Engineers in paintball

[The Hobbit]

So I know there are some here that have been behind the curtain. I’m curious who were the engineering minds behind each company/gun?

Was bob long actually designing the intimidator or just a financial backer/company face?

Who was the guy at smart parts when they were doing more then rehashing old designs/“borrowing” other designs?

just how many markers and equipment did Simon have involvement with?

Please share any and every design and engineering story that the brain trust knows.

[Frmrspec]

https://Www.zdspb.com

[Daltech]

The WDP Angel LED, Smart Parts Shocker, and Brass Eagle Rainmaker were all very, very similar from what I have learned.

[Ecapnation]

Only similarities are they were offered in black Anno and had triggers

[Daltech]

They all used a micro switch to activate the process, they all used electrically controlled solenoids, they all used batteries, they all used unique new body frames, they were all controlled and adjusted by a microprocessor, I would place them all as the first generation of single trigger electro markers. A great place to start learning about the engineering side of design in paintball. With those primary components, all the other details are bells and whistles. Barrel thread, color of Anno, orientation of tubes in the body, single trigger or double doesn’t matter. It was groundbreaking for the era. It’s not like mass produced quality electro pneumatic markers were common or even popular. They were cost prohibitive and rare which led to their slow development. 1996-2000.

Also, fun fact…
Brass Eagle was gonna release the WDP Angel but the deal fell through. Smart parts and WDP made some lawyers kids very happy with a 3rd vacation house and college tuition.

[Trbo323]

The WDP Angel LED, Smart Parts Shocker, and Brass Eagle Rainmaker were all very, very similar from what I have learned.

Um, no?
Angels are triple tubes
The original shoebox shocker is a poppet but everything following is a spool
The rainmaker, well it's just unique. Closer to an automated pump than anything else really

Basically the originals of each are all poppets but that's pretty much all they have in common. Hell all 3 of those use different barrel threads even.

They are similar in the same way a Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla and Chevy cobalt all have 4 cylinder engines, 4 tires and 2 headlights

Sent from my motorola edge 2024 using Tapatalk

[Cyberpyr8]

https://www.pbnation.com/showthread.php?t=6050647&page=315

This is the thread for you. It's probably the only live thread still on PBN. It has John formerly of Dye and now with Method (IronyUSA) and Jack Wood posting in there pretty regularly. There's also others that have contributed. Lurker and several others have chime in from time to time. If you just go check it once a day, it's always interesting what this group talks about.

[The Hobbit]

https://www.pbnation.com/showthread....50647&page=315

This is the thread for you. It's probably the only live thread still on PBN. It has John formerly of Dye and now with Method (IronyUSA) and Jack Wood posting in there pretty regularly. There's also others that have contributed. Lurker and several others have chime in from time to time. If you just go check it once a day, it's always interesting what this group talks about.

Yep I’m over in there and enjoy the discussion when John, jack , and the others get to talking.

[cockerpunk]

some of these questions, i think it depends on the era. early on? i think bob was a lot of the energy ... later on ... a lot less. i think thats generally true of most paintball companies. simon was the engineer behind a lot of stuff, jack, tom, dave, etc. all started with ideas, and later handed off the actual engineering.

im still surprised by some of the ideas not yet implemented. like when we were looking at "barrel breaks" and realized they had nothing at all to do with the barrel, and instead were due to the loading sequence, it became obvious as an engineer that the loader, and the gun being separate parts, either mechanically or functionally, was an arbitrary, legacy, and bad idea. having full control over the loading sequence would insure much much much better handling of paint.

still dont see a ton of that out there. and what you do is basically just like an integrated mechanically, but totally separate functional integrated loaders. in some ways paintball is stuck in a paradigm it cant escape from.

[Daltech]

This guy gets it.

[The Hobbit]

Oh I realize that it is a broad question that the answer can vary. I’m mostly curious as to who the various minds behind the development in paintball were and maybe get some stories from the various development projects.

The loader thing does make things like the warp feed and the various “intellilinks” from the early 2000s make more sense. Though as loader tech developed it seems that the need to merge the two became less necessary.

[russc]

Paintball turned me into an engineer. I regularly send coworkers zdspb animations to educate them on valves and regulators, hahaha

[cockerpunk]

Paintball turned me into an engineer. I regularly send coworkers zdspb animations to educate them on valves and regulators, hahaha

same for me. i wanted to understand deep blue, and decided to become an engineer.

[The Hobbit]

Paintball turned me into an engineer. I regularly send coworkers zdspb animations to educate them on valves and regulators, hahaha

Yep paintball was a driver in going for engineering.

[SR_matt]

Paintball turned me into an engineer. I regularly send coworkers zdspb animations to educate them on valves and regulators, hahaha

I’m not an engineer but I inherited my grandfathers engineering mind (some how it was recessive since my father did not get it which was the core of most of our fighting when we worked on projects together haha). But one of the best how paintball helped me was when I was working for a manufacturing company that had manually controlled single shot fillers filling liquid into small bottles. We had a lot of inconsistent fills. Well we had just gotten a new COO (industrial engineer by training) to try and get our business wrangled into at least a semi professional operation. I was tasked with figuring out what we needed to do to them. Long story short I walk into his office and say “I want to use palmers stabs on these” somehow it came up that I was familiar with them through paintball. He looked at me like I was crazy but said why not it’s only a couple hundred bucks. Well they worked perfectly and that won me his respect and trust. A decade later and a new company later still working on projects with the guy.

but yeah zdspb is probably hands down the best resource in paintball. I sure hope someone has back up’s of it because if we lose that it will be paintballs equivalent to the fire in the library of Alexandria… granted I guess that could be said also about MCB 1.0 too.

[MrBarraclough]

It's a Patreon link so probably paywalled, but here's Paintball Media's hour long video about Simon Stevens. As they point out in the video description, it's difficult to play paintball today without shooting, carrying, or wearing something that Simon had a hand in designing.

I frequently describe Tom Kaye as the Nikola Telsa of paintball, a mad genius ahead of his time. The Automag was the first blowfoward design, a radical departure from everything that had come before. Every spool valve marker today has some amount of Automag DNA in its design. And lest we forget, HPA was Tom's idea too. He designed the Automag to run on HPA years before it was really a thing; the ability to run on CO2 was more of a backwards compatibility. I'm pretty sure he was also responsible for developing the original powerfeed as a solution to blowback up the feedneck.

I would credit Glenn Palmer with being the ultimate originator of autococking designs, providing the foundation that Bud Orr very ably built upon. Bud deserves plenty of credit on his own account too, innovating a new style of stacked tube design to house a Sheridan style valve system that allowed for more experimentation and customization. Using an external back block as the linkage between the bolt and hammer, together with the coaxial cocking rod that made it possible, was a significant design contribution of his.

What I don't know but would love to is how much of the SMG-60/68 and later 68 Special were designed by Dennis Tippmann personally, and how much, if any, was designed by engineers in his employ.

And who at Sheridan came up with the stacked tube blowback design of the VM-68/PMI-3? The 68 Special was designed and produced ahead of the VM-68, but Tippmann withheld it from the market until Sheridan's marker was ready. The idea was that a single mass produced semi-auto model was more likely to encounter resistance and possible bans from field owners, as it radically upset the balance of firepower on the field. If they were too rare, there wouldn't be enough of a constituency for them. But with two companies bringing enough units to market at the same time, there was a better chance of wide adoption since anybody who wanted one and was willing to pay the price could get one. With that kind of coordination between different manufacturers, I wonder about how independently the marker designs were developed (or not).

[Jordan]

There were a number of people working on autococking designs... Glenn just happened to be the first guy to successfully graft pneumatics onto a pump gun. His claim has always been being the first to build a semi-automatic gravity feed marker... his Hurricane Camille predates the 68 Special.

Dan Bacci has a bunch of interviews that are worth watching.

[RhoXi]

[...]Tippmann withheld it from the market until Sheridan's marker was ready. The idea was that a single mass produced semi-auto model was more likely to encounter resistance and possible bans from field owners, as it radically upset the balance of firepower on the field. If they were too rare, there wouldn't be enough of a constituency for them. But with two companies bringing enough units to market at the same time, there was a better chance of wide adoption since anybody who wanted one and was willing to pay the price could get one.

This makes sense to me. Tippmann was probably being cautious because of the SMG-60 getting banned almost immediately after it was released and didn't want to repeat that experience.