Air America Raptor - Was This The First CA regulator?

[mikew]

I was asked what the first available constant air system was and I certainly remember the Air America Raptor when it first came out in 1993 - 4.

But was it the first?

There's very little information on Air America online apart from a few brief mentions of Dan Colby.

[iamthelazerviking]

I bet DocsMachine knows

[Macdave06]

I believe that's a unireg 320. The raptor is the tapered down version.

Sent from my SM-G960U1 using Tapatalk

[mikew]

You are correct, my mistake.

[Grendel]

It was a long time ago but I believe the Nitro Duck Regulators pre-dated the Uni-Reg but they both were very early and around the same time. The first HPA systems I saw at IAO back in 93 were all customized regs that had origins with standard industrial on bottle regulators. Lot of the were using 1/4" hydraulic quick connectors vs. the 1/8" that became standard.

[XEMON]

I remember rigging my scuba first stage reg to fill CO2 tank with HPA at 1200PSI ...
not something i would do today, but it works :P

[Hp_lovecraft]

I know Tom Kaye likes to take credit for "inventing HPA", He did make prototypes in 1990, they were never sold to the public. More of a "proof of concept" that he thought would never sell.

There wasnt much demand in the early 90s- Most guns were blowbacks, and ran just fine on CO2. Heck, most ran on siphon tanks, and would have been a disadvantage to switch to HPA.

But the Mag was different- It was a beautiful design, but just ran poor on co2. Similar story with the autococker when it came out a little later. People tried all sorts of tricks to get them to work at a high level with co2, but it just wasnt a really good option. I can think of at least 10 times I've seen the "Smart Remote" fail spectacularly during tournaments.

I've never owned HPA, but the field I worked at in the 90s brought in nitrogen tanks in 1993 for the trickle of players that demanded it. We only called it nitro, not hpa back then. We had a cascade of nitrogen tanks, and to maximize the filling, you would start with the most empty nitrogen tank, and work down to the fullest. Those early tanks were all huge- I don't remember any smaller then 114ci. They needed to be huge in order to match the shots of a 20oz, which was the industry standard by that point.

[Grendel]

Yup, lugged [carefully rolled] around 6Kpsi N2 tanks both at the field and when we started using N2 on our team. If you think a bulk CO2 tank is heavy try moving a 6Kpsi bulk N2 tank around . On my team most of us still refer to it a Nitro. I was introduced to N2 at the 93 IAO by Mike Lauterbourn (SP?), Tom Kaye and the team Phantom Force. All custom rigs all.

[SignOfZeta]

“Constant air” is just a big CO2 tank. Isn’t it? I remember using this term before HPA existed…don’t I?

[Grendel]

CO2 Cartridge (12 gram) -> Bulk CO2 Bottles (Constant Air or CA) -> High Pressure Nitrogen (N2, Nitro) -> High Pressure Air (HPA) -> CO2 Cartridge . The early units used industrial grade N2 especially for 3000psi and above, there were some lower pressure compressors used early on for the 1200-1800 psi bottles (repurposed CO2 bottles were 1200psi limited). Really did not see the rise of field owned compressors until circa 1995-96 and later. I still used N2 at home up until my move to MA in 2015. The cost of leasing and filling N2 is way more economical then compressors for an individual (that is until the shoebox compressor came out).

[XEMON]

I remember picking up CO2 bottle for free from old field rental and using them with air ...
The town idiot didn't blow himself yet, so we didn't have all the "rules and regulation" we have nowadays ...

[mikew]

Here are a couple of photos of the Air America booth from 1994 NPPL Word Cup held in Florida. I didn't see that many air systems on the field though. C02 was still very popular particularly remote setups with expansion chambers. I was so impressed with the Air America systems I ordered one as soon as got home and still have it though it's not in test anymore.





My Air America Unireg setup in its old school harness.

[DocsMachine]

I bet DocsMachine knows

-Only an educated guess. Alaska was never the hotbed of cutting edge stuff.

That said, I have an AA-labeled 3K/68 tank that originally had a 320 on it, dated '94.

Other people probably put HPA systems together earlier, but I'm pretty sure Kaye was the one to properly develop one with a proper, purpose-built reg, and market it. And the early cost was largely due to the cost of the tanks themselves. We didn't have the economies of scale we had back then, and even Kaye probably was a little leery about ordering however many thousands it would have taken to get a nice price break.

Doc.