This page is for modifications I've performed on Ions, as well as a few conceptual things that didn't make it to reality (at least, not by my hand).
Ion Bolt Lightening:
Removing material from the stock bolt is a popular modification, which I used to offer as a service for others. After a while I started calling this the de-venturi mod since it chiefly involved removing the venturi face from the stock bolt. In addition to that, I've also removed a bit of added material elsewhere, and counterbored the entire length of the bolt too. These are all great projects that I highly recommend for people wanting lathe practice projects with their markers.
I've found that boring the face to a diameter of 1/2" tends to work okay. This leaves some "ridges" as you can see in the picture above. I've been using bolts like this in all the ZDS team markers and haven't run into any issues regarding the modded bolt face being more rough on paint. I can't guarantee that you will have the same result if you follow the same thing yourself, but it at least works for me after proper touch-up.
The bolt in the above pictures weighs in at 18.3 grams, which means more than 55% of the stock material has been removed. It's not the lightest bolt out there by far, but I think these results are pretty good in terms of a homebrew modification. Here are some pictures I took using my old minilathe.
Titanium Multi-piece Bolts:
Toward the end of my Ion bolt project days (2006) I invested a lot of time into producing ultra-thin bolts composed of the high-flexibility titanium. The benefits to this is that titanium being stronger than typical steel allowed more material to be removed. However, titanium is nearly as heavy as steel so effectively almost twice the material would have to be removed in order for it to be lighter than a typical aluminum bolt. This meant spending a great deal of time experimenting with the stress-testing analysis to derive exactly which parts of the bolt needed to be regular, and which parts could afford to be ultra-thin.
Needless to say this was a very difficult task. I later refined the design to involve a titanium "chassis" using lighter delrin sleeves and inserts where needed, to offset the weight. My last working model was a four-piece titanium/delrin hybrid bolt weighing in at 7.9 grams (for a full Ion bolt, with tail and all). It was very impressive, and worked very well....however the cost was a disadvantage. Each bolt, even if mass-produced, would cost over $70 to fabricate. That's just not marketable!
I'm not allowed to post much more information about the Titanium projects due to prior agreements, but maybe in the future I'll do go ahead with it.
Tail Bolt - HE Mod:
Added o-ring to seal airflow off from the air source. Better results than using a modified fire chamber, which places a rearward bias on the bolt during firing, and can lead to air loss if dwell is too high (not to mention assembly difficulties).
Ion Stubby Bolt:
I came up with this modified bolt and boltstop system back in "the day" (2005), and prototyped it from delrin as pictured. It was a very promising project in terms of moving mass (lowlowlow) but the reason I never marketed this was because of the horrible flow rates that come alongside a bolt shaped like this.
The use of delrin is typically not a very good way to use a spool valve bolt, however I found it to be acceptable here due to the means by which this bolt releases pressure (oppossed to how the "regular" tail bolts release it). The lightweight delrin material, combined with the shape of the bolt's inside bores, make this the lightest of its kind; it weighs slightly more than a single paintball. Scratching is still a problem, but when it comes to my own use this works just fine.
Sometime later, Orange paintball independantly came up with their own version of this concept, except theirs was made from a more heavy aluminum design, and called the Nano bolt. It was an immediate hit, despite the flow problems. TechT realized it was popular and quickly set out to release their own version (L7), although it additinoally falls victim to the same poor airflow. However, nobody really cares about airflow, and rather pay more attention to the moving mass, making the lightweight L7 a very popular bolt for quite some time.
Ion Bolt Guide Mod:
This was another design for a bolt that would ride on a "guide" component, inserted down the middle of the chamber. I designed it (below) to work with the stock boltstop. The diameters are such that the bolt would still retain the same surface area difference, despite being shaped differently.
Much later, in June 2007, Deadlywind paintball developed a very similar concept and released it as their Hollow-Point bolt, with a nice refined design and some added parts. The Hollowpoint bolt isn't perfect, but it works very well; I'm very glad somebody released this design at last.
Ion SRC Bolt Assembly:
The SRC (Self-Regulating Chamber) was a redesign that I decided to develope in late 2005 while making my own homebrew Ion bolts in the workshop. In 2006, after a few companies released slightly lighter replica versions of the stock bolt and labeled them as upgrades, I decided I was going to bring to the market my own design and sell it as the end-all Ion bolt, being that it would not only decrease the recoil like all the lightweight bolts out there, but would also spare no redesign in effort to keep the airflow and efficiency to an absolute maximum. The bolt was a multi-component redesign, made to function inside the stock fire chamber, to replace the bolt and boltstop. The assembly added a new moving component to seal off airflow, as well as a complete redesign of the rest of the parts. Airflow on just about every current Ion bolt is a horrible combination of energy-wasting pressure zones, so the SRC was designed to show people exactly what can be done when actual fluid development takes place.
I had drawn up no less than 12 designs and prototyped nearly half of them. Most of the designs were functional but limited the ROF for various reasons (usually bolt integrity and port size). The final version was the most functional while still maintaining its integrity and increased surface characteristics relating to the release of fluid. This final model was planned for release in mid 2006 but due to other considerations I ended up dumping the entire project onto somebody else, who turned arond and quite the paintball business, taking the bolt property with him. I've since come up with a few enhanced SRC versions using knowledge I've amassed in the meantime, but none of these will be marketed unless the original is released.
In the time since 2006, there have been an onslaught of stock bolt replica upgrades released for the Ion, and several bolts that are slightly different while still remaining inferior on any number of characteristics (efficiency, airflow, etc depending on the bolt). I am somewhat saddened to see nobody besides myself take the time to develop a truely superior bolt upgrade. The Hollowpoint is the closest thing to the SRC out there, and while the Hollowpoint works very good it still doesn't seal the airflow to the fire chamber. Additionally, while there is some consideration of airflow and pressure loss, there isn't an extreme amount of development related to it. At the moment, while it's not perfect, I believe the Hollowpoint to be the best Ion bolt upgrade out there, naturally barring any future release of the SRC.
Specific details on the bolt and its functionality aren't available at this time. The individual now in possession of the SRC intellectual property requests that I not divulge any information relating to it since he still plans on releasing it himself (according to him). The agreement also prevents me from producing any competing bolt products for Ions, which is why I haven't demolished a path into the market already. I am, however, free to do whatever I want in terms of bolts for other markers (or entirely new markers) so I have experimented with designing entire markers around the same flow-based concepts. The closest thing to this would be the Shadowmachine prototype, of which I'm investing an extreme amount of time developing both the firing assembly and the peripheral components, in hope that my intendant will see its virtues.