Board Thread:Questions and answers/@comment-27985798-20160925022616/@comment-27306930-20161002024526

That IS interesting. I assume the Mavs both had their ARs intact. As an engineer, I can tell you there's no practical reason why you got those results Spudnick. A dry fired Mav actually experiences less stress than a dart-fired Mav because the plunger is cushioned by the air trapped in the plunger tube. It gently decelerates* rather than striking the end of the plunger tube. In other words, the plunger in the dart-fired Mav is moving faster, and further down the tube before the AR kicks in, so it has more momentum and strikes the end of the plunger tube with more force. More force = more stress.

By extension, a spring/plunger/plunger tube that is subjected to more stresses shouldn't perform as well. Due to the factors mentioned above, the dart-fired Mav should have experienced degraded performance. Mind you, I think the differential in stresses is negligible and wouldn't affect the outcome one little bit.

The "seal theory", yeah, not buying it. There's more than enough silicone lube in a new Mav to ensure that wouldn't happen. If Spud said he did it 10,000 times, I might buy it. But a couple hundred, no.

I'm going to chalk it up to inconsistencies in manufacturing, and plain old entropy. It isn't unreasonable to assume one of them Mavs was a lemon. Or maybe the person that conducted the experiment was a potatoe. And like most potatoes, they're bad at math stuff. Or counting to ten. Just sayin'

(*) Okay, okay, it experiences negative acceleration. I'm dumbing it down. Nitpickers.