Saturday, April 11, 2009

Bunkerama Butter Balls test

Butter Balls Ball Conditioner is a recently developed product designed to revamp the shell composition of older paint, so it will once again be ready for use in play.

For example, imagine that you have half a case of dimpled Stingers sitting in your closet from a couple of weeks ago, and you're short on cash. You want to get out for some practice the next day, but buying a fresh case is out of the question. You pull out Butter Balls, spray it on the paint, allow it so sit for a couple of hours and the next day you will have usable, non-dimpled paint.

Patrick from Butter Balls Ball Conditioner was kind enough to send us a sample so we could see the results first hand. I started out by removing some of the mis-shapen rounds, and was left with 11 badly dimpled rounds of two-year-old whitebox Stingers. After placing the test subjects into a carboard box, I sprayed the paint with the Butter Balls solution a couple times, rolled them around after 15 minutes and then allowed them to sit for 90 minutes.

After 105 minutes, 5/11 rounds were still dimpled, but the other 6 were completely dimple free and shot straight and true the next day when I put them through my Mini. Not bad!

Sure it didnt cure 100% of the paint, but how much can you ask for? If you have a bag of 500 and you can only save 250 of it, I would still consider that a win.

Testimonial from a Butter Balls user.

And now for the rest of the story...

I purchased this product directly through the distributor/inventor after reading the many posts here. I own my own business that designs, prototypes, and builds various small items for multiple industries. I have used/tested this product and also tried the humidification method of undimpling paintballs. Here is what I observed/tested;
The product goes on wet but dries within about 15 minutes. It creates an extremely smooth, almost shiny surface on the ball. The surface drag co-efficient (wind resistance, surface friction) changes to the point that you can actually feel the difference. It is like a very thin coat of teflon has been applied to the ball. unlike the shower/humidity treatment, the ball size remains unchanged. The humidity and warmth caused my marbalizers to swell 0.02" on average and softened the ball. The Butterball treatment actually made the ball surface a little more brittle. This product definitely uses a increase in surface tension on the ball surface to remove the dimples. spraying on finger tips shows this the best as you can feel the area sprayed start tightening almost immediately and upon drying there seems to be no friction between finger and thumb when rubbed together. (if you want to try this you must wave hands in the air to get the stuff to dry)

The Result;
my marbalizers from last season were dented (not really dimpled, bigger dents) from sitting. it took only one hour after application to have my balls return to their original shape. I shot a pod of treated and untreated from the same unopened bag from last august. (Marbalizers rarely break, for those of you who have never used them) They are a really small bore ball. Shooting a stock ion with a 20" J&J ceramic barrel, 12 BPS ramping, egg hopper, I broke only 1 of the treated balls, but broke about 1 in 12-15 of the untreated(10 breaks total from the full hopper). I then proceeded to treat some stinger rec quality balls I had left over too, with similar impressive results.

Also it should be noted that the balls shoot straighter and further after treatment.

After treating 2 bags (1000 balls) I used less than 1/20th of the bottle contents.

Testimonial from a Butter Balls user, using paint left in his car.

Personally, I've used the stuff before. If we can put aside the "what's in it?" argument for a moment (after all, disclosing a secret recipe means you'll be open to copycats and such) then maybe we can talk about what it does. For anyone actually interested in what it can do, and what it's worth, I'll give you my experiences.

I tried a bottle that I got from the TC Paintball in Traverse City, MI. I had two and a half bags of old paint that I had left sitting in my car for most of the winter (two bags Premium, half-bag Stinger). I would normally throw this paint away, or maybe risk making a mess of my gun by shooting it at a tree, which usually means broken paint and accuracy too poor to even practice sharp-shooting. I figured that a small bottle of this solution, that costs a fraction of the paint I was going to throw away, was worth the risk.

I brought the paint inside, and followed the directions on the Butter Balls (pretty straightforward). I purposely left some paint aside, because I figured to make sure it's worth my money, I need to make sure that the paint truly was beyond use before the treatment. I noticed that many of the balls had flat spots, dimples, and the like due to sitting on top of each other.

After letting it work overnight, I shot it the next day. And honestly, the paint shot fine. The balls were back to round shape, fed through my B2 fine, and shot accurately from my Ego. The paint was usable, broke on my target, and was pretty accurate. And just to check, I then shot the old paint that I didn't treat, and broke the very first ball I tried to fire. Even though that old paint had gotten a little better after sitting in warm conditions, it was still far from being anything I would bring on a paintball field. If the ball didn't break, it winged way off target after only a few feet. After getting sick of cleaning my barrel for the tenth time, I said "screw it." The untreated paint wasn't worth the hassle.

So, in a nutshell, the stuff did work. It took worthless paint and made it good enough to take to a field and play with, and get good results. I'm not saying that it can take 3-year-old paint and make it new again, but if you've ever thrown away a bag of paint, you already could have bought this stuff and treated hundreds of dollars of paint. Yes, ideally if you never get a bad bag of balls, you may never need this stuff. If that's the case, then fine. But if you're like me, and have a bad habit of leaving paint in your car, or not playing for a few months during winter, it will save you money. The stuff isn't a miracle, but it does recondition paintballs, which is what it claims.

If you're content throwing away paint instead of trying the stuff, then that's your business. Personally, I think that the amount of paint it can save you (thousands of balls) vs the amount it costs (less than a bag of paint) it's not too risky to try it.

Oh, and a little side note. I know a broke kid who goes to the field on Sundays and collects any unwanted paint from players at the end of the day (old stuff, dropped stuff, whatever) then he treats it with Butter Balls and uses it himself. It must work, since he hardly ever buys paint new, that I've seen.