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Tech index -> Custom Work -> Shocker bolt assembly mods

Shocker Shutoff Bolt:
This is a bolt modification I derived that is designed to aid in the efficiency of the stock bolt. Unfortunately it's a permanent mod and has some disadvantages, which leads to the reason this hasn't yet been marketed (and won't be).
I formally call this the "shutoff Shocker" although it has another name in the paintball industry...FEP Quest. It's essentially how a Shocker that was rearranged to function like the Quest would operate.

This mod basically converts the bolt guide to refill the fire chamber with pressure to fire. normally this pressure comes from an air port in the bolt chamber wall, but the "shutoff" system uses the position of the bolt to control the filling of the fire chamber. While the bolt is in the rear position, pressure travels down through the bolt guide and makes its way into the fire chamber through the bolt's porting. When the bolt fires forward, the bolt guide air supply is cut off, and the fire chamber is released to fire the ball. Then, when firing is complete, the bolt returns backward to open the breech, and refills the chamber at the same time.

For this mod I had to first plug the input hole in the stock fire chamber. After that, I counterbored the bolt guide similar to what was pictured above, then threaded it at the rear for an air fitting.

Sometime after I came up with this idea, I was discussing it with interested parties only to find out that the creator of the marker came up with the same design back in 2003, and patented it in his HE bolt patent in early 2005. So sayeth the designer, he never had any plans on making it, but did want to stake claim on the idea (which unfortunately yanked it away from me, rather obviously). I thought it was funny, anyway.

This mod works okay but it limits you to using an unusually high input pressure; 200-psi or more is required. This is due to the smaller air volume of the stock fire chamber. It's not really a problem but the marker's performance wasn't really increased other than about 15$ increase in efficiency. The gun wasn't designed to accept this type of modification, so I didn't pursue it any further.

Spring Forward Shocker / Abomination Shocker Mod:
This is a modification I performed to my "junkyard" Shocker. Basically, the goal was to increase efficiency of the marker by removing part of the solenoid's cycle. This involved modifying the marker to use a [single-directional] three-way solenoid instead of the [bi-directional] four-way. To do this I added a spring to the front of the bolt guide to push the bolt shut, thus replacing the energized pressurizing of the bolt (that pushes it forward).

This mod had benefits, the efficiency was noticeably higher, but the cycling speed of the marker was reduced as well. I came to the conclusion that I didn't want to make any more bolt modifications along these lines without making a whole new fire chamber, which is too far from the original design for my tastes.

Sometime later, to the same marker, I removed the stock solenoid and replaced it with an Ion solenoid. This created what ended up being known as the "Abomination" Shocker. It looked like this:

It works okay, but it sure isn't pretty. The air usage is less, so efficiency is good, but the marker isn't designed to work with barbs so there is still a lot of air volume wasted. It's an interesting mod, but traditionally a more refined spring action would be needed in order to achieve better results, instead of just trying the few that I tried before I found something that worked.

Many people have come to me regarding solenoid modifications to the Shocker similar to this, involving hoses and tapped fittings. For the sake of tinkering this may be a fun task to perform if you have a larger frame (or a tray to add space) but in terms of performance I never suggest doing this. As stated above, the Shocker is simply not designed to accept hose fittings. Parts that are made to use hose fittings have the air input piped directly into the component, not into a housing (shocker body) then into another housing (bolt sleeve). What this does is compresses air pressure moving through the system a lot more than it needs to be, and the results often end up being worse.
Like I said, for tinkering it can be a fun mod to perform on other guns, but unless you used a completely new firing assembly with dedicated porting, it'd probably be a waste on a Shocker.

Shocker Dreambolt / Mini-Shocker Concept:
One night I had a dream that I created a bolt like the one displayed below. It works very similar to the stock bolt, except the porting is in a different position, and the bolt guide is shortened.

I didn't think much of this at the time (probably because there would be no benefit, except possibly more air consumption). However several days later I started working on some modified designs that would essentially take a mainstream marker and move the dump chamber into the frame (hence the design behind the Invert Mini). Naturally one of the first markers I tried out was a Shocker, and this is what the results yielded:

I made the addition of a new component inside the frame that would serve as the dump chamber. Using the functional model I created above (and others like it), pressure to move the bolt would be piped along the back side of the added dump chamber component, to the solenoid which has been moved to the bottom of the frame. This eliminated the use of the solenoid inserts so the body height is decreased by nearly 3/8" by that alone. Additionally, the overall diameter of the firing assembly has been decreased thanks to the loss of the dump chamber.
This would be very well-performing and have similar results to the stock assembly, except for perhaps a slightly increased input pressure I expect. The relevance to the "dreambolt" is that the porting being located within the bolt sleeve itself allows for a massive reduction in body length, virtually eliminating the entire fire chamber. Without that difference, the length of the fire chamber would still exist in the marker, even though the chamber had been moved to the frame.

Anyways, I applied some quick compound-loft milling to the marker, and made these comparisons with the current Shocker NXT:

It's interesting that this quick "milling" attempt above resembles the milling used on the Invert Mini marker. It shows that the aesthetic designers for that marker were trying their best to go for the absolute lightest weight reduction possible, while still maintaining a simple, sleek look.

Shocker Maelstrom Drop-In:
Information for this may be available in the future.

Thumper Prototype:
Thumper is the name for a series of marker designs I created that involve a closed bolt firing assembly similar in layout to the current Shocker SFT/NXT (elongated bolt with a guide component inside). In essence, Thumper answers the question "how would you make the open bolt Shocker into a closed bolt marker". This is one of my favorite designs simply because it's the most complicated assembly I've ever created. I originally came up with the first design in 2003 but have revisited it many times since then, every few months or so. All the versions share the common function: The bolt is used to close the chamber and a moving bolt guide component is used to facilitate firing.
Some of the models I created would function very good (relatively speaking), some are unnecessarily complicated and would function a bit worse as a result, and the rest of them...well they wouldn't work at all. But I hadn't figured it out until I had been working the design for an hour (oops).
The most realistic, optimized, and reliable Thumper assembly has 19 o-rings total, more than half of them are moving seals at at least one point during the firing cycle. Of the moving seals, 7 of them are inside glands whereas the remaining 4 are outside glands...it's pretty funny.

Seen here with the single-solenoid version, using a Humphrey CRCB solenoid. Someday I plan to prototype at least one of these markers, just to see how it operates in reality, but it'll unforutnately be a long time before I get around to that.

Shadowmachine Prototpye:
This is another lightly Shocker-based design, also closed bolt, and also with many ways of completing the same task. I won't go into the specifics for IP concerns but needless to say it's a very different way of firing the same paintball. Notably, you can conceivably swap out one of the internal components, and switch the solenoid mounting section, and the marker would switch to open bolt.

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