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Tech index -> Custom Work -> Balanced poppet valves

A balanced poppet is a special type of valve that uses air pressure to "assist" the opening of the valve. Normally, the valve hammer has to fight against a huge force of air pressure on the valve's other end in order to get it open (fire the ball). When the valve is balanced, air pressure pushes the valve in both directions, both open and closed. This means the force needed to open it is MUCH less, improving cycline time and consistency, decreasing air consumption, as well as other theoretical benefits.

With the proper modificaiton, valves like this can be installed in any hammer/valve based marker. I've retrofitted them into some of my own guns, detailed here. I didn't mess around with this unless it was really "worth doing".

Impulse:
The valve in an Impulse has a few possabilities for the install. The easiest way (the way I chose) was to fabricate a new sleeve to be inserted in the endcap, which would fit around the new valve poppet's balanced section. The disadvantage to this is that it reduces the amount of air available to fire the marker, but depending on how much room you take away it will still work perfectly fine. Here's the sleeve I installed in the valve endcap:

The distal end of the endcap is then ported to allow venting.

Now for the fun part. The new valve and balanced end have to be fitted to function with the current parts, unless you want to re-make the whole valve assembly (which I didn't want to do, there's no reason to bother). Pictured below is the final balanced valve, threaded together with a 6-32 rod. The second and third pictures were taken during the fabrication of the balanced section and valve poppet respectively. And yes, I free-formly cut an arc into the valve during fabrication.

The last step is to make a new hammer. There's no longer a need for a heavyweight steel or brass hammer; aluminum hammers can work fine in these valves.

The valve is fitted with a small spring at the end to close it (seen in the above pictures). This is the only pressure the hammer must overcome to fire the marker (approx. 8 pounds in this case, instead of the stock valve which is 80 POUNDS!). The end result is a marker that operates with a solenoid pneumatics pressure of 60-psi, on a dwell of 7 milliseconds.

Nerve:
Balanced valves in Nerves have even more benefits than in Impulses, however they are significantly more difficult to correctly impliment without creating a total hack-job install. This mod is finished and functional but due to the difficulty in fabricating the custom parts, it could be a lot better than what I ended up using. As a result it's an ongoing project of mine.
The mod involves a new valve extender to house the new functional components. It must be slightly larger to help accomidate the new functionality of the valve system. Here's what mine looks like:

The new aluminum hammer looks like this:

It is possible to simplify the install by mounting an LPR on the vertical adapter and instead making a "regular" valve endcap like that of an Impulse/Bushmaster/Angel, that doesn't use its own integrated LPR. I didn't want to do this because it wouldn't be marketable due to the cost of a whole new LPR and such. The exact internal configuration I came up with looks like this:

If anybody wants to expand on this concept then be my guest.

Angel:
I'll add details for this when I'm done with the mod.

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Tech index -> Custom Work -> Balanced poppet valves