Tracking down old markers

[latches109]

My minimag I purchased just after they were released in 1992?. stolen from my trunk decade later. I coper plated it. Looks like this one Doc posted. I've never seen another coper plated one.

[Walker]

This one.... It was a one off custom.....

[DocsMachine]

My minimag I purchased just after they were released in 1992?. stolen from my trunk decade later. I coper plated it. Looks like this one Doc posted. I've never seen another coper plated one.

It's not actually copper- that's Titanium Nitride. That's my own personal Minimag- or was, at the time- that I paid what was at the time a relative fortune to have plated. That would have been back in 1996.

(Fun story- that photo was taken on 35mm film, as digital wasn't a thing at the time- and there was literally no one in town, that I could find, with a scanner so I could post a photo of it online. I mailed the photos to Bill Mills, of WARPIG, since I was so often on his TechTalk board, who scanned them for me, and then returned them with the scans on a 3.5" floppy. )

Anyway, the coating was kind of uneven- the plater was an industrial shop, no one was doing TiNitride cosmetically back then- and actually kind of dull. It looked like mildly-tarnished copper in real life.

I eventually polished it all off. I still have the valve in one of my Mags, the barrel (a turned down TASO) is probably still in one of my boxes, but the body got polished and traded off or sold at some point.

Today, you can of course have TiN done cosmetically, and it can look like polished gold. (The two gold 1911s Nic Cage had in Face/Off were Ti-Nitrided.) I'm not sure you can have aluminum plated- it's applied in basically a plasma spray- but I'm surprised that I never saw anyone else try that on a 'Mag, in all the years since.

I've always wanted to do another one, but that's just one of hundreds of "always wanted to do" that I've never gotten around to.

Doc.

[Blackmagic71]

(Fun story- that photo was taken on 35mm film, as digital wasn't a thing at the time- and there was literally no one in town, that I could find, with a scanner so I could post a photo of it online. I mailed the photos to Bill Mills, of WARPIG, since I was so often on his TechTalk board, who scanned them for me, and then returned them with the scans on a 3.5" floppy. )

Thats awesome. The effort it used to take for a picture… today I have two dozen new pictures of my dogs on my phone before I ate breakfast. 🤣

[DocsMachine]

Heh. Yep.

Back in the day, I'd use a 35mm camera (old Pentax K-something, I think) and shoot six or seven shots of a project or customer gun, then mail it off. After doing that three or four times, the 34-frame roll of film (about $16) would be full. I'd then take it to the local shopping mall, where the kiosk would develop it- for another $25 or $30. I'd take those photos- usually only one or two was usable- and scan it ($250 Umarex [?] scanner) play with the brightness and contrast a bit, crush it down so it fit on a 640 x480 monitor, and then uploaded it over a 33.3 modem.

You kids get off my lawn!

The first two years I was in business, I spent close to $600 a year on film and development costs. I still have boxes and boxes of those old pics. Right at the end of the second (around December of '99, if I recall correctly) I bought a little point-and-shoot digital, an Olympus something or other.

The 8MB SmartMedia card (now long obsolete) held, interestingly enough, about 34 shots- a roll of film. It would also eat four AA batteries in the process. Despite that, it still saved me a fortune in film and development costs- and better yet, I could see if the dang picture was any good before I shipped the gun off.

I used that 'til '05 when I got a proper DSLR, that lasted me 'til '21 (and some 150K photos!) when it croaked and I replaced it with a newer Canon DSLR. (With a 128GB SDHD card, that currently has close to 3,000 images and several dozen video clips on it, and the "shots remaining" counter still reads "9999". )

But I digress. I should dig out some of those old paper photos and scan some of the ones that never got posted...

Doc.

[flyweightnate]

My biggest regret was loaning a "friend" an olive hard anodized long body Bushmaster pump and lever changer in college, so I didn't have to pack it home for the summer (on a flight). Had a custom PL Scepter back and full insert kit, too.

Never found out of it was a Navarone or not, and never saw it again.

Close second was a heavily modified 007 pistol. It wasn't perfect, so I ran out of patience. It was pretty close, though.