Well, after all this hassle with the Halo B continuing to not feed correctly on my marker, we finally discovered the problem. Robin has been doing all the assembly and disassembly on the hoppers since mine was new.

Today he decided to open up his to clean paint from a broken ball discovered AFTER he dumped a pod into the hopper last game session. In the process of reassembling it I went on the web to find clear instructions about preloading the spring under the drive cone. After Robin got his together, as he picked my hopper up he said that something was wrong with my drive cone because there was no preload on it.

What has happened is that early on he discovered that if the drive cone screw was tightened that the cone did not move freely on the motor shaft as it should. The drive for the cone rotation is not supplied by the cone being tight on the motor shaft, it is supplied by the torque transfered through the spring. If the spring were left out and the screw tightened onto the shaft the cone would spin free, on a normal Halo B.

Intuitively Robin knew that the cone must turn with pressure from the spring, not because it is locked to the motor shaft. So he loosened the screw just enough to allow the cone to move properly.

Problem with that was that if the screw was not tightened till it bottomed in the shaft hole it would continue to loosen as the hopper was in use. When it had backed out far enough it allowed the cone to lift up just enough to pop loose from the tip of the spring...eliminating the preload first. Then as the screw continued to loosen, eventually the cone was only being engaged by the spring intermittently. This is what was causing there not to be a ball present for each cycle of the marker. In other words every once in a while I'd have 1 to 3 shots where nothing came out of the barrel.

The solution:

Tightening the screw locked the cone to the shaft. It appears that when the cone was made the slight flat created on the top, the flat that is supposed to be low enough to allow a tightened screw to ever so slightly clear, was tilted slightly (not square to the axis of the cone). The height on one side was making contact with the underside of the screw head causing the bind. Two or three light passes with a flat file and the problem is solved. Now you can reach into the hopper and push the cone clockwise and it will snap back. Before I could rotate it a 1/4 turn clockwise and it just stayed there(because of the skipped spring failure). Haven't tried it on the field yet, but I expect no more "failure to feed" problems with this two month old Halo B. 

Since Odyssey has not answered any of my emails I guess I just have to send them this post.