A short while back i bought bobfromaccounting's 'Tinkers lot', which included his early design for Icarus (currently posted in this forum).
After I finished building my 'new'
Excalibur, (also part of the lot) I got started on this. the design itself is courtesy of Bobfromaccounting. its a Closed-Bolt Spool Valve design. Me being who I am; I like off-beat designs, be it cars (rotary, VR6, engines that don't exist in production cars), paintball, ETC. So, naturally, this caught my eye.
SO
On to what little of a build log I have for it:
WARNING... it may be
slightly confusing. If Details are needed on a certain part, just ask.
First things first, I needed to figure out a way to not only hold the gun, but fire it as well. Another part that came with the lot was a UL frame w/board. Perfect, saves me from getting a frame, now I just needed a way to mount it to the gun.
That's where Map gas, Alumiweld (harbor freight) and aluminum strips from Lowes come in. After a little time, some not-so-accurate measuring and a few burnt fingers, this arrives;
I drilled and tapped a few holes for the frame, and so the tray would bolt to the body. Afterwards I cut out the center of the tray to match the interior contours of the frame (to make it easier to route wires)
Next I used some of my extra double sided copper clad PCB (Radio shack) and traced the stock board and cut it out. I then cut out channels where I needed power to flow on the board, and marked it up with a black Sharpie;
The boards next to each other with the mask removed;
The connection on the top was made with a SATA hard drive connector (I had a dead laptop drive and a few extra SATA cables laying around). It went together fairly smooth, until the on/off button refused to work. I eventually found out it was the trace to the connector. It was too thin, and some etchant got underneath the sharpie mask. This was an easy fix, I just direct-wired it with solid-core 24Ga wire. (not visible in the picture, its on the other side of the board):
I realized I needed an eye control button, and I first thought "I don't have anything to ground it with only one of the 7 connections left", but after looking at the membrane pad, I saw it used the same ground for both buttons. I made that open connection the positive, and grounded it to the existing buttons' ground: (bad pic, but the line on the thin portion of the board is the new button wired up)
After long and tedious tinkering, the SMC123A solenoid I purchased for the build just wouldn't cut it. Not enough air-flow to allow the marker to function. Kinda painful, 40 for the noid, another 15 for barbs (2-90* and a straight) and 35 for the t-board. I seem to have found out the hard way that it must be the spyder version, seeing as the wires that are supposed to power the Evalve noid refuse to power it, but the clapper noid wires work fine. I tested the noid on the WGP SF board I received from a friend (thanks again, Stealth) and it worked fine there.
I decided I'd rather have a mechanical 'cocker, so I took the frame and started tinkering with it on Icarus. Huge Success! it fires with no issue! (Dry-fire, no eyes yet, and i never looked at the breach, so i didn't notice the problem a few paragraphs down)
I start part-gathering again and eventually end up with 2 QEV's that I placed on the body, however not where I'd want them to be. The original pathways for these parts were under the body, but after I broke a tap in the rear inlet
I had to move where the rear air-inlet went. The side of the body was a perfectly logical place, so, I drilled a hole, was EXTRA careful with the tap, and I now had a QEV on the back, then I put one on the front, and began building the new tray to fit the e-frame.
Now, you might be wondering "Wait, if you broke the tap in the hole, what did you do to stop the air from rushing past it?"
Your answer: Alumiweld. I didn't trust it to hold the air, but it seems to be working fine. no leaks so far!
The SF board needed to be replaced with a board that would allow adjustments to dwell. Even with the eye (
horribly
) drilled in place, it would see the bolt as a ball and close after a little less than a half stroke. This was due to the timing built into the SF board. Icarus has a slower open time for the bolt than the SF was programmed for, therefore it thought it saw a ball when it really saw the bolt, and closed. I needed a board where i could adjust timing. I grabbed an E1 board (Thanks FoidPoosening) and programmed the clapper noid to have no 'on' time, and set the time between the clapper and Evalve noid to 0, then started playing with timing for the noid to be open, to which 45MS seemed to be the sweet spot.
E1 Board in place:
I drilled the back of the frame so I could see the screen and use the buttons. Its not pretty, tho i'll take pics if anyone wants to see.
Then, being almost nearly done, I took it out for a quick shoot (just a hopper full, though this vid is much shorter than the whole hopper due to issues with the gun)
http://youtu.be/ubMYDtImYvY
After the cut from the speed test, i took it over the Chrono. It was shooting a steady 190FPS, so I started bumping the PSI. I got it up to 235FPS before the solenoid started leaking from the gasket. I have no idea what pressure this thing runs at yet, so i'm not sure if i have too much pressure going to the noid, or what. I still need to grab a 300 and 600 PSI gauge and see what the deal is.
TL;DR
read it
I'm open to questions if anyone has any
good luck with the pressures and higher fps man! 
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