Does the tophat hit the tank?

A while ago I was reading a post about flyers in these guns. I think it was here ’bouts somewhere. Anyway, the author said he thought it was becasue the hammer was driving the tophat down far enough to hit the tank from time to time, throwing the shot to the left when it did. I don’t think I understood the reason for why left, but it made sense otherwise at the time.

Thinking about it has been an interesting ‘thought experiment’, at least to me. I’ve decided the gun works in one of two modes, either the TH hits the valve, or it doesn’t. If it didn’t hit, adjusting the height would mean nothing. The hammer would hit it, push it as hard as it could until forced back. Moving that point up would only shorten the hammer stroke, lowering the energy. The valve would still open almost as far controlled by springs, forces and pressures, but less hammer force would mean lower not higher output. Therefore the tophat is hitting the valve body and stopping, adjustments must be controlling how far the valve opens.

This is also backed up by noting that my CO2 tank is basically unresponsive to the hammer preload adjustment. It puts out 12 fpe (more or less) pretty much no matter what the setting on the dial is. The same thing happens with a friends Condor and the micro flow tank. I think here the valve is easily driven open, so for almost the entire range it gets slammed into the wall (and no further).

However, my Talon tank does adjust power on my Talon frame. That is it was easy to ‘dial it up’ to 20 fpe, and further if I wanted to. Unlike the CO2 tank. It must not be hitting the stop, or a harder hammer hit would do little if anything.

Does this mean tophat settings only really matter when you’ve ‘topped out’ the available power? And doesn’t that mean then that you won’t be able to get good self regulation under these cases?

Am I on the right track here?

TIA

Doug Owen