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.

[DocsMachine]

My biggest regret was loaning a "friend" an olive hard anodized long body Bushmaster pump and lever changer in college [snip] and never saw it again.

-When I was just starting out in this biz, a customer ordered (and I may have taken a little too literally ) what eventually became The World's Most Radical Rainmaker:



I had some issues building that, one of the biggest being the anno company either sat on or lost my order for upwards of a year. That gun, I think two others, and a handful of other bits. Bad news all around.

To keep this particular customer happy in the meantime, I loaned him my parts-box 'Cocker:



Which may not look like much now, but was pretty cutting edge at the time. The Max Flow was still one of the top HPA systems, and that was an experimental Bob Long body with an "internal volumizer". Basically a bored out front section like the later 2K-up bodies, but 'capped' with a brass insert so it could use pre-2K front blocks. (I got the body in about '98.) To that I gave a Tornado valve and a Lightning bolt, swapping the AKA pull pin with one off an Evolution 'Cocker.

The upshot being that I could get about 1,600 shots out of a 3K/68ci tank, at about 160 PSI. The trigger was butter smooth, and the gun was reliable as an anvil.

I loaned the guy that, and a couple months later, got the RM finished and tested. He paid and then I- stupidly- shipped the RM off.

Long story short, after some back and forth and various excuses, I stopped hearing from him, and of course never saw the gun again.

The RM has passed through a number of hands since then- and is currently back in the shop for some refurb after 25 years - but the 'Cocker never turned up.

Doc.

[DocsMachine]

Oh, and note the funky coloring of the loader in the RM pic. No camera at the time, film or digital, could get the correct color of that gun- the photos always came out navy blue. I had to fix the color in PaintShop.

Modern cameras do better, of course, though I've seen a few guys post phone photos of similar-color guns and telling people "it's actually purple, not navy blue!"

Doc.

[Carp]

Those are some nice looking markers.

[Dusty Bottoms]

I built a beautiful Automag RT Classic back in 2015 from various sourced parts. What was really cool was I found a very nice black 'euro-feed' RT body, which are rare as hen's teeth. This thing looked factory new, like out of a time capsule. I loved this RT, and played many great games with it. Unfortunately, I sold off all my paintball gear, as well as many books and collectibles, when my ex was in nursing school. We were just squeaking by on my then meager salary, and with my son in daycare, we were paying through the nose just in daycare fees, plus mortgage and everything else. I always regretted it, and since I sold it on eBay I never really knew who grabbed it.

Years later, I managed to build a similar black RT, again with a super rare black 'euro' body which I found by complete luck, but still wanted the original one I sold years before. The fact that I sold it while in a marriage that eventually turned very sour made it sit wrong with me even more. Fast forward to 2023, I was finalizing the divorce with my ex, and my black RT had gone through a few hands when I saw it pop up for sale on Facebook. I snatched it up immediately! Now it's reconfigured how I originally made it, and I have these two beautiful RT's to make memories with. These two markers, above all my others, are going nowhere!

[DarkApollo]

What an awesome story and two beautiful RT’s!