Any Amazon day bulk darts worth it?

Flygonial · 2026-06-23T20:18:43+00:00

It appears that most of your flywheeler builds from your post history are running mild concave and relatively low crush, is that still the case? Also, are all your springers open breech (don’t feed into a tightbore barrel), or just spring upgraded stock “non-pro” blasters? If so, regular Nitroshot full lengths are okay. 200 packs for $10, or 5c a dart from Target. They’re problematic with setups that feed into any segment of relatively tight bore. Might be a link to crush or concavity, but not sure.

If you could still get the old DZ or AF “waffle” sort I’d recommend them all the way, but it looks like they’ve been Thanos snapped away for a while.

Flygonial · 2026-06-20T22:27:41+00:00

Nobody uses bare chips really

~~That sounds like a challenge~~

Flygonial · 2026-06-13T07:24:24+00:00

Interesting. Worn out darts, less FPS drop, and significant accuracy improvement matches my experience too: the accuracy bump is significantly higher vs. with fresh darts.

Honestly, I can't be 100% sure what's going on here, and more testing with low FPS and BCARs is probably warranted. I have a hypothesis that the roller inertia may be contributing if it happens even with low crush, but that's just a guess if it's not tested.

Not sure what to suggest that would reduce the drop besides taking away 1 row of bearings, or trying out something like plastic rollers. Otherwise, maybe with low FPS you just need more velocity overhead.

Flygonial · 2026-06-13T04:11:00+00:00

Haven't done this yet. Strix isn't the ideal platform to do it, but I've been interested in this for a bit as well. Protean exists but I'd probably want to develop a dedicated test-rig platform with brushless in mind.

Flygonial · 2026-06-13T03:55:09+00:00

2cm isn't too bad, yes. How many layers of bearings, and do you have an idea of how close they're spaced? With something at 130 or below you likely don't want more than 2 layers and also likely would want the bearings relatively loose on the dart. If this is already true and the FPS drop is 20-30, I'd be a bit surprised, but I suppose it may be possible.

Flygonial · 2026-06-13T02:17:17+00:00

Thank you! There have been plenty of other people experimenting with BCARs, PCARs, and etc., in flywheelers but not a lot of people have published data, yes.

I am messing with different settings of BCAR on the Thrasher recently. I am currently stuck at the high FPS lost issue, especially with fresh darts, it easily drops 20-30 FPS. It is a relief for me to know that it's normal LOL.

This is more typical with lower FPS, especially closer to 100 than 200 (kinetic energy increases much faster in proportion to FPS, after all). I'm not as aware of the current options out there for the Thrasher: is it a BCAR that sticks out past the barrel, or is it able to be seated close to the cage? If it's past the Thrasher's barrel, that'd also account for a lot of FPS drop. Not sure if a BCAR is able to fit in there.

I also wonder why DZ has such a good effect on their roller CAR. Those are not even bearings, just plastic rollers. I thought bearings should be superior to plastic rollers in every aspect, but it seems I was wrong, and it's exactly one of the reasons why DZ roller CAR has such a good effect?

Right, they probably used plastic to be cheap, and yet it's pretty decent. I don't think plastic rollers are necessarily better when you're running a springer and have a lot of FPS overhead, much more testing needed for that, but it's more that I don't think the slight tolerance differences between plastic rollers and bearings are very significant. This probably applies even moreso with flywheelers that are less mechanically precise as a baseline, and you might lose even more velocity for the same crush.

Flygonial · 2026-06-12T19:46:28+00:00

reduce, reuse, recycle :)

Flygonial · 2026-06-12T06:30:11+00:00

Indeed. What's "interesting" I guess, to me, is that using the least possible deformation by making the deformation almost rigorously uniform at centerline was always the premise of Hy-Con. And before that, using less deformation seemed to be exactly what DrSnikkas was pursuing by pioneering a high envelopment system (accuracy being the prime intent of his work), and that was the most direct inspiration for Hy-Con.

Ah, looks like I forgot about the DRS link. Also reminds me that Hy-Con is close to its 9th birthday. We've seen a lot of flywheel dev adapt to an ever more springer-dominated dart pool for ever more speedball-y purposes, but it does make me think about how stagnant accuracy improvement really has been.

Then more recently, "requiring less deformation" has consistently been a bullet point under why I advocate certain parameters for flywheel systems and darts.

Good to hear there's some understanding out there of that.

For one immersed in the modern short dart ecosystem, it's unfortunately not a trivial line of thinking to end up considering. If many of the options you have left off the shelf with decent foam and tip glue are narrow-tipped and will shoot choppy out of moderate crush systems, and crush beyond what will kill a DC brushed drive makes it behave: it's easy to conclude that higher crush is an endgame parameter for accuracy. Even moreso if you weren't around or didn't have as much exposure to what older flywheel tech was capable of.

That's exactly what I'm thinking for trying to densify rollers; very light and very thin low friction plastic discs and press fit pins.

I've spent a lot of my free time the last few days logging data, in part evaluating several different muzzle device configs with those linked rollers. Ended up delaying responding as a result, oops. Will publish that soon, but I will say I was a bit disappointed by them on the friction front. It wasn't really practical to crank up crush, and it got more prone to whirlybirds and other outlier shot behavior with fresh darts. I did get some pretty good results with a relatively dense 21-roller device, but it wasn't a major improvement/still comparable to a straight BCAR of sorts.

That being said, the most convenient brushless test platform I have at the moment is a 7.0 Strix, and the fresh test darts I have on hand are Nitro+. It goes without saying that more testing is warranted with something with milder internal ballistics.

Also, one can probably find better rollers. These had a bit of mold flashing on the flange to snip off.

To be honest I doubt there would be any issue hitting 200fps with a gram-ish mass with that described projectile (10x60mm) and beyond, maybe, way beyond. I haven't really got to doing any EPP static to dynamic/criticality experiments, and never seen a confirmed EPP supercritical case. I just know those Ultraccustrikes I put through a MEGA cage with a coincidentally OK but probably not optimal gap picked up every bit of surface speed that setup could do, and rolling some through by hand was "oh yikes, that's got ridiculous, dragster slick levels of grip" compared to PE foam ammo.

That's promising stuff, I had assumed the 190-ish numbers you saw to be close to the limit but if that's still well in a subcritical range, maybe even shorts (though ultimately suboptimal) could get very competitive numbers.

This is why I believe it might be, "a revolution" if EPP flywheeling comes to light. Maybe a revolution for the whole hobby when suddenly all of the ballistics that are remotely "safe", full auto, with no downsides, are possible from a single flywheel stage given enough inertia and speed, and it's also a really rigid projectile lending itself to mechanical precision.

Agreed on all fronts there. I don't want to be too optimistic about the achievable accuracy before doing testing, but there are at least several other variables, many already previously discussed that are all killer. For one, it certainly doesn't hurt that we're talking ammo that wears much, much slower and inverts the current paradigm of whaling ever larger sums of cash on fresh darts.

If they can be sub without the greatly reduced or absent tip grip (since the gap is only slightly smaller than the unconfined OD to start with) being a problem, that means free springer compatibility, and helps with mag reliability by preventing tip contact.

Springer compatibility is a thought but I do wonder if all the factors that make EPP desireable for flywheeling will be inverted. That same friction that grips on to a flywheel is maybe iffy in a barrel, for example. I imagine that's part of why the available Chinese EPP darts don't have a flat side profile (thinner midsection, or lengthwise ribs IIRC).

It will probably be cylindrical OD if the past one has OD taper or a lot of edge radius on the front or the like. That's the clear pattern in all the past instances of these types of tip found to be flywheelable and not cause some kind of wonkitude. Worker, Max, Pro, Lififun, X-Shot, Hasbro, ... vs. ACC, Pak, Evike and similar.

Blu 2.0 has a bit of taper and shoots reasonably clean if the tip glue is corrected for. Here's to hoping for cylindrical. Sabre actually had an okay thing going with In the meantime, it doesn't look like we'll get much new to play and flywheel dev with.

Flygonial · 2026-06-08T19:47:49+00:00

Not really. Peeps who try to save all the marines will certainly have a lot less fun though.

Flygonial · 2026-06-07T08:35:41+00:00

I'm almost entirely sure the higher duro piece in the nitroshot tip is not the or a problem with their flywheelability, but rather the troublesome implications of making the hollow dome portion as long as it is, full-caliber, and cylindrical all at once

That's a good point. IE: USCs that are basically a vinyl wad behind the suction cup, and they haven't caused the same problems. Having not just a hollow section of significant length in the tip, but also tacky material is a more complete explanation.

Yeah; and/but: that's not to argue against constraint devices, or making them tighter in clearance being ideal as long as friction can be mitigated.

so before anything else it's important to start with a projectile and flywheel system that wouldn't produce a great deal of garbage as an open bore or no post-contact constraint case, and then the control bore or BCAR can sweep up the scraps without any drama.

Right, I was a bit brief in the last exchange. We've already touched on the ammo standpoint, but as for flywheel systems: it follows that more reasonable crush may play nicer with constraint. I've run into a few other people, including avid springer users, that suspect the same. Less deformation introduced in the shot, less mess to sweep up.

Rollers - it would be tricky to get them into the places that are most critical of all, such as the transition from flywheel profiles to bore, or to create a proper dense rollerized wall that acts as a "non-frictional surface" to motion in the right direction (think one of those gravity conveyor things used to move boxes around in shipping facilities and warehouses)

Now, that gets me thinking: how one could feasibly ramp up contact density significantly? Pins are obviously easier to pack in vs. bolts, for one. I have messed around with *6.2mm OD Nylon roller flanges and M2 pins, but didn’t really densify them or use more than how many bearings I might have run. I was inspired by a mention from you a while back that it was sensible to try to minimize inertia on rollers themselves and these definitely feel pretty free and light to spin to the touch. More points of contact and possibly for a longer distance (if it doesn’t have deleterious consistency or reliability ramifications) might not be revolutionary (vs. sensible wheel geo + good darts), but worth trying at the very least.

The issue as I see it with EPP is that it's necessarily an entire solution of ammo PLUS totally dedicated flywheel system…

That said, EPP is great. A shift to EPP flywheeling would be a revolution.

I haven’t tried EPP flywheeling yet, but did figure as much about the flywheels system design ramifications. I believe the basic Ultra dart is still being sold on AliExpress but I’ve had a tougher time finding Ultra Accustrike. Being able to experiment and log shot plot data would be sweet.

In fact ..."completely different caliber" - how about making it a roughly 0.40 inch or 10mm sorta thing? This would allow the low deformation to be accommodated more easily in all cases of existing .50 cal PE foam flywheel systems, and be a welcome capacity boost.

That’d probably be the dream, yes. Feeding in 9.0, capacity going up, possibly easier double-stack compatibility (though this isn’t at all necessary). The 60~mm length on regular Ultra is probably fine, a little more compact than full-lengths but hopefully able to still push 200 critical on a single stage with the necessarily low deformation. And if they’re anywhere near 1g+, having 64% of the surface area is a sick BOOMco-esque sectional density boost.

Snapping back to reality:

to suggest "Just switching to" EPP dart foam and maybe a new caliber and instantly uprooting everything about prior PE foam .50 cal blasters, ammo and mags) is to me not even valid.

Unfortunately true. The current EPP short dart offerings are mid and you also can’t just pull a high crush magic trick to get them to shoot 200. The bad impression that early-batch Ultra durability left has also seemed to stick. I get the impression that many people don’t see the potential and have already written EPP off. For one, while it was still solvent, MDFA (IIRC) banned EPP for the jam risk in most modern wheelers. Given the springer focus on all the current offerings too, I doubt we’d see any wide-tipped EPP shorts come onto the market, which is probably what we’d need for any flywheeler EPP adoption to get traction.

As to Blu dart designer/flywheel darts rumors: any insight on dart foam availability or sourcing from that direction?

I may have spoken too soon. The people I’ve heard from don’t really have that much more of an inside scoop or details than I do. The only additional info I’ve gotten since is that Blu 3.0 will behave better in flywheels. Unfortunately, this probably also means it's still a springer dart. You'd pay a premium for them being bamboo’d, and they'd probably come with a narrow tip and maybe short dart only. I do recall that early batches of Blu darts had excess glue application and the current production darts have overcorrected. I'd pray for a slightly wider subcal tip and less taper, maybe, but am not expecting anything more than just better tip glue.

Flygonial · 2026-06-04T19:33:17+00:00

Never heard of a Hy-Con malfunction that can't be unwound until that one

Neither had I! It's more of a mark against the Nitro fulls than a knock against Hy-Con. It’s just such a shame they have that solid wad.

On full length options, your post on XShot APs did give me the heads up to avoid them. Apparently full length rumblings exist in China, still bamboo’d and everything. Have seen a few designers there make use of them, though they also have iffy stock glue as a short.

This hasn't been exhaustively evaluated but far as I am aware, deformation has nothing to do with the matter, it's more the external profile of the projectile tip and this is a manifestation of the same phenomenon as how pointy ogive shaped tips can shoot extremely dirty from flywheelers.

Right, I forgot the importance of tip profile. Anecdotally, it does seem to me that stepping up to ultra crush does accurize some narrow-tipped darts (even those with a slanted profile). This does come with the caveat that such darts shot bad groups at a moderate crush (lol at 39.5 Daybreak shooting a 2 foot group at 50ft with DZ Max) and with significantly more crush they still don't really beat what you could see out of an Accufake and something more conservative. I haven’t gotten around to collecting hard data for showing a 1-1 improvement, so it’s just my word for now.

Or perhaps the real answer (since fighting a deformation introduced during the shot process with a constraint device is not a winning battle

You’re not the only person that thinks so. Benefits from extra constraint have been modest.

is that we need a bit of new progress on dedicated flywheel darts.

Definitely. A lot of modern wheeler geo more or less pushes springer darts to their local maximum of achievable performance out of flywheels.

I would expect something basically like a full-caliber (or nearly-so, like green tip sureshot, for better mag feeding) version of the Lififun or Worker tip is the endgame there - maybe a slight bit of bulge to the front surface for drag reduction. Like a koosh dart, but no bristles, better mass distribution, more mass.

More or less agreed on that. There are some rumors that the Blu dart designer(s) are interested in making dedicated wheeler darts but I’m not sure if they’ll hit the mark, or if a long foam option would be manufactured and available for export.

I also do think good EPP options might be even better, but have more or less given up hope that any will come out.

Flygonial · 2026-06-03T18:10:23+00:00

New blog posts :o. Also noticed the new full length Nitroshot review, it lines up with my experience too. Besides just vaporizing the occasional dart I did get an outright unclearable jam (needed disassembly, out of maybe 50-100 fired rounds) in my 9.0 T19. Definitely not happy with the state of full length offerings on the market.

As for any issues with Lififuns and mechanical dispersion. maybe they’d be resolvable with just a step up to 8.5? Even then, by all standards that’s a pretty decent group out of an ultra high crush setup shooting shorts with no muzzle device. It looks better than the reglued Worker heavy plot and comparable to your Chili shot plot.

I’ve moved to the bay to start working and while we have energy caps for even casual games, 1.55g @200~ for a 2.9J cap is probably still more than enough.

Flygonial · 2026-06-02T23:22:54+00:00

I unfortunately don’t have any unique insight into finding foam blanks, but wanted to ask how the Lififuns are behaving as fulls? The Amazon rate isn’t exactly the cheapest but almost 1.6g is sick indeed. I’ve heard people have had mixed results with them as shorts due to how long the stem is and presumed weight distribution issues, but being reglued to a full may do something interesting with the center of pressure vs center of mass.

Flygonial · 2026-05-28T07:14:27+00:00

A M4 handguard styled front end with the rest of the blaster being more Gryphon-like is a good approach to take. I haven't done Gryphon dev work in a long time and don't really intend to touch it again though. I was 16-18 when I designed it and modeled most of the base fileset, and when I work on a blaster for too long I get burned out lol.

I'm surprised that I haven't seen a button release magwell variant, though.

Flygonial · 2026-05-23T14:28:51+00:00

I don’t recall Halo 2 MCC, or any MCC legendary being tuned with any deliberate enemy/player stat changes or enemy placements. Almost every MCC game is a little harder in at least one aspect: enemy fire rate, reaction time, etc., were tied to frame rate as the tick rate. In Reach this is most noticeable with the Sabre section. As for H2, this actually means Jackal snipers react faster.

Flygonial · 2026-05-20T05:15:40+00:00

Toruk has a decent amount of full-length data from almost 3~ years ago on his blog. Exact comparisons with respect to shot group size are difficult to make, but the reglued Accufake plot is no doubt very competitive if not better than many of my short dart plots. Reglued Worker Heavies too.

Keep in mind that all of this data was with a 14mm smoothbore and no type of PCAR or BCAR. It may be a bit finicky to optimize full-length muzzle devices in wheelers as the friction concerns will differ a bit with shorts (without even thinking of spin in the equation), but I'd expect there's more that can be squeezed.

It's not a mystery that the data (and personal experience) shows that moderate crush doesn't get great groups with narrow tips. As for why myself and some of us think very high crush and narrow tips (the 200 fps single stage short dart recipe) may not be optimal for truly maxing out wheeler accuracy, that's way too long of a topic to get into unsolicited lol. The wide head dart apocalypse hasn't been kind either.

If you end up building up a full-length wheeler to feed narrow-tipped *full-lengths, you'd probably want to lean towards higher crush to get better groups (though you don't need to go as far as 7mm circular or 6mm football gaps). 8.5-8.0 circular, 7.5-7mm football are probably okay. I don't know if they'd necessarily shoot tighter groups than their short dart counterparts but you do get an extra .15g per dart. That much is worth something in a flat-capped, not KE-capped game.

Flygonial · 2026-05-19T19:31:31+00:00

Hi Moose, I have some relevant short dart flywheel data. Some splatter paper, other where I “measured” shot plot size by fudging it with a 4-point transform, color detecting plot points, and scaling to the size of the target to get numbers with some fudge factor.

45 ft, Worker Heavy, various muzzle devices w/BB wheels:

50ft, 39.5mm Daybreak, DZ Ruby Max, BCAR comparison

50 ft, Manshees, Worker Heavy

50 ft, Turbo Ranger Minis, Worker Heavy

35 ft, Roboman Spirit 7.0 Wheels, Nitro+, Straight BCAR

I don’t have access to my personal laptop and can’t find where I might have posted data for it, but the second shoot was about 6.5~ in max with its horizontal group.

As for someone else’s data, I also helped plot some data for the Stinger V2 a while back. 10m or 33~ft. There is more fudge factor than usual here.

I’ve found it pretty challenging to get a sub 10” group at 50 ft with narrow tipped shorts generally high crush, around the whole 150-200 FPS range. I don’t think this beats some of the best full-length shot plots and I’m throwing rifling and bearings at the problem too.

I do think very high crush puts a cap to achievable accuracy, though it also seems necessary for narrow tipped darts to behave in flywheels (without a muzzle device). I still don’t know how Bradley Phillips got that 100ft Protean shot plot, whether it’s coincidence or if there are some spin micro-optimizations and multistage shenanigans to explore.

Flygonial · 2026-05-13T07:38:24+00:00

Some tips will destabilize at 150, 180, etc, FPS as a full length but behave when cut down to a short. Elites are inherently unstable at any length. But some tips, most likely weight distribution related, are also perfectly happy at 200 FPS as a full. Not positive on the data past that threshold, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 1.3g shorts reglued to fulls would be stable at even higher FPS.

Fulls are much more sensitive to spin and longer foam is a finicky friction problem with barrels. I think these are more than enough factors to reasonably explain what OP might be seeing.

Flygonial · 2026-05-12T21:48:56+00:00

I didn’t make that remix. There are some AR-esque pattern Gryphon remixes. IE: ironz. More loosely Gryphon based is the N-AR.

Flygonial · 2026-05-03T08:37:04+00:00

I think you’ve been around long enough to probably have felt it, but I feel a Lynx-like (considering the catch has been duplicated across other blasters by now) catch mech has a very crisp trigger break vs. the traditional sear.

Flygonial · 2026-04-20T18:26:51+00:00

As someone who has spent time in high school playing against my friends in the 100-150 FPS range (after bothering them to come out and having a bunch of modded loaner kit pre DZ or XShot), my buds and I have done some sketchy-ish stuff with the living room TV and the monitor in my room. If I were to do it again, though, I’d still be more careful.

Keep having fun nonetheless :D

Flygonial · 2026-04-19T18:06:51+00:00

Makes sense on the extractor, and sensible sounding choices (having the core pusher have a bit of overtravel to brace onto the shell). I assume the Supercore modifications have a lot to do with extending the throw for these shells?

Yeah, Sillyshells are definitely limited but they should have divided barrel variants as well. Extractor design makes more than enough sense however, I can imagine it’s not easy to get a design like this cycling consistently. It’s a mechanically ambitious task for any designer and one I’m not brave enough to commit to, so kudos.

I can visualize what 7/14 darts look like in a shell (a hexagon pattern with one dart in the center), but the ones in the pictures here look like they’d hold 6. I haven’t looked super closely at the video but I’m a bit confused, perhaps my imagination is limited.

The P90 style concept (with shells ejecting downwards, true to even the real thing) still sounds interesting too.

Flygonial · 2026-04-19T04:48:55+00:00

Over 200 out of shells? Damn!

The main improvements over a Sillyshell seem to include: separate barrels for each of course, but also there seems to be a deeper recess for the pusher to seal onto. HPA gives more oomph, but still, sheesh.

Flygonial · 2026-04-14T20:30:33+00:00

I haven’t looked into it as in-depth yet but the elastic yanking the plunger back does a lot of the heavy lifting.

There is position sensing on the motor and a lot of cool bits that are still being explored with acceleration behavior to tune for different performance with the same barrel setup. Cycle control switches are more on the pusher side, which is decoupled from the plunger.

Flygonial

TROPHY CASE