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.

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.

What is the recommended psi?  200 sounds too low.  Shorten dwell and raise psi.

Went to the field today. Played speedball for 3 hours with no failure to feed. With HPA, I am running  200 psi into a LP kit valve using a Palmer Stabilizer (regulator) and the volumizer that comes with the LPK. The dwell on the E-Bolt ram is set at the recommended 1/3 adjustment position. The pressure to the ram from the Micro-Rock is two turns back from the point where things start to leak.  Probably ran nearly 1500 shots through the marker with not one single miss-feed. The problem may actually be fixed. Oh, BTW, with the gage showing 200 psi, when I went to the chrono, I had to adjust the pressure lower to get the velocity below 290 fps.

Something else about this set up, the velocity adjustment screw located in the side of the power tube is no longer used. it is backed out far enough to be flush on the inside of the tube. All velocity adjustments are made with the Palmer (controls pressure to propel the paintball) or the Micro-Rock (controls how hard the ram hits the pin valve.

BTW, as I am working out the optimization of the function of the E-Bolt and marker pressures I am using a small (1.25" diameter) 0-400 psi gage from a welding regulator. It is much more acurate than the standard types available for paintball systems and has a 350 degree sweep making it easy to read with graduations of 10 psi.

JohnnyCanuck wrote: 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.

It makes a difference as to what barrel ID and ball diameter is. The situation is that my son and I keep trying to best each other as to how low a pressure we can get the markers to operate. But , right now both of us with very similar setups are running right at 200 psi. Though some say after market bolts make no difference, we are also both running the Rufus Dawg Wicked Bolt:

http://www.pbreview.com/products/reviews/3734/ - http://www.pbreview.com/products/reviews/3734/