Armchair Airsmithing

If you've ever seen my videos, you know that I'm a fairly basic kind of player. I have a paintgun, it works, I'm happy. I don't tinker with a perfectly fine working paintgun, I see no reason to. It's working the way I want it to work, why should I throw more random crap in there?

But you know what gets me? Players who think they're qualified airsmiths telling me what I need to do to my paintguns to make them "awesomer." I don't understand when it became everyone else's job to tell me what I need to add to my perfectly fine working paintgun to make it finer. Unless the digital-camo vest I've been wearing lately has a subliminal message in the pattern that says "Please tell me what to do with my gun because I'm clueless!" I'm willing to say that's a possibility.

Last year is a good example. I played stock-class at CCP. (oh sorry, Chicagoland Paintball.) After the night was basically over, the referee came over to me with the "best idea evah". His idea? Get a PVC extension off the back of the stock class feed, and put a hopper on it. "So you won't have to reload so much!" Then I could take the 12 gram adapter and rig it for a nitrogen bottle.

I went into the hard case, and pulled out the direct feed body that I keep in there. His jaw hit the floor, and he couldn't believe that I wouldn't put it on the gun. I wanted to play stock class that night. Big deal. But there was a tech problem I showed him the feed was wobbly, and I didn't trust it. "Well, just JB weld it!"

There's something called aesthetics. Learn it. Oh, wait, this is the same type of player who wears a red jersey with yellow goggles and an "agg" retro goggle band that's stretched out beyond safe. Right.

But more recently I posted a project I was working on over on the Spec Ops forum. And one of the reply posts was "suggestions" of what I need to do with the gun. It included adding an intelligrip, dremmeling out the revvy I had on it for the warp feed, and get "just a freak back" to make the barrel shorter.

Here's the thing. I appreciate the feedback, but all of the above suggestions don't solve any of the problems I'm having with the paintgun. The only problem I have are aesthetics. I want to make it look cleaner and the feed hose is the only thing in the way of that. It's a project in progress, as are all projects like this. So adding an electronic grip and wiring it into the warp and revvy don't solve the problems. It just adds more things that can go wrong.

It's not just me. When I go to fields, I hear people complain a lot about their "POS" gun and how they want to make it better. Then another person starts to expound on how "you NEED to get this board" and "You gotta have this barrel" and my favorite "you have to add a low pressure system to it." Once, just for fun, I asked a kid why he needed low pressure on his gun. He stalled, looked at the ground, and finally said "I dunno, it's cool I think."

A long time ago I asked Doc for help with an article, and he put it best. To paraphrase, he said that a lot of people will just throw parts onto a paintgun without thinking if they're meant to go together. They do this because they buy the "cool part of the month" that everyone else has, and they want to be cool too. It doesn't make sense to use a high pressure output HPA system then run it through "low pressure" regs. When I play today, I look around and see this mentality is alive and well. I also see that everyone seems to know what parts you need to make "your gun better" regardless if they even own the same kind of paintgun as you do.

For the most part, the advice falls to customer loyalty or what's fashionable this month. It really has nothing to do with what you need as much as someone else selling you on a product they're loyal to. When a guy wearing a DYE jersey, DYE pants, DYE shoes with matching socks and a limited edition DM7 marker tells me "You know what your gun needs? You need an Ultralight! TOTALLY make you a better player!" No, you need to stop being a fanboy. If you're so insecure in your product loyalty that you feel that you need to pressure other people into buying your "brand name" too, go bother someone else.

Call me a purist, but if something is working, and it's working perfectly for what I use it for, why should I change it? Why do I need a "name brand part" to fix a non-existent problem on my paintgun? Oh, right, because if it says "DYE" it shoots 3 BPS faster, right? Just like chrome adds 5% accuracy and the right colors make it shoot harder.

For that matter, why do I need to add electronics to a non-electro paintgun? If it's mechanically sound and it meets my needs, what do I gain by adding electronics? Extra cost when I replace batteries, right. "But it shoots faster!" No, it shoots 285 FPS if I have it adjusted right. Oh, you meant volume shooting, well as often as I've needed a gun to shoot 15 times a second I can't justify the cost to benefit ratio.

I watched my old FPS videos, I've only shot my e-mag at 15 bps ONCE. EMR's castle, raking the trigger when the attackers reinserted and I was adding to the suppression fire. That's all. So why should I spend $100 for an electronics package that I'll only use, on average, once a year? Seems to me my money is better spent on other things, like PSP games or pizza.

To be honest, I can see where the paintguns I own could use improvement. But mostly it's things that I can fix with a simple add-on. My current paintguns, the A-5A2 and the Longbow / Shortbow need to be a little more air efficient. I'm planning on buying a spring kit for the A-5, and possibly a different bolt to help that. The 'Bow needs to be broken in, as I haven't shot more than 2000 balls from it in the year I've owned it. Once it's broken in, it'll settle down and I can adjust from there.

Well that and the "blade" trigger, I'd like to swap that out for a nice 2-finger grooved one, but I digress.

My point is that because you put a part on your gun and somehow it's still running that doesn't mean that you're qualified to tell people what will and won't work on their particular setup. It also doesn’t mean that you have to sell other people on "your brand". Fine, you spent $200 on a barrel, $1500 on a gun, and $300 on clothing. That does not mean I need to as well so you can feel better about yourself.

If someone asks you "Hey, hows that Stiffi working for you?" that's another story. They see you have one, you're using it, and they want to know. If someone asks you "Hey, have you had problems with the air efficiency with that gun?" then feel free to brag about what you did to get 10 more shots from your 4500 tank. But personally, I find it rude (if not a little insulting) to approach someone and tell them "Your gun sucks, but I know what you can do to make it better!"

Unless you're a paid representative, it's not your job to sell me parts from your favorite company. It's also not my job to justify your wasting money on things that you really don't need to play paintball. I admit I'm not the most technically inclined, but by the same token don't make a backhanded insult by telling me my gear sucks because it's not like what you have on your setup.

Normally, what I use works flawlessly. Dumb things happen, but for the most part what I got works. There's a reason for that. It's not just the quality of the manufacture, but mostly because I don't tink with it. I don't add "mod of the month" to my gear. When it works, I stick with it. When something wears down, I replace it.

But please, don't tell me I have to put parts on parts in parts to make a perfectly working paintgun play better. 90% of the time, the gun isn't at fault for poor performance. It's the nut behind the trigger.

48869-061225-405831-19 Rate content:

© 2006 All Rights Reserved.