have dwell set at 1/3 as well, and my micro-rock is set as needed.