PNG

I play paintball too, BTW. Right now I've got an A-5, still running CO2 instead of HPA, but that's going to change soon.

I guarantee that the output from your air tank wasn't 4500 psi, although the tank pressure was that high. There's a primary regulator built in to the valve that takes it down to less than 1000 psi, and probably a lot less if your gun was set up to run at low pressure (like 300 psi)

Another nitrous myth, busted: Higher pressure in the bottle doesn't mean more power. Here's why:

In a conventional nitrous system, two things control how much nitrous and fuel make it into the engine - pressure and jet size. If your system is set up to have the correct A/F ratio with jets of a particular size at, say, 1000 psi in the nitrous bottle, cranking it up (by heating the tank, or overfilling) to 1300 will only make it run lean, hurting power and probably the engine as well. Nitrous only makes power when there's an appropriate amount of fuel to burn - Too much nitrous, and the engine eats itself, not enough and power falls off as it runs too rich. This is a good thing, because an engine tuned to run best on a full bottle at, say, 1100 psi, will get progressively richer as the tank empties and cools, making it less likely to damage the engine. To prevent a fall-off in power, you can use a bottle heater with a thermostat to keep it at a constant temperature (and therefore a constant pressure) until it's almost empty.

The only exception to the "pressure doesn't make power" rule is when you're limited to a certain nitrous jet size by class rules, in which case many guys will run as much pressure in the tank as they can to shove more nitrous through the motor, and then jet the fuel side to match.