BOTTLE BABY EPISODE I

 

With CO2 modelers, sooner rather than later there comes a time when the original method of charging the CO2 tank becomes apparently sub-optimal ~ in cost, in efficiency and in availability.

  When I first started to write this, it was to give more detailed advice to CO2MFer Steve who is considering the jump from cartridges to paintball bottles. The first draft of that went 6 paragraphs of the history of non-standard charging nozzles and I hadn’t still mentioned paintball CO2 bottles. So I’ll save that stuff for Bottle Baby Episode II, coming soon.

  Paintball bottles are used in the sport of Paintball to facilitate an external and tool-less interchangeable CO2 reservoir for paintball guns. They come in a variety of sizes (capacities) from 12 oz to 28 oz and sometimes larger. Co2 is sold by the pound and is dispensed in a mixture of liquid and gas depending upon temperature and volume. More on this later.

  These bottles can be found online and at some sporting goods stores and of course at Paintball parks, which usually have an on-site store not unlike a golf course pro shop where you can buy balls, clubs, spikes, and lime green Republican pants. A 20oz bottle will run you maybe thirty bucks.

  Of course, you can get these from Amazon for a few bucks less, but I want you to consider this. First ~ where are you going to get it filled? Your local paintball supplier is a struggling small businessman and is eager to keep you as a customer. You better believe he’s tired of yahoos coming in for full service for something he bought somewhere else. (Curiously, better than 60% of Them look like Eddie Vedder.)

Offer to buy two bottles if he’d fill them as part of the deal. His cost for the CO2 will be less than a buck, and you go home ready to fly, and cost-wise you probably end up on the + side of the deal. Next time you go to get them filled, take a couple of engines or models. I guarantee he will be fascinated by these, and he probably wants to see them run. There’s a guy in Sacramento at a paintball store that let me have gratis a few of these tiny, tiny used brass check valves from CO2 pistols for my evil experimentation. You’re building a relationship here that benefits you both. Dick’s Sporting Goods used to fill paintball bottles, but the ones in the dipshit republic where I live, California, stopped it when some shopping centers took a brave and principled stand against gun violence and banned stores from selling guns, ammo or anything resembling the same. So as a business model they’d rather sell shoes fabricated by 7-year-old “political” prisoners and religious slaves in China. Honestly, it’s enough to give hypocrisy a bad name.

Another good thing about buying from a B&M store is you can check to see if your bottle is “fresh.” On every bottle is a hard-etched date of manufacture₁. It is illegal to recharge the bottle if that date is more than five (5) years old. Most of those discount bottles you get off Amazon or EBay are discounted for a reason ~ a substantial chunk of their service life is effectively over. A bottle with an etched manufacture date of 2 years ago has 40% of service life taken away. If all he has a bunch of bottles no “fresher” than a year, he might give you a price cut, even more if you buy two. You’re building a relationship here.

The adapter can currently be found at Old Engine Bazaar run by Jiří Linka and runs roughly around 34 bucks. [link below] His service and shipping time is excellent and accepts PayPal or direct charge. While you’re at it pick yourself up a Gasparin motor for your next rig. It has a nozzle for the 2mm nipple used on most post-80s American engines and most if not all European makes. His listing says it’s for “US 12OZ bottle use for Paintball” but fits all size paintball bottles; the threaded valve is the same for all.

So, after all this, you ask yourself “Self, 35 bucks for the bottle, 5 bucks to fill it, and 40 bucks for the adapter, ain’t that a bit much, and isn’t talking to yourself a little disturbing?” Here’s the math ~ all the above is about eighty bucks. Let’s say you don’t cool your bottle first and only get 25 oz of co2 in your 28 oz bottle. Twenty-five ounces of CO2 is the equivalent of 708 grams of CO2 or 88 8-gram cartridges. A fifty-lot of Mr. Fizz cartridges on Amazon right now runs $27.99. [0.07¢ per gram]. So, to buy an equal amount as the 25 ounces you bought for 5 bucks in the paintball bottle would cost you $49.50 in cartridge form. Anyone who has used cartridges for any length of time knows the whole cartridge is rarely efficiently used, three full tank charges are usually the best one could hope for, so the effective amount of full aircraft tank charges optimistically be 80% of the theoretical quantity available. So maybe it’s a draw. UNTIL . . . your second charge of the tank ~ five bucks. The cartridges will still run you $49.50, again and again. So, at the second tank charge you’ve spent 85 bucks and have the tank and adapter, or you’ve spent 99 bucks and have 88 empty steel cartridges and 88 full.

So visit your local shop and get your first bottle and have it filled. While you’re waiting for your adapter to arrive, store your bottle in your fridge upright. Next time you have it filled, freeze it for a few hours and take it to the paintball store in a cooler or wrapped in a blanket. You’ll get a lot more liquid CO2 in the bottle the colder it is.

When this bottle setup paid for, maybe consider buying a smaller (12oz) bottle to have handy when your main one goes empty, to afford you some time to get to the PB store at your leisure for a refill.

Well good luck. Any questions feel free to ask. Here is the link where you can buy the adapter ↓

 

PAINTBALL BOTTLE ADAPTER

 

 

NOTES

₁ Check to see if the empty weight of the bottle is etched upon the bottle as well. If not, ask if Eddie Vedder can weigh it empty before he fills it. Write that weight down and tape it to the bottle when you get home.

₂ Got friends or a flying club interested in flying CO2 motors also or do you live far away from a place to fill your bottle? Consider a 5 lb. tank. (A 2 ½lb tank is also available, but generally they cost more than twice the 5lb size. Go figure.) A 5lb tank on Amazon runs $60/free ship. Now you have a much wider base of refill places available to you ~ welding gas suppliers, aquarium fish suppliers, home brewer suppliers and probably more. The valves assembly to connect to the paintball tank is about 50 bucks. But it holds the equivalent of 283 CO2 bulbs. Yowza! Be sure to have it filled just before the expiration date, its been known that modelers have had the 5 year tank expiration run out before the tank is empty!

Well that’s the basics of using Paintball tanks for charging Co2 model engine systems. If I have left anything out, please comment below. I have left out any discussion about SodaStream™ bottles as they are more or less a different method requiring different equipment and has its own pros and cons.