Paintball

[tarakian]

Originally Posted by russc

How did you guys make the full auto work without blending?

Being mag fed, we did not have to rely on gravity to feed. No different than force fed loaders on an electro.

The secret to brittle paint in a mag feed setup is to NOT use a coil type spring. You use a clock spring, and the pressure remains the same from first ball to last ball.

[Chappy]

Originally Posted by tarakian

Being mag fed, we did not have to rely on gravity to feed. No different than force fed loaders on an electro.
.

So it reliably fed full auto at a Z's full cycling speed? That would be quiite impressive.

[HP_Lovecraft]

Originally Posted by Chappy

So it reliably fed full auto at a Z's full cycling speed? That would be quiite impressive.

I've wondered the same thing.

The hammer would travel 1/40th a second, but the delayed bolt travels 1/20th a second (based on the high-speed video by HaveBlue). So if the hammer was running full speed, without dampening like the F/A, then the bolt would never have time to close?

This is assuming that it uses a traditional bolt-driven breech, simply substitution the hopper for a spring loaded magazine. It might instead replace the bolt with an indexer, kinda like the old SMG60, to ensure that paint is fed fully into the breach before firing.

Or the hammer is slowed down? (via weight, hyraulics, etc). WHo knows, maybe the f/a feature was vaporware.

I've seen a few MZ16s "in the wild", but not actually firing. They were wall hangers. and not for sale. Just as well, I'd probobly be willing to pay far more then my wife is willing to accept.

[tarakian]

Unless Perry built more, there are only 2 MZ-16's that I know of. At least that's all that were done by Moe and Craig before they sold to Perry. Both were shipped to a company who wanted to rep them to police and military, can't remember the name of the company. They were never returned.

We measured the maximum cycle rate of the Mega-Z at around 12.5 balls a second. This was done with no paint and the marker hooked up to a 50lb. tank of CO2. We used a drill press to actuate the trigger and fired it until it was a block of ice. Not sure what measurements anyone else may have done, but this has always been what we considered to be the true rate. Not really that difficult to keep up with for feeding rate. I would have to talk to Moe to get more details on what he might have done, I was mostly involved in the mag design.

[HP_Lovecraft]

Originally Posted by tarakian

We measured the maximum cycle rate of the Mega-Z at around 12.5 balls a second. ..... We used a drill press to actuate the trigger and fired it until it was a block of ice.

I think Chappy was wondering more how the blowback handled running full/auto or burst without chopping paint. The hammer itself cycles close to 40cps. Far too fast for paint to feed, especially with the delayed bolt.

The SMG-60 gets away with it by using a very heavy hammer, with a long travel. The Tippmann F/A gets away using a hydraulic secondary sear.

So did the MZ16 utilize any of those techniques? or a 1-way bearing? or was it semi only?

Unless Perry built more, there are only 2 MZ-16's that I know of

This must be one of them:



I know there are more though. Moe told me a story about how they had a contract to produce 100? 1000? for the Korean military police, as a training device. They were produced, and shipped over, but shortly afterward the Army General overseeing the program was arrested on corruption.... and received the firing squad! And don't think Montneel received payment... or not full payment? it was the nail in the coffin at that point.

OK, that last part seems crazy, but thats how I remember the story.

[tarakian]

I remember there being talk of a contract with Korea for several thousand. I believe it was meant to be through TASO, but they wanted MontNeel to send them the prototypes. Having been screwed over by bigger companies before, the conversation centered on how to protect MontNeel from just having TASO copy the gun and tell us to go pound. I'll have to have a chat with Craig and/or Moe, see if I can get more details.

[Have Blue]

Originally Posted by HP_Lovecraft

The hammer would travel 1/40th a second, but the delayed bolt travels 1/20th a second (based on the high-speed video by HaveBlue).

That was only the case when the Z wasn't shooting any paint - one of the high speed runs shows a ball being fired, and the backpressure drives the bolt back nearly as fast as the hammer is retracting. The bolt only really floats forward when you're not shooting anything.

[tarakian]

I talked to Craig (Busty) about this. There were only 3 prototypes of the MZ-16 produced, all of them were shipped to a company called StressShot (I think), who never returned them. No more were ever made while Craig and Moe were with MontNeel, the Korea thing never came to fruition. The 3 round burst mode was never completed, due to the prototypes not being returned and the subsequent sale of the business. I'll have to ask Moe what he had in mind for this next time I see him.