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A broke stripper in Baton Rouge

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scotton

scotton

Member
Nov 2, 2016
818
1,046
TX, United States
I've identified a weakness in my 3D printed strippers and moderators. The weakness is their weakness.

I was getting ready for the Cajuns Classic and I wanted to use the new vented moderator design but the dope was off on the closer yardages and I didn't have time to re-dope. I decided to go with the tried and true stripper, since my dope was pretty solid for it.

I got out to the bayou, had a slow start and then I got into my groove. Then, with four lanes left, I went into shotgun mode. Really struggled. Checked the scope mounts, stock screws, smoked crack, nuthin!

I was sighting in for day 2 and I reached out to make sure the stripper was tight. That's when I realized it had broken 3/4 of the way through and was hanging on by a thread!

20230404_213036.jpg

Well, mystery solved. I thought I had packed a spare, but all I could find was the vented moderator. I had about 10 minutes to get re-zeroed and get the dope figured out. I think 20 more minutes would have been great. Surprisingly, I only did 3 shots worse than day 1, but it was not a good feeling having no idea where the pellet was going.

The vented moderator is also susceptible to snapping in half, so I went back to the drawing board. I was thinking I could print some baffles to go inside the HW97 muzzle tube, and maybe print a new end cap with some vent holes in it. I wasn't really feeling this, and as I printed the 3rd of 5 baffles, I had an idea. I really like the cone concept of the air stripper, but I don't want anything that is going to hang on the outside of the end cap. So why not make a vented endcap with a cone on the inside? So that's what I did.

vented_cap_cone.jpg


When it prints, the cone is a little narrower and the air holes are a little smaller, but I'll test this out tomorrow and see if the concept works.
 
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Though it's been over a decade since I attended Cajuns, I figured you must've run into Suzie Pong at Gatormans' Gentlemen's Club. However given her talent with ping-pong balls, ain't no way she'd be broke! In fact she made a small fortune off me by landing ping-pong balls in my cocktail with uncanny accuracy.😲 Fascinated me almost into the poor house!
 
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Ezana4CE said:
I’ll admit it, the title of this thread intrigued me. Didn’t really know what to expect.
Click to expand...
Total click bait.... I was expecting a tale of epic proportions like "The Hangover" meets "Pretty Woman" where a one legged exotic dancer from the bayou had a rags to riches story like a cajun Julia Roberts and wins the Miss Crawfish pageant.

But I did learn from this thread that it is important to make sure to check that your stripper is tight or else you could fire a shot and break the stripper... It's time to get a 3D printer.


-PJ
 
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AirNGasman said:
Though it's been over a decade since I attended Cajuns, I figured you must've run into Suzie Pong at Gatormans' Gentlemen's Club. However given her talent with ping-pong balls, ain't no way she'd be broke! In fact she made a small fortune off me by landing ping-pong balls in my cocktail with uncanny accuracy.😲 Fascinated me almost into the poor house!
Click to expand...
Great story. Now I'm going to go throw up while I ponder why we can't find a nice, sane-ish gal to settle you down. Maggyyyyeeyyee doesn't count, she's crazier than most of your exes.
 
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PelletJunkie said:
Total click bait.... I was expecting a tale of epic proportions like "The Hangover" meets "Pretty Woman" where a one legged exotic dancer from the bayou had a rags to riches story like a cajun Julia Roberts and wins the Miss Crawfish pageant.

But I did learn from this thread that it is important to make sure to check that your stripper is tight or else you could fire a shot and break the stripper... It's time to get a 3D printer.


-PJ
Click to expand...
You were looking for the post of the same name by one Ronaldo "circus freaks and one armed geeks" Robinson.
Someday I'll share the hilarious group text that Ron sent during the Cajuns, where he basically said that he used to dominate at the Cajuns but his dog wouldn't let him go anymore. It was a real pick-me-up while I was trying to figure out why I was struggling to hit the face plate.
 
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I'm going to call the vented cone cap a qualified success. I shot it today at 50 yards in ridiculous wind and it did as well as the other strippers in ridiculous wind. And the pellet holes were perfectly round. I checked it with the chrony and it's right on.
Interestingly, I had to click down 25 clicks at 50 yards to get it zeroed. I was worried about what that would do at 10 yards, but the 10 yard clicks are the same, just 25 clicks off. The vented moderator had about a 7 click POI change compared to the stripper, and the short yardage clicks were off by a yard. So I had to shoot a 10 yard target with the 11 yard clicks, etc. So the new vented cone cap appears to line up with the clicks for the stripper, with a 25 click offset.

I'll be testing and comparing all three next time there is less wind. If I think the vented cone cap needs improvement, the next thing to try is to make the cone longer/deeper so that it gives me about a 6mm gap from the crown to the cone. Right now the gap is about 50 mm because the muzzle brake is about 75mm deep. Might be worth printing a cap with a 45mm longer cone to try it, but I don't think it will be a massive improvement.
 
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I made it out to shoot some groups at 50 yards today. The wind was still pretty strong, but fairly consistent.
In order from worst to best for group size, here's what I wound up with:
Worst - Vented cap with long cone
Next - Air stripper
Next - Vented moderator
Best - Vented cap with short cone

Since I've shot a few matches with the air stripper and it's fine, I was just hoping the one of the vented cone caps would be as good or better. And the short one is, so I'll plan to use this going forward. The vented moderator had a couple of shots go off the paper, but it was a decent group. Not a fan of the POI change for it, both the drop and the 2 inches to the right. I was surprised that the long cone cap shot so much worse than the short cone cap, but the paper doesn't lie. On the target, the air stripper is top left, the vented moderator is top right, the short cone cap is bottom left and the long vented cone cap is bottom right. The Xs are point of aim. The shots in the middle were warm up shots.

20230406_135130.jpg
 
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Warning: I'm about to do a dangerous maneuver that I believe in professional "dance" circles is referred to as the "flip flop".
On a pleasant Easter afternoon, I noticed that my grass was in need of mowing, so I went to the club.
The goal was to check the 10, 25 and 50 yard dopes for the vented cone cap. I decided to also check the air stripper and the vented moderator as long as I have the targets set up.

The procedure was to sight in at 25 yards with the vented cone cap and shoot a good 5 shot group at each target, then switch to the stripper and repeat, then the vented moderator. Then I went back to the vented cone cap and repeated the process for all three devices. Then I quit because the wind was starting to pick up.

Here is what happened.
All three were identical at 10 yards (52 clicks up).
The vented cone cap and the vented moderator had identical clicks (42) at 50 yards.
The air stripper was flatter, with 48 clicks at 50 yards.
The vented moderator had a POI shift at 25 yards (0), it was shooting 8 clicks low at 5 clicks to the right.

So what is this telling me? One, with the POI shift for the vented moderator, I think the length of the tube is causing an influence on the pellet. This is a springer, so I think that anything we can do to get the pellet out in the clear air faster is going to be a good idea.
Two, I think the air stripper is doing a better job of stripping the dirty air away from the pellet, which is giving it a slightly higher BC.

So I've gone back to the drawing board on the air stripper and designed a new version that it thicker. I'm also going to try flipping the triangular cut-outs. The reason for the shape of the cut outs was because printing circular holes in structural walls causes sagging. However, when I first designed the stripper I didn't realize that I would be printing it upside down, so the triangles are actually facing the wrong direction. Here are the two designs I'm talking about. I may play around with the shape of the air holes if I feel like I can get better dirty air flow. Possibly go higher with the air holes on the green one with more of a bevel at the top. Either way, the tube wall is twice as thick as the original, so it should be stronger.


strippers.jpg
 
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