VL Revolution vs Shredder Hopper Review
The VL Revolution or the VL Shredder?
The Shredder or the Revolution? That is a question often asked where paintball players are found. Which one loads faster? Which one is better? Which one is number one?
A cursory glance at each will quickly reveal some very distinguishable characteristics.
Shredder
The Shredder uses two 9-volt batteries and hence is a 18 volt system. It weighs a little more and uses a larger paddle wheel to churn the paintballs. To access the batteries is quite difficult, requiring a phillips screwdriver.
Revolution (pictured)
The Revolution uses one 9-volt battery and uses little rotator to mix up the paintballs. The battery compartment is easy to open and slides easily into position.
We took approximately 100 paintballs and put them through each loader 10 times. We used the same 100 paintballs in both loaders. We added up the totals and got an average. We eliminated one outlier for each loader so as to not skew the results.
The Shredder scored 12, 14, 15, 25, 18, 16, 10, 13, 15, 14, and 18.
The Revolution scored 15, 14, 15, 18, 20, 17, 18, 18, 14, 24, and 15.
The average for the Shredder was: 15.45 seconds and after eliminating the highest outlier the average was: 14.5 seconds.
The average for the Revolution was 17.09 and after removing the highest statistical outlier the average went down to: 16.4 seconds.
The difference is two seconds between the two. However, we do not feel that the experiment should be taken as final. Throughout our experiment we noticed a lot of changing variables. Sometimes the paintballs just got stuck and didn’t load. Sometimes they were just in the wrong order and wouldn’t feed. In order to run such an experiment and have it be statistically sound one would have to run the loaders over 100 times.
Conclusions: Our conclusion is that neither is better than the other. On any given day, one could beat out the other. It all depends on how the paintballs line up or mix.
One thing we did notice is that the Shredder’s paddle turned more vigorously. Obviously this is because of the extra power. But even this did not help when the paintballs got “stuck.”
One thing we liked about the Revolution is it’s easy access battery compartment. It is very convenient to open it up and slide in a new battery.
Our recommendation is to buy whatever loader you want. They are the same for all we are concerned. Buy the cheaper one, or whatever you can get your hands on.
