Artifact Blaster Modworks has been making short rubber domed darts which I have recently discovered. If you are familiar with the black, full length ACC darts, these are basically a short and more colorful version of them. They have been sold in a few color schemes, my favorite is the all-pink, of which I just received 4k.
These are special because they are by far the cheapest dart EVER mass produced to be visible, safe, and fly reasonably straight at high speeds. A few similar products have existed in the past, but were generally much more expensive and often had tips so hard that they might as well be made of concrete.
Weight:
1.1g. Seems to be very consistent.
Length:
36mm
Tip:
SOFT rubber semi-ellipse. This is the softest tip I have ever felt for any mass manufactured dart other than stock darts. It does have high friction and takes a bit of tweaking to work with hoppers if you don't make your blasters for varmint hunting.
Fit:
Stock-ish. Tighter than grey mcmaster or ace foam, but looser than (most) of the beige stuff that gets around. Still usually will slide through sch80 1/2" pipe without resistance, but like stock foam, not quite 100% of the time.
Color:
sub-optimal pink cheese all over, ofc.
Range:
Depends on the blaster, duh. Seems basically the same as my sillydomes, but I didn't have both for comparative testing when I had the opportunity to shoot yesterday.
I tested ~12 darts with a pullSCRT (Basically a toned-down +bow without the face diddle) with a 2-stage barrel (100mm CPVC+300mm sch80) and modified hopper.
Flat +-3 degrees: 37m +-3m
12+-3 degrees: 60m +- 5m
(Yes, ranges were actually measured and actually took place on level ground. Darts landed on pavement, roll/tumble distance was estimated as 4m.)
Stability:
Good, but not great. If you've fired other solid rubber domes before, you probably have seen how they squiggle in flight sometimes without the total chaos seen with stock darts. As usual, higher velocity blasters will generally fare worse, and barrel setup can make a big difference. I expected the squiggle threshhold to be higher than my sillydomes due to the extra mass, but they seem about the same. Dramatically better than stock darts and good enough to be useful 30m out, but not precise at that range by any means.
Condition:
Darts SEEM to have a dye on their tip that can sometimes rub off on your fingers if you rub the tips, which is puzzling because the rubber tips are not just red on the surface, but through the entire inside of the dart head. Red marks on white walls have been reported. This may just be an issue of needing to air out the darts to let them finish setting, but I don't know yet, I just got these this week and havent opened more than a few bags.
Darts come a little bit smushed from the way they are packed tightly into bags. Not usually bent, but often a bit flattened and dented once in a while. Use and handling tend to fix or at least smooth over this problem. In an ideal world these would be packed perfectly orthogonally in a magic cartridge that dissolves when you open the box, but I'm inclined to forgive Artifact for doing this the cheap and easy way because holy cow they pass on the savings.
Price:
~$0.10 in the USA
If you pick them up yourself from the factory in China, they're about $.03 if you buy at least 1000 (Not much by China manufacturing standards). Ordering them through a Taobao agent and getting them to the USA will at least double the price and take a few weeks. Guys like me who went through that and are redistributing will want at least $0.10 each, but that's still two and a half times cheaper than my own domestically made domes, and dramatically cheaper than any comparable product AFAIK.
Hoppers:
In most cases, a standard wye hopper will need to be slightly modified to work, as the darts tend to nosedive hard and get stuck on the bottom even more than other rubber domes. Some high power or at least high volume applications can overcome this without wye modding, but I got it working on basic homemade springers by just glueing a halfpipe of CPVC in the bottom. Some form of Zorn's "optimal wye" is probably the best/most elegant solution, the "brithop" format would be more difficult to carve out the necessary roof chamfer for clearance with these.
Update: A CPVC variant of the optimal wye feeds 100%, but poops sometimes and makes the darts fly funny. The CPVC glued to the bottom seems to work better. The optimal wye CPVC is centered with a significant gap (~1.5mm) between it and the inside bottom of the wye, so it may be that the darts need more room to drop than the optimal wye, but less than an unmodded wye.
Taobao
Edited by KaneTheMediocre, 08 May 2016 - 12:30 PM.
