November 23, 2004
THE GLORY AND THE SHAME
Shooting Stars: Design team optimizes valve response time for paintball gun (Paul Teague, Design News, 11/8/04)
In a modified version of the football team huddle, engineers from Smart Parts Inc. and Humphrey Products Company convened in a conference room in Loyalhanna, PA, last year to draw up a game plan for dominating the competition in a vastly different sport: tournament paintball.A relatively small group of people want to run around in the woods and splatter each other in paint. It would be easy to make fun of them, and of the American culture from which they spring: chickenhawks, teen geeks, weekend warriors, etc. The fact that there is an industry dedicated to enabling the paint warriors is equally easy fodder for critics of American capitalism. While people go hungry, . . . . We can all fill in the blanks.When they broke, they had a strategy for developing a new solenoid valve that they felt would set a new standard in paintball markers—the guns players use to splatter opponents with tiny balls of paint.
But this was to be no ordinary valve. It had to be backward compatible so it would match the footprint of an existing valve. It had to be easy to maintain. And, it had to perform better than existing valves. How much better? A lot. For one key aspect of the valve—operating pressure—the engineers aimed for about a 125 percent improvement.
They hit their target. The new valve, the result of intense collaboration between Smart Parts, pneumatic-technology supplier Humphrey, and Humphrey's Japanese partner Koganei, could well surprise the market with its capabilities. It's a 7V device that provides a higher rated pressure (225 psig vs. 100 psig) than competitors' models, faster firing rate (an expected 28 balls per second vs 24), and shorter cycle (or, on-off) time than the previous valve. Humphrey engineers say their tests show that despite the 225-psig rating, the valve actually seals at 300 psig. The valve also has fewer parts than the one Smart Parts used previously, and weighs less. Though Smart Parts won't disclose the actual valve weight, the company says it is 1.1 gm lighter than the previous valve.
And yet, isn't this glorious? "Paintball" is a $2 billion per year industry that could never exist in anything but the freest of markets. No central planner would ever spend any money to develop technology for hobbyists to go out into the woods and shoot each other with paint. Only a free people, with a free market, in fact, only with Americans, could we find some very smart engineers spending a year (down from an expected 18 months) developing a new, faster and more powerful solenoid valve for use in paintball guns. When analysts write about new technology, increased productivity, or the growth of the economy, it tends to be either very dry or esoteric. This is the real face of the American economy: a paintball gun that will shoot a pellet 125% harder with a 25% increase in its rate of fire. I sure want one. Don't you?
Posted by David Cohen at November 23, 2004 12:55 PMAnd don't forget, that valve, or one like it, will have other uses.
Posted by: Mike Morley at November 23, 2004 1:02 PMNot just America. I had a go at this dreadful pastime about 10 years ago. Never again...
A group of us went along one Sunday thinking it would be a hoot, and a chance to act out those war-movie fantasies we'd been nurturing since we were schoolboys.
Once inside, we were issued with the bog-standard hand-pump action guns and sent into the forest. Talk about lambs to the slaughter! It was hell in there.
A bunch of balding, beer-bellied, wheezing amateurs in jeans and t-shirts up against these obsessive, face-painted and khaki-clad weekend commando types, who, very unfairly we thought, had brought their own semi-automatic weapons.
Almost immediately, as we fumbled pathetically with our second-rate equipment, we were hit by an unbelievable barrage of paintball pellets. And I tell you what, those things bloody hurt.
I suppose the moral is that none of it would have happened if only I'd gone to Church instead...
Posted by: Brit at November 23, 2004 1:14 PMBrit: So you're saying that while the British response is to quit, the American response is to build a better solenoid?
Posted by: David Cohen at November 23, 2004 1:36 PMThe couple of times I've played were a hoot. We brought our own group with ages from 16 to 50 (me), rented our guns so everyone was equal and played outside over varying terrain. The last time we played (just before 9/11) a couple of Special Forces soldiers on leave joined us - the fiance of one of us and his buddy. The highlight of my very brief career was tagging one of them. Wonder where they are now?
The wife of one of the guys I brought later called my wife ("What did he do to my husband!") with a play-by-play of the 15 minutes it took him to get out of the car, walk up the stairs into the bedroom and out of his clothes.
Posted by: Rick T. at November 23, 2004 2:03 PMIf you want a better example of the free market at work, just look at the impact of professional sports on orthopedic medicine. The need to get a football player with a knee injury back in service has created the entire arthroscopsy technology for example.
Posted by: Bart at November 23, 2004 2:21 PMI was talking to one of my ex-students today and he had just returned from San Diego were he was trying out for a professional paintball team. Incredible country!
Posted by: Bartman at November 23, 2004 3:03 PMDavid:
Six months ago you posted a moving piece on how hard yardwork followed by repose with the family and a fine cigar was the epitome of all that was good about American life. Now you are waxing poetic about how the City on the Hill is best appreciated by running around the woods shooting paint at stangers.
Is there anything you want to talk about?
Posted by: Peter B at November 23, 2004 6:48 PMBack in the early 80's, a young client of mine who had inherited way too much money brought me a prospectus on a start up company devoted to making paint ball guns. I told him that from a legal standpoint it looked fine, but this was sure to be a fad. He put in 10 grand; he got out for over 50 grand. The American way.
Posted by: Dan at November 23, 2004 7:15 PMDavid:
At the risk of a tongue bath, you are clearly the most gifted poster here.
I'm trying to figure out why that solenoid can't eliminate camshafts...
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at November 23, 2004 9:11 PMAs some who plays paintball, I don't see what benefit that rate of fire has. The problem isn't in the solenoid, but in the feeder system. You try to shoot that fast and you'll chop.
As for playing with real soldiers, that can be a hoot because paintball markers fire quite a bit differently from a gun (at any significant range, arcing matters, plus you can see the incoming rounds with a chance of doging) and a good bush will easily stop paintballs. As a result they have a strong tendency to do the wrong thing.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at November 23, 2004 11:42 PMDavid:
"So you're saying that... the British response is to quit".
Well after a couple more Quixotic sallies resulted in a thorough paint-drenching plus severe bruising to the solar plexus and the pride, we did indeed follow the advice of WC Fields:
"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it."
I got my wargaming jollies 25 years ago at the Basic School in Quantico, Va. I'll pass on paintball.
These are the kinds of industries that will continue to crop up as productivity continues to climb and it takes less and less people to produce the "necessities" like clothing and beer.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at November 24, 2004 10:38 AMPeter: I need something to keep the squirrels away from the hammock and the deer away from the lawn.
Jeff: Thanks. And, ewww.
Posted by: David Cohen at November 24, 2004 12:26 PM