Paint Guns

 

My first Paint gun was given to me my junior year of high school for a birthday present.  It was a black spider.  Nothing special, just stock aluminum barrel, bottom line, 200 round VL hopper and a 9oz CO2 tank.  The first thing I did was purchase a $75 expansion chamber upgrade.  Next I purchased a quick release bolt, biggest waist of money for that gun.  My friend Rudy, was fond of the shiny accessories which could be purchased.  He bought a SS die 14” barrel and kicked our asses.  So it had become time to upgrade already.

 

My next gun was a Classic Automag.  The Classic version of the Automag came with no accessories, not even a barrel.  I pieced together my favorite components including:

 

It looked something like this but the tank was fatter and the barrel was shorter.

 

This gun lasted me about 9 months.  I made several modifications to the guns trigger.  There were a couple sear modifications and a valve polish.  The net result was a trigger that was too touch and easy to short stroke.  To help me chop paint even faster I put a double trigger on the gun.  I had to cut the trigger guard so I could fit the trigger on, this made the thing a ticking time bomb for those who can’t keep there hands off other peoples stuff.  I swear it was a weekly event that some one set off my gun in the staging area.  I soon found myself using a Minimag barrel to compensate for all the paint I chopped.  The gun was beginning to look rather freakish.  About the same time I upgraded to my first compressed system.  It was a PMS 110 cu in 3000psi Mini Reg II.  There was nothing mini about this compress system it was like a small watermelon attached to my gun.  This was probably the funniest looking gun I have ever seriously played with.  Think about it classic Mag(small), minimag barrel(tiny), and this gynormous tank hanging off the back.  It was loud as hell inaccurate but shot fast and though many barrel breaks and short strokes.  I sold this gun minus the compressed system near graduation time to my old friend Travis Stecker.

 

Somewhere in this time frame I traded my spider to Justin for cash and his phantom pump gun.  I became an extremely good aim with this thing and played exclusively with it.  I loved this gun and thought it would be my last.  Ha! How wrong I was.  This gun eventually became a common item of trade between Justin and I.  It has probably switched hands 3 or four times between us.

 

I wasn’t really intending on it but another gun just caught my eye.  I bought my friend Mike Linn’s brand new Mag that I helped him customize.  I used all my knowledge from the first Mag to help Mike create the perfect gun.  Mike was severally pussy whipped and wasn’t playing paintball any more so I offered him $550 for his gun and compressed system.  Good deal at the time.

 

This gun became my bread and butter.  I put my friends AA 16” medium boar on it and it shot great.   Ok, so I stole Chris Pearsons barrel!  Sorry Chris if you want it I can pay you back, you weren’t using it anyway.  Soon my buddy Justin bought a mag and we swapped barrels and I obtained a 14” stainless steal dye.  This setup was and is still one of my favorite setups ever.  Braided stainless steel hosing, 68ci compressed system, VL revolution and an Armson elbow.  This gun was solid, snappy and accurate.  I learned to play aggressive and fast with this marker and became very confident in my ability to aim quickly.  Perhaps this is why I loved this gun.  Eventually I learned the trigger too well and began out shooting this gun too.  This was a sad day when I realized I would need another gun.

 

So at the end of my freshman year of college I decided to sell my gun to a good friend Kyle Vonstroberg.  Who knows where he is now, I think he might be working for the mafia or something.  Regardless, I bought a brand new ANS Autococker, a gun I had been drooling over since Mike Linn bought his a year previous.  This gun was a tank, one of the heaviest guns I have ever owned.  I learned to shoot fast with this gun and consistently but it didn’t inspire the type of play I liked.  Sure, I began to shoot targets far away but that wasn’t my style I just wasn’t getting close and snap shooting people.  I shied away from making critical maneuvers and became a hosing bum.  I also worked on my gun all the time, it had so many quirks that it wasn’t worth lending to some one else.  Every time I made the mistake of lending the gun to some one they would bring it back a mechanical mess; paint would flow out of every orifice and Air would his out of one component or another.  Soon I sold the gun to Justin for a ridiculously low price of 450 with compressed air tank.  We won’t talk about that deal any more.

 

This next gun I owned was one of the first E-Mags #163 or so.  This gun was a tank! It was 6 lbs or so without the compressed air system or hopper.  Once fully loaded I bet I was lugging around near 12lbs.  Ok, so maybe I exaggerate but not much.  The compressed system I was using was a first generation MacDev Conquest.  The system was light for the time and had exceptional flow rates, unfortunately the pressure it could supply was low and made the on off system near impossible to actuate when the pressure was turned up all the way.  Also the retaining pins on off leaver tended to fall out.  This gun was hot and cold, it generally shot super accurate and felt good.  However, sometimes I felt like I could never get a ball out of the gun.  This gun had the worst chopping problems out of all the guns I have ever owned.  It also had one of the highest rates of fire, Go figure.  To bad I owned this gun before the second generation motorized loaders arrived.  With a Halo B the gun might have been fun. 

 

I did however build an experimental loader.  I calculated it to have a feed rate of about 42bps but it was huge and ugly.  My friend Daniel and I built it in his garage with hot glue, epoxy, VHS boxes, Radio shack shit and a RC tugboat motor.  It was amazing, I played one game with it and only chopped one paintball, I shot 750 rounds in less than 10 minutes and claimed nearly ever kill on the field.  No one had ever seen that type of fire before, I was pulling the trigger around 15 round per second.  It was great…  So I sold that gun.

 

In this time frame I ordered a custom Phantom pump.  This gun was more of a novelty than a workhorse.  Everything I could wish for in a pump gun was on this gun including matching urban cammo annodazation, just a sweet setup.  This gun I will never let go.  It is just too perfect.

 

My intermediate gun was a gun called the Mephisto or commonly referred to as the Tribal.  This gun was great, it cost me $400 used but preformed like no other.  One of the lightest most reliable guns I have ever owned.  This gun snapped, long balled and didn’t chop.  I sold it eventually because the manufacturer went out of business and replacement parts were being discontinued.  It actually stayed in my hands longer than the gun I am going to talk about next.

 

Some thing weird had come over Justin and I.  I think it was similar to that strange love people have for Harley Davidson Motorcycles; for all intensive purposes Harlys are crappy bikes but every one loves them, they just have too much style.  Well, Autocockers are the Harley Davidsons of paint ball.  There are myths that they are the most accurate things on the planet.  Perhaps that is true but only on good days and only for some people.  So we learned our lesson again why we do not own Autocockers.  We built them from scratch and learned ever facet of the guns, even the ones we didn’t want to know.  I owned mine one functioning day and sold it.  I was done with that shit forever.  Justin still owns his Autococker, he tried to make it better.  This philosophy didn’t work.  I would liken it to trying to get out of a hole by digging to china.  Several thousands of dollars later Justin had the pretties POS anyone had ever seen.  Now it is in several areas but he has yet to sell it completely despite his valiant efforts to recoup some costs.  About a month after finishing our guns cockers just went out of fashion.

 

 

Well I didn’t actually sell the gun I got $400 and a first edition Angel.  This Angel had its share of problems but with a little TLC it was running great.  Luck I knew my EE stuff by this time.  Oh Ya, I think I am in my Jr. year of college now.  It is Easy to loose track.  Anyway I replaced the batteries and reworked some wiring.  It was butt ugly but it shot great.  I was still using the Conquest as I had run out of cash and times were getting tight.  The Angel soon became my only tournament gun.  I had owned better guns but the angel was always there for me.  It shot fast accurate and didn’t chop paint very often.  This was aided by the use of a second generation Eggolution (one of the new faster hoppers).

After getting many complaints from my teammates and quasi-sponsor that my gun was a POS I purchased a Shocker Sport on clearance.  The gun was around $450 and I bought a matching compressed air system for $450 too.  I even bought a freak system for it for around $200.  This gun hands down is the most accurate gun I have ever shot.  I could shoot people corner to corner of the supair field with only a couple pulls of the trigger.  This relied upon them not moving of course.  Needless to say the gun just didn’t have the rate of fire I needed and the trigger pull was lousy.  I tried to fine-tune it but only managed to destroy the timing characteristics.  I was so bad at times that balls would fall out of the barrel when shot rapidly and bounce off opponents heads.  Don’t believe what they say about the Shoe box, it doesn’t play that big, and I should know.  It is actually not that heavy, or at least my setup wasn’t.  You could use a normal revolution too because it shot annoyingly slow.

Next and hopefully last I made a last ditch effort to get a good gun once and for all.  I went out on the line and spent a half months wages on an X-mag.  This gun was phenomenal but just didn’t have the feel I was looking for.  I would have settled but it was about time to switch to another sport.  About two months after buying this gun I was selling all my paint ball stuff for a new mountain bike.  Who would have thought it would come to such an abrupt end.  Some day I may buy another awesome semi but not for a while.

If you think my grocery list of paint guns is long, Justin’s list is significantly longer.  I don’t think he can keep track.