I am looking to replicate the work of another who devised the below sorting system which is for a hobby of mine. It sounds like the injection molded bb is being rotated and somehow sorted based on how it dynamically spins or possibly wobbles versus it's original diameter. Does anyone know of a system/product that exists that does this?
"BBs are a major limiting factor in the accuracy of airsoft guns, but how limiting precisely and how much improvement can be made precisely is yet to be properly quantified. To this end we sought to construct a machine which would sort, or segregate into bins, BBs based on their mass distribution consistency and then test its efficacy against a variety of popular brands of airsoft BB. The results were substantial improvements across the board, with universal reductions in average group size and broad improvements in regards to grouping standard deviation, maximum group size, minimum group size. In terms of percentages, improvements averaged approximately 10-25% depending on the specific metric. In summary, injection moulded BBs show marked improvements in regards to precision when binned with our method. This, combined with other research undertaken, have yielded startlingly large performance gains with relative ease, inviting further questions regarding the actual mechanical limits of the 6mm smoothbore-backspin system in regards to ultimate accuracy.
What if I could bin BBs, that is to say sort them by quality, to tighten groups and kick out those pesky fliers? Technically this isn't new, people have been trying to sort BBs for decades now in pursuit of better accuracy. Placing rounds, one by one, on a crack scale and sorting by mass, measuring with calipers for diameter, and so on. Clearly though, for my efforts, such a process would have to be automated as there is no way I'd do the airsoft equivalent of “handloading.” That said it has the possibility to substantially improve accuracy.
There is another problem with this though: it is fairly easy to sort BBs by diameter and weight, in fact a decent factory should have already done this for you with a quality BB. It is possible I could build a machine to do this to even tighter tolerances, but what I wanted to do was test for something much harder: sphericity and density consistency. You see, we all know bubbles are the bane of a BB's existence, and so we regularly break them open in tests to qualitatively assess their consistency. That is only part of the issue though. Plastics don't typically come in sufficient density to make BBs, thus dopants are added to increase the mass. For example when certain ferrous dopants are used, the BBs can become mildly magnetic as some people may have observed. Why do I bring this up? Because the blending of those dopants with the plastic may be imperfect, there may be settling in the injection mould before the plastic hardens, or any of a couple other potential sources of inconsistency, and so the BB may be visibly perfect when split however it may have worse mass distribution than a BB with significant bubbles. How do you test this? How do you even test for voids in the BB without cutting it open? Simple: spin up the BB, nice and fast, and it will be forced to rotate around its center of mass. The worse the BB wobbles, the worse it is. Issues with sphericity can also be readily observed here. So how about a machine that individually spins each BB, measures the difference between geometric center and center of mass, and bins the BBs accordingly?"
"BBs are a major limiting factor in the accuracy of airsoft guns, but how limiting precisely and how much improvement can be made precisely is yet to be properly quantified. To this end we sought to construct a machine which would sort, or segregate into bins, BBs based on their mass distribution consistency and then test its efficacy against a variety of popular brands of airsoft BB. The results were substantial improvements across the board, with universal reductions in average group size and broad improvements in regards to grouping standard deviation, maximum group size, minimum group size. In terms of percentages, improvements averaged approximately 10-25% depending on the specific metric. In summary, injection moulded BBs show marked improvements in regards to precision when binned with our method. This, combined with other research undertaken, have yielded startlingly large performance gains with relative ease, inviting further questions regarding the actual mechanical limits of the 6mm smoothbore-backspin system in regards to ultimate accuracy.
What if I could bin BBs, that is to say sort them by quality, to tighten groups and kick out those pesky fliers? Technically this isn't new, people have been trying to sort BBs for decades now in pursuit of better accuracy. Placing rounds, one by one, on a crack scale and sorting by mass, measuring with calipers for diameter, and so on. Clearly though, for my efforts, such a process would have to be automated as there is no way I'd do the airsoft equivalent of “handloading.” That said it has the possibility to substantially improve accuracy.
There is another problem with this though: it is fairly easy to sort BBs by diameter and weight, in fact a decent factory should have already done this for you with a quality BB. It is possible I could build a machine to do this to even tighter tolerances, but what I wanted to do was test for something much harder: sphericity and density consistency. You see, we all know bubbles are the bane of a BB's existence, and so we regularly break them open in tests to qualitatively assess their consistency. That is only part of the issue though. Plastics don't typically come in sufficient density to make BBs, thus dopants are added to increase the mass. For example when certain ferrous dopants are used, the BBs can become mildly magnetic as some people may have observed. Why do I bring this up? Because the blending of those dopants with the plastic may be imperfect, there may be settling in the injection mould before the plastic hardens, or any of a couple other potential sources of inconsistency, and so the BB may be visibly perfect when split however it may have worse mass distribution than a BB with significant bubbles. How do you test this? How do you even test for voids in the BB without cutting it open? Simple: spin up the BB, nice and fast, and it will be forced to rotate around its center of mass. The worse the BB wobbles, the worse it is. Issues with sphericity can also be readily observed here. So how about a machine that individually spins each BB, measures the difference between geometric center and center of mass, and bins the BBs accordingly?"
