you may think that it would have more kick because the bolt is accelerating and decelerating faster, but there is far less pressure behind the bolt and the bolt itself only weighs 7.4 grams less than half the weight of a firebolt.
It would, in comparison to not having a QEV and the same setup.
Of course having a lightweight bolt does far more to reduce kick than anything else.
And once your cycling mass becomes stupidly light, the bolt speed hardly has an effect.
But you were keeping your upgrade bolt a secret
So I couldnt know that
...as for being hard on paint, there is less force in my bolt cycling with a qev than a firebolt cyling without one (it does have less than half the mass and half the pressure behind it)
Remember the pressure acts on both sides of the bolt, so a higher pressure behind the bolt also means more air to be evacuated from in front of the bolt sail through the same sized apeture (the noid/QEV) when you fire.
Increasing the pressure by 50% may yield a 50% increase in bolt force.
But adding a QEV will add hundreds of percent to the bolt force by allowing the air in front of the bolt to evacuate with much less back pressure.
You can compare bolt force by measuring cycle rate.
Mass actually acts the other way.
If you have a particularly heavy bolt it will have less acceleration, reducing its ability to break paint when chambering.
Having a heavy bolt isnt like hitting the ball with a heavy thing versus a light thing. The bolt doesnt get a run up to the ball, and the ball is allowed to move forwards as we push it.
What we really want is to start the ball off with a slow/light bolt force and end up with a hard/fast bolt force.
But again its such a small effect.
In addition to this there is the amount of surface area contact between bolt and ball.
Pressure is force over area, so it follows that if you reduce the area in contact with the ball, for the same bolt force the ball will 'feel' more pressure when loading.
This is an area where the firebolt lets itself down big time. The front of it is like a bloody razorblade.
This is a much larger effect.
Common paintball 'thinking' would say that you need a larger bolt apeture to allow the air through 'easier'.
But thats nonesense. Having a larger bolt apeture just gives the air somewhere to expand before it gets to the ball. Wasting energy.
Look at the ego bolt, it has a fairly small apeture, to give a large contact area between the bolt and the ball, making the ego rather gentle on paint for a bang valve gun.
as for accuracy, its shooting 15bps consistantly with NO shoot down, matching paint to bore with my whipers barrel and freak inserts, so its as accurate as anything else out there.
I was more commenting about the stock setup as I havent seen a hollowpoint up close.
(The hollowpoint looks like a very clever design. Which, correct me if Im wrong, but until the bolt pops off the stalk, the front and rear acting surfaces are very similar areas, further reducing the effect operating pressure has on bolt force)
My original point is, when comparing like for like, no matter what your requirements, adding a QEV degrades the overall performance of the gun, where as increasing the pressure improves the overall performance of the gun.
Sorry I did ramble on a bit....
